Welcome to the Homeland

More about the book

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 urban—rural schism is the new frontier in America’s culture war.For the first time, Welcome to the Homeland explores 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.