Blue in a Red State: The Survival Guide to Life in the Real America

Imagine if you felt out of step with every other member of the parent association at your kid's school, your quilting circle, or even your workout group. What if casual conversations revolved around Fox News and the decline of American values? How would you feel if you were afraid to put a political bumper sticker on your car or had to think twice about what liberal posts you liked on Facebook? These are just some of the experiences shared by liberals across twenty states and five time zones who tell their stories with honesty, warmth, and humor.

Most of us have to “talk across the aisle” once or twice a year―when we're seated next to our conservative out-of-town uncle at Thanksgiving, say. But millions of self- identified liberals live in cities and towns―particularly away from the East and West Coasts―where they are regularly outnumbered and outvoted by conservatives.

In this uplifting and completely original book, Justin Krebs, the founder of the national Living Liberally network, speaks with and tells the stories of atheists, vegetarians, environmentalists, pacifists, and old-fashioned liberals―a term he is intent on rehabilitating―from Texas to Idaho, South Carolina to Alaska. Krebs weaves these stories together to create a provocative and rollicking taxonomy of strategies for living in a diverse society, with lessons for every participant in our great democratic experiment.

Justin Krebs is a political and cultural entrepreneur, strategist and writer. He is the founding director of Living Liberally, a national progressive social organization with over 200 chapters. The organization is primarily composed of Drinking Liberally happy hours, which give liberals around the country the opportunity to get offline and form face-to-face friendships. He has worked as an adviser bringing new media techniques, cultural elements and creative campaign approaches to conventional progressive allies. He lives in Brooklyn.