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Exurbia Now
The Battleground of American Democracy
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Descrição da editora
“Focusing on greater Chicago, Masciotra argues that the exurbs, home to both monster trucks and liberals, are becoming a key political arena.” - New York Times Book Review
The suburbs have become too liberal and diverse for many white American conservatives, so “exurbia”—areas outside the cities and their suburbs—are becoming the staging ground for the radical right extremist insurgency . . .
Beyond a fanatical devotion to former president Donald Trump, one of the curious things that united the rank and file of the January 6 insurrectionist mob was that many of them were residents of one of America’s fastest growing residential areas: Exurbia.
Home to the likes of Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ohio’s Jim Jordan, big box retailers, chain restaurants, monster trucks, and megachurches, exurbia is becoming America’s greatest political battleground, more important to American politics than urban or rural America.
In this brilliant work of political and cultural inquiry, veteran political journalist David Masciotra provides a definitive account of what exurbia is, how it came to be, and how it's transforming American life. Zooming in outside the greater metropolitan area of Chicago—where Masciotra grew up—he shows how exurbia has become a safe space to fly the MAGA flag and romanticize the mores of the pre-civil rights, pre-feminist, pre-gay rights 1950s.
But, as Masciotra also shows, reactionary white flight is not the whole story of small-town America. The story often lost is the power and persistence of small-town liberals—people who believe in equality, celebrate diversity, and enroll in movements for justice. Exurbia, as it turns out, is ground zero for the fight over a democracy mightily beleaguered, yet still full of promise, and still worth fighting for.
Combining interviews, research, and anecdote—and anchored in personal experience—Exurbia Now delivers a powerful ballad on the state of small-town America, and provides a sense of the fight for democracy, on the ground, in the heartland.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exurbia is "the breeding and staging ground for the far-right insurgency, and, therefore, the battleground of American democracy," claims journalist Masciotra (I Am Somebody) in this unsparing inquiry into America's racialized geography. He argues that as the suburbs become more diverse, white conservatives are abandoning them for the exurban fringe, where far-right activists work to gain control of town councils, school boards, and police departments, forming ideological enclaves that percolate white discontent and paranoia. To make his case, Masciotra draws on his personal knowledge of communities on the far edges of Chicago in Illinois and northwest Indiana, along with reporting and sociological studies—including one showing that the most common factor among January 6 insurrectionists was that they lived in counties where the non-white population was growing. Most rewardingly, he delves deep into suburban political history, incorporating a wide array of narrative threads; these range from an interview with a former leader of America's first neo-Nazi skinhead gang—which in the 1970s and '80s roamed Chicago's south suburbs, attacking Black and Latino people on the street—to an inquest into the thinly veiled political agenda behind suburbs' usual absence of sidewalks. (As one urban planner explains, the idea is that "if we have sidewalks, we're going to bring people who do not belong.") It's both a darkly limned history of Chicagoland and a convincing portrait of a new era of white flight.