“We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn’t teach me.”
― J. D. Vance
“We spend our way to the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”
― J. D. Vance
“Stanford’s law school application wasn’t the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren’t a loser.”
― J. D. Vance
“Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.”
― J. D. Vance
“If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, ‘Well, what’s going to happen to this kid?’ you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility.”
― J. D. Vance
“It’s amazing to think how powerful of a force optimism and hope can be. It’s the thing that saves me. I believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world. I still believe that, and consequently, I believed that I had a chance, even though things around me were absolutely crazy and difficult.”
― J. D. Vance
“There are definitely – there is definitely an element of Donald Trump’s support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia. But a lot of these folks are just really hardworking people who are struggling in really important ways.”
― J. D. Vance
“People have lost their faith that if they work hard, if they try to get ahead, if they play by the rules, then that will ultimately result in positive outcomes.”
― J. D. Vance
“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”
― J. D. Vance
“The evangelical Christian faith I’d grown up with sustained me. It demanded that I refuse the drugs and alcohol on offer in our southwestern Ohio town, that I treat my friends and family kindly, and that I work hard in school. Most of all, when times were toughest, it gave me reason to hope.”
― J. D. Vance
“I believe that I’m a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don’t want to lose that. I think it’s possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you’re self-reflective and meaningful about it.”
― J. D. Vance
“We need to think about how we teach working-class children about not just hard skills, like reading and mathematics, but also soft skills, like conflict resolution and financial management.”
― J. D. Vance
“It seems to me an indictment of the Republican Party that if you talk about issues of poverty and upward mobility, people assume you’re a Democrat.”
― J. D. Vance
“The regulatory approach of the Food and Drug Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office has driven up the costs of generic drugs.”
― J. D. Vance
“Politicians of both parties told us that free trade with Asia and Latin America would spur economic growth, and maybe it did somewhere else. In our towns, though, factories continue shutting down or moving overseas.”
― J. D. Vance
“To serve in the modern military – or to be the uncle, parent or sibling of one who does – is to treat the necessary service and sacrifice of war with a sacred honor. In my community, we pile into cars and drive hundreds of miles to watch our children’s graduation from basic training.”
― J. D. Vance
“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
― J. D. Vance
“I think running a small nonprofit to work on the opioid crisis and bring interesting new businesses to the so-called Rust Belt – all of these things are valuable, if not more valuable, than running for office.”
― J. D. Vance
“My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.”
― J. D. Vance
“People don’t want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate meaningfully in politics, because most of us don’t speak like Obama or Clinton.”
― J. D. Vance
“It’s not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don’t recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.”
― J. D. Vance
“Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.”
― J. D. Vance
“I didn’t come from the elites. I didn’t come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it’s a town that’s really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America’s working class.”
― J. D. Vance
“I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn’t learn how to get ahead.”
― J. D. Vance
“It’s hard to strike that balance: to tell a kid that life isn’t fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter.”
― J. D. Vance
“I have been waiting for someone to come along and tap into that very real frustration that exists in a very large segment of the working-class Republican base. And no one had done it until Donald Trump. I very clearly saw a void, and I knew somebody would fill it. And the moment I knew he had filled it, I knew he would win the nomination.”
― J. D. Vance
“I happen to think that conservatism, when properly applied to the 21st century, could actually help everybody. And the message of Trump’s campaign was obviously not super-appealing to Latino Americans, black Americans and so forth. That really bothered me.”
― J. D. Vance
“If you’re graduating from high school, and you come from a lower income family, you’re effectively given two options. One is get a four-year college degree; two is work at a low-wage job, potentially for the rest of your life. We’ve got to do better on that front. We have to provide more options.”
― J. D. Vance
“I don’t think that the Left has a monopoly on bad ideas. I don’t think the Right has a monopoly on good ideas.”
― J. D. Vance
“Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.”
― J. D. Vance
“The idea that working a blue-collar job and living in a working-class community provides barriers that are unique to your circumstances – that’s not a very controversial subject anymore. I think it’s something that people on both the Left and the Right probably accept.”
― J. D. Vance
“When people read ‘Breitbart’ every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.”
― J. D. Vance
“People listen to what their political leaders are telling them, and my view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes.”
― J. D. Vance
“I don’t think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban.”
― J. D. Vance
“I never thought, when I was a kid, that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently – they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we’re both poor, but that’s kind of it. There wasn’t much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship.”
― J. D. Vance
“Violence and chaos were an ever-present part of the world that I grew up in. And unfortunately, it wasn’t just in my family. Sometimes, you’d see, you know, Mom fighting with one of her boyfriends. But a lot of times, you’d see people exploding on each other in a local restaurant or on the street.”
― J. D. Vance
“I needed a lot of the good things that church provided. But as I grew older, it became increasingly hard for me to rationalize the importance of church in my life with the beliefs that it required that were at odds with modern science.”
― J. D. Vance
“I used to go on chat rooms on AOL, back when those things existed, and argue with believers in evolution and argued with them that it was against God’s law to believe in evolution. It was something I believed really personally.”
― J. D. Vance
“It would be great if people returned to areas of the country that need talented people with good economic prospects. Our country would really benefit if those who went to elite universities, who started businesses, who started nonprofits, weren’t just doing so on the coasts.”
― J. D. Vance
“The increasing segregation we have in our country geographically and culturally has led to these pretty monolithic views of different classes of people, and because of that, we’ve lost a certain amount of cultural cohesion.”
― J. D. Vance
“Trump’s biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.”
― J. D. Vance
“It’s not just that government has failed us. It’s not just that we have failed ourselves. It’s government. It’s individuals. It’s sort of everything in between, from families and communities and neighborhoods, churches and so forth.”
― J. D. Vance
“I do think that tonal element of Trump’s is attractive, but I don’t know if I would go so far as to say the confrontational element of his rhetoric is necessarily attractive.”
― J. D. Vance
“It seems that in the rush to be the first one to the story, the media overstates things. Not maliciously; I don’t think they’re intentionally misleading. But the credibility gap is already there, and in this rush to get to the story first, a lot of mainstream outlets just erode their credibility further.”
― J. D. Vance
“Whether I’m speaking to conservative or liberal audiences, I don’t find that people are close-minded about the things I say. I’m still optimistic that we can bridge a divide between these various bubbles. But I do think that it requires a little bit of effort.”
― J. D. Vance
“I’ve always just felt a little out of place. I still feel out of place in San Francisco. It’s this place where everything is going great, and everyone feels super optimistic about the world. It’s a little different about how I grew up.”
― J. D. Vance
“For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate ‘poor’ in our public consciousness with ‘black.’ Terms such as ‘welfare queen’ and ‘culture of poverty’ became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.”
― J. D. Vance
“As a culture, working-class white Americans like myself had no heroes. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. I doubt my neighbours could even name a high-ranking military officer.”
― J. D. Vance
“I once interviewed my grandma for a class project about the Second World War. After 70 years filled with marriage, children, grandchildren, death, poverty and triumph, the thing about which she was unquestionably the proudest and most excited was that she and her family did their part during the war.”
― J. D. Vance
“My grandma always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.”
― J. D. Vance
“Church attendance rates among white Americans without a college education have dropped pretty significantly. People with college degrees are more likely to go to church than people without college degrees among the white working class.”
― J. D. Vance
“One of the most interesting social trends of the past 20 years is the rise of residential segregation. So rich are living with rich and poor are living with poor.”
― J. D. Vance
“If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don’t understand them, that the political elites don’t care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things.”
― J. D. Vance
“My fear with Trump was always that he didn’t have great solutions.”
― J. D. Vance
“Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades.”
― J. D. Vance
“In some ways, Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities.”
― J. D. Vance
“Hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.”
― J. D. Vance
“We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears – when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity – there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job.”
― J. D. Vance
“I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”
― J. D. Vance
“Every two weeks, I’d get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”
― J. D. Vance
“For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices – and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group.”
― J. D. Vance
“We must have the courage to confront dreadful views even in the people we love the most. But that’s difficult to do when we cast large segments of our fellow citizens into a basket to be condemned and disparaged, judging them even as we ignore that many of their deplorable traits exist in us, too.”
― J. D. Vance
“While faith need not be monolithic – it can motivate both voting behavior and character development – focus matters. A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror.”
― J. D. Vance
“Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world’s money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.”
― J. D. Vance
“Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains. Yet the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons.”
― J. D. Vance
“My family has existed in eastern Kentucky for as long as there are records. If you’re familiar with the famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud back in the 1860s, ’70s and ’80s in the United States, my family was an integral part of that.”
― J. D. Vance
“My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it’s a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.”
― J. D. Vance
“At a person-to-person level, I think that there’s always something to be said for having some empathy for the folks who really, really disagree with you about a given topic.”
― J. D. Vance
“We are so isolated in our own little worlds, in our own little geographies, that it’s pretty hard to understand where someone else is coming from. And so I think that we have to really think about what that means as a country and, frankly, whether this segregation that we have is durable over the long run.”
― J. D. Vance
“Folks like me have to feel a little indebted to the communities that they came from. And if they do, I think we’ll start to see a little bit more of a geographic integration in the country because people will start to think, ‘You know what? I owe that place something, and I should return to it in one form or another.’”
― J. D. Vance
“Solutions are complex, and I continue to worry that Trump didn’t fully appreciate the complexity of what’s going on. Consequently, I worry about whether he’s going to make the problems a whole lot better… But I am a Republican, and we really should give the guy a chance to govern and hope he’s successful.”
― J. D. Vance
“The most depressing part of the 2016 election is that the candidates often failed to show any cultural leadership: any recognition that the world of public policy was important but hardly the only good and necessary part of our shared society.”
― J. D. Vance
“We’re very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.”
― J. D. Vance
“If it’s hard for Blue America to see Red America as anything other than a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks; it’s hard for Red America to recognize that many minorities are legitimately worried about what a Trump presidency means for their family.”
― J. D. Vance
“I almost failed out of high school. I nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me… Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.”
― J. D. Vance
“It’s jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse. And I’ve suspected that this optimism blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country. So I decided to move home to Ohio.”
― J. D. Vance
“The person in New York City is showing too little empathy for the Trump voter. The Trump voter is showing too little empathy for the person who’s very worried about the refugee ban. They’re not spending enough time with each other to have a meaningful conversation.”
― J. D. Vance
“I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head.”
― J. D. Vance
“I think what Trump will be judged on by the folks that voted for him… is whether things start to get a little bit better over the next few years. And ultimately, that doesn’t depend on whether Jeff Sessions is the attorney general.”
― J. D. Vance
“Church gives people a sense of community, a sense of how to behave… social support when times get tough. In a world where white working class folks are going to church less and less, they’re losing that when they might really need it.”
― J. D. Vance
“People in my hometown voted for President Reagan – for many, like my grandpa, he was their first Republican – because he promised that tax cuts would bring higher wages and new jobs. It seemed he was right, so we voted for the next Republican promising tax cuts and job creation, George W. Bush. He wasn’t right.”
― J. D. Vance
“We watch our sons go to war, disagree with the rationale for sending them, loathe the men who ordered them to battle, and then, when the veterans come home, beg and plead with the local V.A. to ensure they have access to proper care.”
― J. D. Vance
“During my first round of law school applications, I didn’t even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford – the mystical ‘top three’ schools. I didn’t think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn’t think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed.”
― J. D. Vance
“On my first day at Yale Law School, there were posters in the hallways announcing an event with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. I couldn’t believe it: Tony Blair was speaking to a room of a few dozen students? If he came to Ohio State, he would have filled an auditorium of a thousand people.”
― J. D. Vance
“I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.”
― J. D. Vance
“I happen to be a conservative, but one need not accept the Right’s theories wholesale to acknowledge the sometimes negative effects of government action on health care.”
― J. D. Vance
“We’ll rail against the way the government has destroyed our health care market in one breath and resist the support offered to the poor and middle class to navigate this brokenness with the other. This is not conservative; it is incoherence masquerading as ideological purity.”
― J. D. Vance
“The subsidy for employer-sponsored coverage has tethered health care to employment in a way that virtually no economist endorses.”
― J. D. Vance
“For two years, I’d lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It’s jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse.”
― J. D. Vance
“Not every town can or should be saved.”
― J. D. Vance
“Many people should leave struggling places in search of economic opportunity, and many of them won’t be able to return. Some people will move back to their hometowns; others, like me, will move back to their home state.”
― J. D. Vance
“At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I’ll miss him and the example he set.”
― J. D. Vance
“The military is arguably the most significant social institution in our country.”
― J. D. Vance
“The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world’s finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting.”
― J. D. Vance
“In communities like mine, we send our best and brightest to our armed forces. Our culture’s elites, on the other hand, encourage their children to do just about anything else.”
― J. D. Vance
“My grandma – we called her Mamaw – loved her country.”
― J. D. Vance
“I am proud of my service and proud of those who served alongside me. But war is about more than service and sacrifice – it’s about winning.”
― J. D. Vance
“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”
― J. D. Vance
“Anger about the wars isn’t the only reason voters support Mr. Trump. But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won’t reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite.”
― J. D. Vance
“Undoubtedly, church fish fries and picnics help build social cohesion. It was at my dad’s medium-size evangelical church – my first real exposure to a sustained religious community – that I first saw people of different races and classes worshiping together.”
― J. D. Vance
“The sometimes-tough love of the Christian faith of my childhood demanded a certain amount of self-reflection and, occasionally, self-criticism.”
― J. D. Vance
“It’s difficult in the abstract to appreciate that those with morally objectionable viewpoints can still be good people.”
― J. D. Vance
“I’m a big fan of Purdue as an institution and in its role of educating the next-generation workforce.”
― J. D. Vance
“There are definitely some folks in my hometown who are unhappy with the way I portrayed my hometown… But I think most folks realize I wrote this book not to disparage the hometown but to really try to understand why so many kids who grew up like I did struggled.”
― J. D. Vance
“Trump’s voters loathe Jeb Bush because their lives are falling apart, and they blame people like him.”
― J. D. Vance
“The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs but also a sense of purpose and community.”
― J. D. Vance
“What unites Trump’s voters is a sense of alienation from America’s wealthy and powerful.”
― J. D. Vance
“I come from a family that doesn’t have a whole lot of money.”
― J. D. Vance
“From the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale, from other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had.”
― J. D. Vance
“We need to ask questions about how we’re going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.”
― J. D. Vance
“When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it’s very easy to read a slice of that book and say, ‘Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that’s what I’m going to say the entire book is about.’”
― J. D. Vance
“Airing the family’s laundry can make people upset.”
― J. D. Vance
“One of the things that concerns me is that so few people who go and get an education elsewhere… feel any real… pull for returning home.”
― J. D. Vance
“I’m not one of these people who thinks I know all the answers.”
― J. D. Vance
“It’s very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, ‘Everyone is against us. You can’t believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they’re all conspiring against Christians.’”
― J. D. Vance
“I eventually got to the point where I was like, ‘Well, if I can’t believe in the Big Bang Theory and be a good Christian, then maybe I’m not a good Christian.’”
― J. D. Vance
“When I started law school in 2010, I would have called myself an atheist. When I graduated law school in 2013, I was exploring my faith again. A lot changed in those three years.”
― J. D. Vance
“Faith gave me the belief that there was somebody looking out for me, that there was a hopeful future on the other side of all the things I was going through.”
― J. D. Vance
“If you’re white working class, it’s very easy to caricature the elites, and if you’re elite, it’s very easy to caricature the white working class.”
― J. D. Vance
“Policies that promote better wages and better jobs would be super-helpful, and I’m a big fan of programs that encourage people to go where jobs are.”
― J. D. Vance
“I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world of the American elite works.”
― J. D. Vance
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