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

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.

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