Welcome to the Homeland : A Journey to the Rural Heart of America's Conservative Revolution

by MANN, BRIAN

• ISBN13: 9781586421113
• ISBN10: 1586421115
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-08-22
• Publisher: Steerforth

Summary

After George Bush's stunning reelection in 2004, newspaper headlines such as "Rural Values Proved Pivotal" summed up the story, and the outcome left tens of millions of urban Americans baffled and outraged. America's political divide is not between red states and blue states. The divide is between counties in every state in the nation, and this urbanrural schism is the new frontier in America's culture war. For the first time,Welcome to the Homelandexplores the radically different culture evolving just over the horizon of our urban beltways, and explains how Homelanders Mann's name for the nation's fifty million rural whites have managed to dominate the conservative base of the Republican Party, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and to use the electoral college, which favors small states, to their advantage. Ultimately, Homelanders are fighting to create a new national culture, one rooted in the traditional values of nineteenth-century America. In a nation that grows more urban and multiracial every year, how did Homelanders seize so much power? In a unique blend of travelogue, political analysis, and family memoir, Mann unveils a grassroots movement that has done the impossible, reversing the urban tide of American politics.

Author Biography

Brian Mann has covered rural America for twenty years, working for public radio stations and networks from Alaska to New York. His award-winning stories appear regularly on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. In 2005, Mann won separate national and regional Edward R. Murrow Awards: for coverage of the Iraq War and its impact on small towns, and for his reporting on the rural heroin epidemic. He grew up in rural Alaska and lives now in a village in New York’s Adirondack Mountains with his wife, Susan, and son, Nicholas. He works as a reporter and editor for North Country Public Radio and a commentator for Mountain Lake Public Television. Welcome to the Homeland is his first book

Table of Contents

Preface: Two Brothers, Two Cultures	1	(10)
Introduction: The New Homelander Elite	11	(24)
No Man's Land	35	(12)
My Brother's Keeper	47	(12)
Day of Reckoning	59	(13)
Going Rural	72	(14)
Islands of Blue	86	(13)
Red President	99	(9)
The Homelander Senate	108	(15)
Boomburg, U.S.A.	123	(14)
Beating the House	137	(16)
The Great Schism	153	(13)
The Curse of the Cities	166	(24)
The Science of Faith	190	(16)
Winning Red	206	(8)
The Republican Party's New Elite	214	(9)
The Big Homelander Payoff	223	(15)
Breaking with Tradition	238	(22)
Let's Hear It for Rural Democrats!	260	(9)
Conclusion: One Nation, Two Tribes	269	(17)
Acknowledgments	286	(1)
Suggested Reading	287