Is the homeland where America's heart is?

Like Democratic strategists since the Reagan administration, Mann feels sure that long-term trends favor his tribe. Demographic shifts in such "red" states as Arizona, Colorado and Nevada seem to be inching toward a metro majority. Occasional progressive Democrats, like Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, are able to win election in the most homelander-rich states (generally because the Republicans have enthusiastically nominated a total nutbar). Most important, he suggests that most Americans, while they may feel briefly wistful about the homelanders' nostalgic appeal, are pretty happy with the dynamism and opportunity of metropolitan life and don't actually want to reconstruct the society of 1955.

Yes, but. Mann's formulation of America's political division as primarily a matter of whether we live near a big city or not is entirely rational, but rather too abstract. It's a more valuable abstraction than painting, say, Minnesota in one color and Montana in another, but it still falls into the trap of all logical abstractions, i.e., imagining it explains that which cannot be explained. Furthermore, Mann's book is sloppily researched and unannotated, which persistently undermines the quality of his analysis. You can never be quite sure where his information is coming from, and he makes a few egregious errors and several dubious interpretations.

In a laundry list of left-wing excesses of the 1960s (which allegedly drove heartland folks to the right), he writes: "Progressives armed with rifles and pistols occupied college campuses. They clashed with National Guard soldiers, blew up police stations, and robbed banks." Hello? I don't think Rush Limbaugh could utter those two sentences with a straight face. The first one is a flat-out falsehood. There were no armed campus uprisings in the United States in the '60s, period. Not anywhere, not ever. The second sentence, while less of a howler, conflates two entirely different phenomena: Large-scale antiwar protests, in which the National Guard were almost universally the aggressors; and the actions of a tiny clique of nutso revolutionaries, who were not widely supported even on the left.

Unfortunately, the sloppiness, historical ignorance and middle-road bias evident there (and repeated in his dismissive discussion of the 1968 Democratic convention protests in Chicago) also affect Mann's understanding of the right. I suspect he is far too cavalier about the importance of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and an especially nightmarish brand of Christian eschatology in homelander thinking. Those elements are not sufficient to explain the homelander phenomenon either, but they are intimately involved with it to an extent Mann is reluctant to face.

He also significantly underplays the importance of evangelical Christianity in the American right and society more generally. Mann refers several times to a Barna Research poll suggesting that evangelicals are only 8 percent of the U.S. population, without explaining that the poll used a strict doctrinal definition of the term, counting only people who held specific theological beliefs. Other polls have suggested that 23 percent of 2004 voters self-identified as evangelical Christians, with 14 percent identifying themselves as belonging to the "Christian right." Similarly, Mann seems to think that only a small core of fundamentalists reject evolutionary theory in favor of the six-day creation described in the Book of Genesis. Polls have consistently indicated that nearly half of all Americans hold such a belief.

His big idea that metro life is about change and homelander life is about tradition is dispensed in a couple of sentences and then swept aside. That's because it doesn't hold up. Maybe rural Republicans cling more fervently to the idea of tradition than urban Democrats do, although I'm not even sure about that. But rural America has changed at least as much as urban and suburban America in recent decades, and arguably more. After the coming of Wal-Mart and the near-total destruction of Main Street business, the corporate consolidation of agribusiness and the depopulation of farm communities, the explosion of the exurbs, the methamphetamine epidemic, and the arrival of immigrant laborers in almost every rural county in America, it's hard to say where any enduring tradition is to be found.

All Americans (and indeed all people everywhere) have confronted extraordinary and ever-accelerating change ever since the beginning of the Industrial Age. How people cope with change and respond to it is a function of their culture. Perhaps the real story in America is the confrontation of two opposing but interlocking and interdependent cultures, one of which is rural-identified but not limited to rural areas. From "All in the Family" to "The West Wing," metro values have been pumped into all parts of the country for years, and in the age of Fox News, talk radio and CMT, the favor has been returned.

A friend of mine who grew up in rural Indiana in the '70s and '80s talks about the way his region has been transformed since his childhood. No one in his hometown cared much about country music or stock-car racing, he says, until those things became attached to a new conception of rural identity. It was a pretty conservative place, but people listened to pop music, watched the same crappy TV shows as everybody else, and voted variously for Democrats or Republicans, depending on context.

These days, if you're rural and you're white and you feel OK about those things, you've got an entire nationwide culture waiting for you: Rush, O'Reilly and Faith Hill for the sober folk, Michael Savage, Neal Boortz and Toby Keith for the hell-raisers and outlaws. Jesus, of course, is for everybody, and the Intimidator is sitting at his right hand. (If you don't know what I'm talking about ... you might be a metro!) Voting for Republicans, supporting any and all present or future foreign wars, and the kind of ultra-patriotism that produces those translucent flag decals, complete with slavering eagle, slapped over the entire rear window of a pickup, just comes with the package.

This new homelander culture is beamed into the cities 24/7, just as urban pop culture has long been available in Podunk. Anybody with their eyes and ears tuned to the monster-mash of contemporary America has observed the result: A Ford F-150 with a Rebel-flag sticker parked on a back road, with 50 Cent's latest hit rocking the sound system and a pungent, ropy odor seeping from the door frames. A posse of African-American guys on the Q train to Brooklyn, sporting do-rags, sideways Black Yankees caps and NASCAR team jackets. At the level of pop culture the boundaries between metro and homelander are porous, unpoliced, prone to infiltration.

Mann halfheartedly suggests that the 75 to 80 percent of Americans who live in cities or metropolitan suburbs will eventually wake up, realize our true power, and grab the reins. (Even then, he predicts a long period of divided, unstable government: Hillary Clinton in the White House, Sam Brownback in the Senate, John Roberts on the bench.) But he never quite grasps the implications of his own keenest insights: The really important thing about the homelander revolution has been its effect on the rest of us.

It's a striking fact of modern American life that rural white conservatives have become smarter, better organized and more militant, and that they now largely vote as a bloc. But the notion that there is some sort of equivalent or larger political grouping that opposes them in some coherent way is pure fiction. (See also: Democratic Party, recent history of.) Mann's supposed metro majority simply does not exist -- it's a welter of races, social classes and economic strata, from the urban poor to the bicoastal intelligentsia to the security-obsessed suburban moms of demographic lore. Being non-rural, non-born-again and non-right-wing does not constitute an identity.

Seen in this light, the right-wing rural revolution is not the wistful resistance movement of a vestigial and declining population. It's the impressive leading edge of a large and thriving minority that's trying to turn the rural bias hard-wired into American governance into a permanent advantage. These revolutionaries set out, some years ago, to push the center of American political life sharply to the right and turn back the cultural clock by 50 years. Their task is half-finished.

American history is the same story told over and over again. The people Mann calls the homelanders are just the latest version of the xenophobic, fire-and-brimstone know-nothings who've been around since the dawn of the American republic. They believe -- no, they know -- that they represent the country's truest and purest spirit. The rest of us, well, some of us are full of big words. But we're starting to think they might be right.

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