and it sort of that the main direction of the book is to discuss the ways in which that escapism no longer has anywhere to escape and. that the estranging it is turning into belligerence, you said. and so i'm kind of what i was wondering and think about that. the subtitle of the book, you know, the battleground and. how, how, how much parallel we in, i guess, you know, in words i couldn't help from going to you know, taking the battleground state has been a metaphor for quite some time in kind of liberalizing it somehow or thinking you know you said that they had they've gone from flight to fight. yes. and what forms that fighting is going to take? you know, you think of trump on january six saying we've got to fight like hell. we're not going to have a country. so that the moment in which we find ourselves in the converging

crises which we must navigate are very because we're in such short term peril and danger due to digital and the maga maniacs. what we find is that trump's elected returns his popular ity is off the charts and exurbia and the most psychotic members of congress lovable characters like. marjorie taylor greene, matt gaetz, jim jordan, some of your favorites. doug lauren boebert they all represent that are predominantly exurban. so the book begins, i'm going to get to your questions take the long way around the scenic route through exurbia. the book begins as a work of political geography that rather than examining trump because we've all read a number of of trump they're all quite gruesome and unpleasant. rather than inspecting let's

inspect the places where they're most popular and perhaps through inspecting those places we can learn about the people who vote for them and the movement that they represent. and what we discover is the movement is reactionary, but it's also reactive in the sense that it's an adverse reaction it's a backlash to the progress, the immense progress that is taking shape across the united states in my lifetime, your lifetime, just over the past few decades, the progress on issues of race, progress on issues of gender the progress on, issues of acceptance and opportunities for lgbt q people. and it's not to say that we live in an in an endemic paradise or a. there's still so much work to do and so many injustices to. correct. but it's due to the quiet revolution of the civil rights movement that is still in

motion. and it's due to the increasing of people of color and lgbtq people in positions of power and prominence that the people who have fled to exurban counties and exurban towns have run of the means of escape. as you were asking. so it's a fight or flight politics and there's nowhere left to take flight. so they've adopted a fight mode against the very mechanisms, against the very that made the progress that they so vehemently oppose. and that is constitutional liberal democracy. so in trump they found an authoritarian figure to speak for the hinder lands, to speak for the exurbs, speak for the small metro suburbs in of an

aggressive against the mechanisms, the systems and the culture. all forces that have made this country more more just diverse and more progressive. so exurbia becomes the staging and breeding ground of a radical right wing insurgency that is opposed to what's in cities such as this one and what's happening in the suburbs that immediately surround. hmm. would the people you're talking about. yeah. and this is. this is an impossible question, i'm sure. are they able to conceptualize their own position? articulate their own position? one of the things i sort of vaguely was thinking i would find in the book, but i didn't, you know, was any encounter with you and serbian and exurban escapist themselves? you did write about attending a

tea party rally and saying, well, what is the evidence example of that? and they had this sort of very trumpian locution, well, you just need to pay attention to what's happened, you know, which trump continues to use and then proceeds to avoid any kind of example. so i used to question how you know if we're thinking what is a battleground democracy? is it possible to conduct the battle on, their turf on terms other than theirs. that's an interesting question. so. one of the early reviews of the book that offered a criticism is is something that you're echoing right now. so so thanks for that doug. i appreciate it. and that's that that there are profiles of the maga. exurbia writes in the book i did that for the deliberate reason that and perhaps this this is a flaw i'm perfectly willing to acknowledge. but i grew rather tired those profiles the the reporters going into the diner and talking to

the guys in the ball caps and saying, why do you support trump and and and why you support marjorie taylor? greene and. and do you really think that bill gates is implanting a micro trip inside of your skull? i grew rather tired of that because i found that it was reinforcing the prejudicial bias that those are the real americans. so i made an effort to instead fill my book with correct who represent something different even in the suburbs, even in the exurbs. so lgbtq youth or people who start a local environmental group in. the town where my wife and i live. or robert cotton, who was part of the cotton family, the first black family to move to a sundown town of valparaiso. and cotton, now on the city council of valparaiso. so stories of hope and stories

of and stories the diverse possibilities that exist in the united states of america. but it's an interesting question you ask about how much are the exurbia nights reacting in the fight mode against the progress that has occurred in this country consciously aware of their opposition to democracy. of they would say that they're not opposed democracy. they would probably argue that they're defending democracy. but what i find is that often times you can't take these people their word. so i draw on a story in, the book about when white flight in my hometown, no one said, we're leaving the town of lansing, illinois, south of chicago, because more people and a few latino people moved into our

neighborhoods. they cited, like property values and fears, crime and real estate trends. so there is always a way in which they will smuggle through custom of fear or and anger against multicultural and the culture that it creates. and of the things i attempted to do in the book is write about the on the ground that exists in the in which people actually live their lives in these towns gives some sense of what life is like in these towns because so much of our political dialog and discourse has become radically divorced from reality, you know because of of the dominance of the right wing culture wars and the need for a reaction to it.

we can't just ignore these things. we spend half our time about the bisexual eminem's or or aaron rodgers or there's illegal immigrant on every corner preparing to kill an elderly christian. you know, these fever of the right wing and we're not talking about what's actually happening in small towns like lansing, illinois, or highland, indiana or, or three oaks, michigan. you know, fill in the blank. so we're not talking about health care. we're not talking about living wage. we're not talking environmental sustainability. and the people who have create this culture war, who fund it, who feed it, and who support it. they will that they're interested in a higher standard of living in, a more robust democracy. but all of their actions from voting to consumption to habits

of assembly indicate otherwise. well, one of the i think one of the another misperception or misconception that you seem to want to address in the book is the idea that that there's an economic behind support for trump. and then you want to reestablish priority of the social and the cultural. and i want to get to this in a minute the sort of the religious or the cosmic, even sort of motivates us. so could you talk maybe about that? yeah. so in some ways the book was born of frustration because i as noted earlier, i live in region that i write about and i've enjoyed showing you some of those spots. maybe we'll do an exurbia now tour. i'll get a bus and it's we count on you to attend.

so i and i noticed in a contradiction and a pretty extreme one from the start of when trump declared his candidacy in 2015. people clamored to claim that support for trump was to frustration over trade deals and economic precarity, and that the average trump voter was the reincarnation tom joad or. some character out of a woody guthrie song. and perhaps there was some truth that at the very beginning. but now we've had nine years to review data, to review to review journalism. and the the the evidence is overwhelming that the majority of the the paradigm, an overwhelming majority of trump's support, cultural and social, that it's it's rooted fear and

hostility towards fear and hostility toward voters of color fear and hostility towards progress of. the secular. sort for lgbtq people, for liberal women and i at this point donald trump isn't even talking about economics it's all of it's all this grievance tour and a resent tour and yet there are still people who insist that there's a very powerful class dynamic at work. one of the ways that i address in the book is to do a big push back against the asinine david brooks stuff notion of working class. i know david brooks is someone you deeply admire. doug. i should say, since we're on the record, doug does not admire

david brooks, but but david brooks is one of those most responsible for defining working as someone without a college. so other words, an elementary school making $33,000 a year is not part of the working class. but a construction crew foreman. making $85,000 a year is part of the working. so that's most of trump's support that people define as working class people make in the trades earning a good living and motivated by fear and has to still ity towards immigrants, towards single women, toward lgbt people and so on and so forth. and it's important because if we don't properly diagnose the threat and understand the motivation behind it, then we won't know how to properly combat. well, yeah.

can you follow up on that? because i sort of remember a passage or a sentence, the book where you say it's easy, mock this and find it ridiculous, but that you thought it would be better a wiser choice would be to measure, mitigate. hmm. and wondering. it's kind of another version of my question. okay. how do we actually combat? how do we actually kind of engage? i mean, can you engage with these trump voters? can we talk them? they used to be a kind of genre of, you know, ten ways to talk to a trump voter or something like that different ways to kind of here's how you can you can engage them and not not yet. and they won't shut down. is that possible? is that how do we mitigate? how do we how do we know what we're dealing with and how we then. well if so, there's two ways to answer that question. there's there's the sense. of our own personal lives and what we do at the family gathering when quotes alex jones or you know you say pass the

gravy and he says the wall or something like that. you know, how do we handle that? awkward moment? i think that it's it's it's possible to in those scenarios and and i've found some luck asking questions because these people the ironic thing is they're the first to lambast for being woke or politically correct or a snowflake but they're often the most sensitive. so if you if you go into the conversation with questions and kind of ask them how they feel, you might find an avenue to to go down and find some productive possibility. but in terms of overarching political strategy, i don't think it behooves leftist organizers or people working within the democratic party to try to reach out to the voter.

and this seems to be a bit of a sickness on left, or at least the democratic party left that we can we can always reach out to the right wing voter rather, trying to maximize turnout among the base is, you know, i wrote another book on jesse jackson and he addressed this in the eighties. he said the democrats were so worried about regaining the reagan voters that they lost, that they neglected their own natural base, blacks and latinos, student voters and others and think that there are some democrats who fall into the temptation of doing that again, whereas jesse jackson also says that, if we vote, our numbers will win. if we don't vote, our numbers will lose. you referenced this with your very first question. the numbers are the side of the progressive left voters of color

voters, lgbtq voters, a majority of women voters. so those to win elections should do what they can to maximize their turnout. but in our own private, personal lives, you. i don't think we should just tell trump voters to go to hell. although it's. yeah, i see your facial expression. it's a tempting option, but you know, we can look for opportunities to have conversation. i was sort of thinking the question that i started with that i agree with and accept that approach. part of what is frighteningly perilous about our situation is that win or lose, that substantial section of our society is going to be there and they're going to be trouble that. if trump wins, then certain kinds of violence and certain kinds of harassment and certain

kinds of things will be sanctioned and empowered. if trump loses, then stop the steal again then. yes, that that that. we that elections can be won and it's just not thinkable. that they will say, oh, well, we gave it our best shot. mm hmm. yeah. yeah. those. you're up on some of the frightening developments that i try to address in the book. one of which is political violence. so tell a story very early on that occurred in crown point, indiana following the murder of george floyd. and we the black lives matter summer, some high school and college students in this little town of crown point, where i've had many good times, they had a for a while they had a bar with a bob seger theme, which was fun, but some high school and college students organized a black lives rally protest march around the courthouse.

they were flanked by mostly men, white men with osama bin laden, beards holding, assault rifles. and because indiana an open carry state, there was nothing that the police or any other authority could do about it. so you had these this this multiracial, multi gendered coalition of teenagers and 20 somethings and some of their parents and relatives, peaceful marching around the square and with menacing looking white guys holding guns in their direction. i end the about political violence with the question what happens when they decide to shoot and that relates to at a recent turning point usa turning point usa is kind of the maga youth you know the nazi youth reincarnate.

somebody asked charlie kirk, leader of the organization, when do we start to use the when can we just start shooting these? and kirk said we shouldn't do that, but very revealingly he didn't say we shouldn't do that because to kill innocent people is wrong. you know, that would be woke to say that murder is wrong. instead, he said it would play into hands and it would allow them to depict us as fascists and violent. so by any stretch of by any imagining the definition we're living in an era political terror because. the united states army defines terrorism as, the use or threat of violence to achieve a political objective. and all of these threats against libraries and school and election workers are of terrorism to try to make these people resign and sometimes they

succeed. now much of that to the part of your question is fueled by an infamous national ecosystem that has become so narrow that can't penetrate an alternate analysis, can't enter. so i have a chapter in now about the death of local media since the since the year 2000. to thirds of news have shut down and in many these exurban towns there no such thing as local media. so there's nothing there to provide an on the ground perspective that might clarify an issue that might introduce someone to a person who he or she believes is a threat. so if you're afraid of the latino immigrant or you're afraid of the transgender

teenager to a local newspaper profiling a person, those characteristics might dispel you of some of those fears and some of that hostility. but when none of that exists, people living in isolation, they go to tucker carlson or steve bannon or fox news. and that feeds the rage, it feeds the paranoia and feeds the prejudice. and as robert putnam, author of the classic of social capital bowling alone argues, isolate asian is isolation is political, extremism thrives and exurbia is a region of isolation, both in the in the or all in physical sense, the socioeconomic sense, but also in the sense in that they're not they're not getting the that could introduce some

reality to their increasingly paranoid. well that leads me a question. you know, you mentioned bowling alone. there's i want to talk about nostalgia here and there seems to be kind of a paradox nostalgia in the book which is the one hand there's a sort of maga back before pre-civil rights free women's movement pre lgbtq. on the other hand, they seem very comfortable with a world that's nothing like it was, that's full of box stores and megachurches and no sidewalks and an you know that in which the way things used to be is just no longer, even accessible. and then kind of the way you weave your own stories in the kind of you have this, it's not i'm not trying to both sides is a different kind of nostalgia but you do write about a vanished when there was more opportunity for neighborly association and local involvement and local and and

but you also then kind of seem to say we can progress towards that. there's a wonderful phrase about something more communal and charming. i can't remember the third term communing and charming something you look at it more recently than i have sung, but i mean, it's sort of it's that's what sort of paradox that i the sort of same sense of the world that i grew up in being no longer accessible. what i began to think about, well, it was a world in which, you know, differences. i think it wasn't the world as it should be. you know, you start by talking about we haven't reached the progress hasn't reached where we want to. but it was there was much deeper sense of things that be. mm hmm. and i don't know how much that is just my own nostalgia. you know, you think the way things feel when you're younger. well, you're kind of, you know, a lot of the stories that you tell, a lot of the that you mentioned about how people live, their lives and the great variety, diversity of perspectives and backgrounds and activities, art and culture and beer. i learned a lot about reading the book.

i didn't know about the it's about law in 1912. the most important part of the book. it was yes and yes. i realize i have not had a budweiser since 1978, i guess it was. no, you're making a brilliant point. and it's one that no one's ever made before. so i'm trying to absorb myself. that's that's a really fascinating contradiction that you point out, is that so much of the current right wing movement is around nostalgia, but it's not nostalgic the good things. i mean i mean and forgive me if i'm really simplifying your point but you know walkable and green spaces and and neighborhoods where there were communal networks of support like the united states of america has lost much that and and i could certainly understand and relate to nostalgia for those types of communities but the nostalgia that we see

influencing much of our politics is the nostalgia that i quote elbert campbell in the book as saying as dangerous because it can lead people to committing act of evil in the name of an unknown realizable good. campbell warns that that's the danger. romanticizing the past is. you can't bring back the past, but in an effort to do so. you'll resort to violence or persecution or trying to bring back a past that never was. exactly. yes, exactly. but terms of you're correct that there some things about which even i write nostalgically when i think about growing up in lansing illinois and, you know, as cliched as it sounds hillary clinton's book title, it a village, that's how my childhood that the entire village addition to my two wonderful parents my entire village was involved

raising and rearing me and nurturing and discipline me. and so much of that is gone per perhaps there is if the right wing could get outside of this informational pollution that they exist. there's opportunity for common ground there to discuss what we've lost as a society. but we have to make the right diagnosis. so why we lost that as a society, it's not of immigrants and not because of secular liberalism. it's because of the forces of an increasingly corporate and commercialized economy. it's because of the destruction of local networks, of democracy. and we also have to talk more clearly about how to get out of that trap as you mentioned, i try to end the book with notes

of optimism. and at one point i write about the organizations towns, which does wonderful work, advocating for more livable spaces. and i also quote the great patti smith who talked about going to burnt out cities and dilapidated cities or going to small towns and an art scene to try to get something going. because she said so many neighborhoods in chicago, new york and san francisco and l.a., they've just priced people out of doing that, doing the kinds of things she did when she was young. so look for another place to do it. hmm. yeah. yeah. one of the things i learned about you from the book didn't know you had a lutheran school background. so i might want to ask you about the godzilla jesus chapter, especially since in the last couple of weeks, sort of bizarre religiosity of trump's, you know, explicit appeal, you know, in selling bibles and the

address to the national religious broadcasters and just the, you know, to explain what seems to us sort of just laughed. well, really, you know, biblical illiteracy and, you know, just vulgar ism. how how it is that, you know, the great mystery of why it is, although some people have said there's no mystery at all. when you study evangelicals. why do evangelicals in increasingly large majorities find trump not just. a candidate that they can use to advance their own agenda, but somebody who they regard kind of chosen and. yeah. yeah well, kind of. they do. right right. yes. well, charles darwin, great hero of the religious, wrote that we bear the stamp of our origin.

and that statement applies is to the religious right, because there's a common misperception out there that the christian conservative movement began as oppositional toward abortion and maybe gay rights, but in reality, christian evangelicals voted the first time in large numbers for jimmy carter. in 76, they turned against him in 1980 and supported his opponent ronald reagan because carter been aggressive in punishing christian elementary and secondary schools in the south that, refused to admit black, latino and native american students. so the religious right was born and and by way the religious right leaders all discussed this openly. randall balmer, who's one of the best