Made In Texas: George W. Bush And The Southern Takeover Of American Politics

by Michael Lind

Everyone knows that President George W. Bush is from Texas. But few of us know the role his home state plays in his presidency, and in our country. In this dual biography of man and state, Michael Lind confronts the chief crises of Bush's presidency--the economy, the Middle East, and religious fundamentalism--and traces their roots back to Texas, a state, Lind argues, that yields salient clues to the future course of our country.Widely praised as an iconoclastic and brilliant political observer, Lind, a fifth generation Texan, chronicles the ethnic clash that produced modern Texas, the well-known plundering of the state's natural resources at the hands of its elites, and finally the deep strain of "Old Testament religiosity" which, having originated in Texas, now reaches all over the globe in the form of Bush's foreign policy.In the tradition of Gary Wills's Reagan's America , Made in Texas provides a wholly original cultural history that should change the way we understand not just our president, but our country.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2002

About the author

Currently Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, Michael Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books of history, political journalism, and fiction, including a poetry chapbook, When You Are Someone Else (Aralia Press, 2002), Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2003), a children’s book in verse, which won an Oppenheimer Toy Prize for children’s literature, and a narrative poem, The Alamo (Replica Books, 1999), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the best books of the year. His first collection of verse, Parallel Lives, was published by Etruscan Press in 2007.

Reviews

[The American Conservative]

'Of the three Lind books that I have read, all, including his latest, display the same flashes of brilliance and often ingenious talent of spying historical and cultural patterns that no one else has detected. All of them also suffer from the same flaws: his efforts to push cultural, political, and historical realities into the convenient categories he has discovered, even when they don’t fit, and a steady, harsh, almost obsessively angry polemic directed against a standard set of the author’s favorite targets: conservatives (neoconservatives in particular); the American South, especially its Celtic manifestations; and religion of almost all species (especially “supernaturalist” Christianity).
In Made In Texas, Lind not only trips into the same fallacies but also eagerly seizes the opportunity offered by the administration of George W. Bush to clobber the same targets.'

Read the full review, "Messing with Texas," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Mimi]

Interesting depictions of Texas politics between the Southern plantaion model, and the mid-west plains state model. There are some inacuaracies on geography (which drive me nuts). Over all a must read for anyone interested in politics today.

[A Mulford]

For anyone interested in how Southern conservatives think in modern day America, you don't need to look any further. This book is an excellent place to start.

I highly recommend it.

[Chuck]

His analysis was shallow and without any real insight. He could have made his points in an essay, instead of spreading it all out in a book, most of which is filler.

[Jeremy]

Interesting backstory on Texas politics, but I could have used more detail on our nefarious protagonist...