Jeff Roche

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654 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 20 Dec

Jeff Roche’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in History · Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025) · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

So you don't have federal land programs at work in West Texas.

You don't have large-scale federally owned or controlled spaces.

There are no Native American reservations there.

There are very few farms.

forts, even no homestead programs.

So Texas without control over its public lands is a different kind of space.

Also the fact that Texas never experienced territorial status.

So in a place like Montana or say Colorado, the politics is very different there because during those territorial days, citizens really couldn't afford to be

too hyper-partisan because the next governor was going to be appointed by the next president, who could be a Democrat, could be a Republican.

The judges were appointed.

So Texas developed a little bit differently.

But in terms of its environment and the kind of politics that it created, it's very, very similar to other spaces in the American West.

particularly the western half of the Great Plains and the Intermountain West, the kinds of places that had similar histories with the removal of Native Americans, the coming of cattle ranching, the shift from cattle ranching into some other form of extractive industry or agriculture.

Different from the Mountain West, obviously.

So those kinds of places in terms of their political development over time, very, very similar to Western Texas.

And I think in some ways, hopefully, one of the goals of the book was to provide a – model is too strong a word –

but a series of questions that we could ask about how the politics in a place develops in its relationship with the history of that place.

So in that, I think it's a Western history in terms of the development of those kinds of politics over particularly the first three quarters of the 20th century.

So I in the book in 1976, which is the moment where what I'm describing as the conservative frontier, which is a kind of a politics that's out beyond the edges of political settlement to extend the metaphor.

And when I end the book, the politics of that kind of conservatism had been settled, right, where they're now the Texas Republican Party has declared itself a conservative party.

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