Love and Hate in the Heartland

Meet the “deplorables.” Meet the majority that was silent until the election of President Donald Trump. Meet the Middle Americans whom globalism and the modern economy have left behind.

In a collection of beautifully written vignettes telling of family history and bar stool interviews and stubborn beliefs and resignation, Mark Phillips gathers a collage of the forgotten Americans—the Americans that urbanites didn’t know existed, pollsters couldn’t define, and politicians sought to target. The Alleghenians featured, the author among them, feel left adrift. They are not politically active; they are more concerned with eking out a living after factories have failed than with the intricacies of the Affordable Care Act.

Love and Hate in the Heartland goes beyond talking heads and superficial media portrayals to tell stories of humanity, strength, resilience, generosity, and self-reliance. Faced with a bleak outlook, these noble ideals mingle with resignation and misguided bitterness. Written in evocative and graceful prose, it gives faces to the voices we heard in November 2016.

Mark Phillips is the author of My Father's Cabin, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Commonweal, and Country Life. He has also worked as a beekeeper and occasional maple syrup producer in upstate New York.

"Mark Phillips writes with fierce honesty, keen perceptions and a wordsmith's lucid grace. In this unflinching exposition, he applies these ample skills on his own people, his family and neighbors, those folks who embody the sometimes conflicting values of grassroots America -- stubbornly independent and communally spirited. What he delivers is a picture -- shaded with respect, sensitivity, insight and principled criticism -- that reflects rural America's long-ignored complexities." --Kerry Temple, author of Back to Earth

"In a time when political reds and blues get painted with obvious brushstrokes, it’s a quiet pleasure to read a politically-inspired book that shows subtle grays. In Love and Hate in the Heartland, Mark Phillips doesn’t condemn, and he doesn’t forgive; instead, he depicts carefully, thoughtfully, and gut-level humanely the working class that helped elect Donald Trump. Most of all, these pages are a walk through the Alleghanies. Sometimes Phillips walks as a naturalist, tapping sap, combing honey, searching for ghost-like mountain lions, showing us the flora and fauna of western New York. Sometimes he walks as a chronicler, talking with neighbors, stopping by roadside crosses, recounting lore, familial and local. At all times, he walks alertly. With keen eyes and callused hands, Phillips observes and points—at the rough edges of rural morality and history, at the lure of hard labor dusted with coal and iron residue, at the hope that resides in and is inspired by America’s hard workers. No easy, branded slogans here. Mark Phillips brings to his series of dispatches nuance and complexity and humor and a poet’s tactile grace." -- Adam Berlin, author of The Standing Eight (and many others)

"With genial respect and graceful prose, Mark Phillips shows us how generational stories of faith, work and geography undergird the hopes and dreams of post-industrial Middle America. He is himself a gifted storyteller." --Chet Raymo, author of Soul of the Night and Honey from Stone