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

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

Brian Mann, . . Steerforth, $24.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-1-58642-111-3

Forget the red state/blue state divide—the real fault line is between progressive metropolitan and suburban areas in every region and the conservative rural sea surrounding them, asserts this trenchant study of American politics. Drawing on demographic, polling and voting data and interviews, journalist Mann analyzes the disconnect between overwhelmingly Republican rural "homelanders," who vote their traditional values and Christian moral certitudes, and an urban "metro" culture whose cosmopolitanism, secularism and relativism they revile. An avowed moderate pushed leftward by Bush's policies, his attitude is respectful but conflicted. Mann chides liberal pundits (Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? is a favorite target) for caricaturing homelanders as rubes gulled by Republican culture wars rhetoric into voting against their interests. Instead he finds them thoughtful, politically savvy (aided by a Constitution that grants them disproportionate electoral clout) and adroit in commandeering government policy and largesse. But he remains frustrated in his attempts to translate across the ideological gap—"It's my nature, I guess," mutters his staunchly conservative brother when pressed on his convictions—and views rural conservatism as parasitic and doomed. Although inadequate in spots—he says little about class, for example—Mann's is a lucid, provocative contribution to the conversation over America's political future. (Sept. 1)