After Ross Benes left Nebraska for New York, he witnessed his polite
home state become synonymous with "Trump country." Long dismissed as
"flyover" land, the area where he was born and raised suddenly became
the subject of TV features and frequent opinion columns. With the
rural-urban divide overtaking the national conversation, Benes knew what
he had to do: go home.
In Rural Rebellion, Benes explores Nebraska's shifting political
landscape to better understand what's plaguing America. He clarifies how
Nebraska defies red-state stereotypes while offering readers insights
into how a frontier state with a tradition of nonpartisanship succumbed
to the hardened right. Extensive interviews with US senators,
representatives, governors, state lawmakers, and other power brokers
illustrate how local disputes over health-care coverage and education
funding became microcosms for our current national crisis.
Rural Rebellion is also the story of one man coming to terms with both
his past and present. Benes writes about the dissonance of moving from
the most rural and conservative region of the country to its most
liberal and urban centers as they grow further apart at a critical
moment in history. He seeks to bridge America's current political
divides by contrasting the conservative values he learned growing up in
a town of three hundred with those of his liberal acquaintances in New
York City, where he now lives.
At a time when social and political differences are too often portrayed
in stark binary terms, and people in the Trump-supporting heartland are
depicted in reductive, one-dimensional ways, Benes tells real-life
stories to add depth and nuance to our understanding of rural Americans'
attitudes about abortion, immigration, big government, and other
contentious issues. His argument and conclusion are simple but powerful:
that Americans in disparate places would be less hostile to one another
if they just knew each other a little better. Part memoir, journalism,
and social science, Rural Rebellion is a book for our times.
