Know Your Enemy: Consider the Cranks, with David Austin Walsh

Know Your Enemy: Consider the Cranks, with David Austin Walsh

Matt and Sam talk to historian David Austin Walsh about his new book, Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Historian David Austin Walsh joins to discuss his excellent new book Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right—a fascinating re-description of the relationship between the far right and the American conservative movement from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War.

How did figures like William F. Buckley Jr. relate to those on the fringes of right-wing politics—people like Merwin K. Hart, Revilo Oliver, Russel Maguire, and George Lincoln Rockwell? And how should we make sense of Buckley and others’ furtive efforts to sanitize the right of its more explicitly racist, antisemitic, and conspiratorial elements? In this conversation, Walsh makes the case for viewing the conservative coalition, from National Review and the John Birch Society to white power movements and neo-Nazis, as embodying a “popular front.” That is to say—like the American left in the 1930s—these groups thought of themselves as part of a unified movement with a common enemy; and despite their differences over strategy, tactics, and rhetoric, they shared a fundamental worldview and vision of the good. What’s more, as Walsh demonstrates, figures of the fringe and mainstream tended to maintain relationships and contact with one another, even if formal ties were severed.

Walsh’s book is a major contribution to ongoing historiographic debates about twentieth-century American conservatism—of the sort we love to have on Know Your Enemy—and he is a delightful source of detail and texture about the cranks and weirdos who make up a larger share of the right than many mainstream liberals and conservatives would like to believe.

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