[BEEPING] Afternoon. Welcome. It's a tribute, I think,
to our speakers today that we get this kind of a
crowd on a Friday afternoon. So it's good to see you all. Welcome to the
Institute of Politics. I just did a podcast with JD,
and I said that timing in life is everything. He wrote his memoir of growing
up in and around Appalachia and in white working-class
America at a propitious time. And in his beautifully
written memoir, he gave us some sense of an
America that, frankly, too many in this room probably
don't see, and gave us some insight into
the great divide that we have in our country and
what the implications of that are. So it's really a pleasure
to have him here today, and important for us
to have him here today. And I will leave the rest to
our introducer to speak to. And we're grateful to have
our own, Chicago's own, Alex Kotlowitz, a distinguished
author in his own right, to conduct this discussion. I just want to mention
that next week, as part of our ongoing series
"America in the Trump Era," our visiting fellow
Jackie Calmes, late of the New York
Times, will lead discussions on the future of
trade with former US trade rep Michael Froman and Josh Bivens,
and the future of health care with governor and former
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, as well as Nancy-Ann
DeParle, who was President Obama's aid in
developing the Affordable Care Act. So I heartily recommend
that you visit those events because I think they're
going to shed light on a couple of
issues that are going to be front and center
in the years to come. So with that, let me
introduce Andrew Mamo, a second-year
student from Katonah, New York, who's majoring
in public policy and is one of our
great ILP interns. Andrew. [APPLAUSE] Thank, you Mr. Axelrod. JD Vance grew up in two
places, Middletown, Ohio, and Jackson, Kentucky. In a Rust Belt industrial city
and an Appalachian hill town, he and three generations
of his family witnessed firsthand the rise
and fall of the American Dream. He left Middletown after
graduating high school to serve in the Marine
Corps, graduated from Ohio State in
less than two years, and received a law
degree from Yale. His New York Times
bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy:
A Memoir, is truly a book about family,
culture, what it looks like to
rise up in America, and who gets left behind. He writes about his family
with warmth and honesty, digging deep into
the culture, values, and morality that makes
up America's working poor. The stories Mr. Vance
tells, from tales of hillbilly justice, to
Marine Corps boot camp, show us what patriotism
looks like in so much of modern America. Though not a book
strictly about politics, his memoir provides
an incredible window into the part of America that
has come under such focus after the recent election. With the changing tides
happening in American culture, this book will,
for years to come, continue to serve as a
reflection of the most intimate feelings
of those who felt left behind during
the Obama years. The lesson, Mr. Vance
asks his reader? Powerful people sometimes do
things to help people like me without really understanding
people like me. Leading today's
discussion will be journalist and national
best-selling author Alex Kotlowitz. His Chicago-centered biography,
There Are No Children Here, hits on many of the same
themes as Hillbilly Elegy, chronicled in childhood
in the Midwest under troubled parents
and economic hardships. Please join me in welcoming
Alex Kotlowitz and JD Vance. [APPLAUSE] Well, thanks. This is testament to not
only Chicago but to Hyde Park that we get this kind of
audience at 12:00 noon. So it's a privilege to
be here with JD Vance. And if you haven't
read his book, one of the things I really
admire about the work is that it's so deeply
honest and yet incredibly tender and empathic, which is
not always easy to pull off. And so I thought what I want
to do with this conversation, we'll work our way
to the present, because there's clearly
a lot to talk about. But I want to start
really with the book. And I want to ask JD, why
did you write the book? And I ask that not to be
prickly, but really to sort of, did you write it to
sort of understand, to try to make sense
of your own story, or was it because you had an
argument you wanted to make? Sure, it was a
little bit of both. I started to write the book when
I was a law student at Yale, and I was really
troubled by this feeling that I was some sort
of cultural outsider, a bit of a foreign alien
in this institution. And it struck me
that a corollary of that feeling of
being an outsider is that there weren't a
lot of kids who grew up like I did who were in those
institutions that are obviously gatekeepers to a lot of
the opportunities that exist in our society. So I wanted to think about
upward mobility in the United States in a very broad
sense, but also try to tie it to my
personal experiences. And so in that
sense, I was trying to make both a broader
argument, but really just trying to work through, in a
lot of ways, some of the things that had happened to me
and some of the things that I was really
concerned about and didn't quite
understand about my family or my community. I'm curious, just
on a personal level, did you go back to Middletown
and talk to family while you were working on the book? Yeah, I did, I mean,
for a couple of reasons. So one, I just wanted
to be as honest and as accurate as possible. And so I didn't just
want my memories to be informing this thing. I wanted my family
to have their say. And I also was a
little bit worried that if I just wrote this
book purely about them, conjured from my own memory,
that they'd get pretty upset, and they'd be
upset that somebody had aired the family laundry
without consulting them. But the fact that
they were consulted, the fact that they looked
at the manuscripts, the fact that I really
sort of interviewed them, and I'm not a
journalist, but I tried to be a bit of a journalist
in interviewing friends and family, helped a lot
and I think definitely made the book a
little bit better. And what was their
response to what they read? Well, because they
were expecting it, their response was
just happiness for me, for the success of the
book, and so forth. But there was
definitely a little bit of pushback, a
little bit of worry that I was airing the
family's dirty laundry and that folks were
worried it would paint us in a negative light. But most of them, I think once
they saw the finished book and once they recognized
how important it was to me, they just appreciated
it for what it was. Right, well, I think one of
the things you did really well in the book is, despite the
fact that people obviously made some bad choices
along the way, is you come to sort
of, on some level, understand how they get to that
place, which brings me to sort of the core of the book. I mean, I think the sort
of central argument, if I understand it right,
is this notion that so much of the reason that people are
poor has to do with choices, with behavior, with culture. Can you speak to that a bit? Because I sense a
little bit in the book that you're kind of a little
torn about this argument. Well, I am really torn about it. And I think that the
reasons that people are poor is very complicated. So there's this sort
of structural argument and a cultural argument. And I think both arguments
have elements of truth and important things to say. I'm actually a
little bit agnostic about this more difficult
question, especially in my community, of why people
got poor in the first place. So I don't try to
sort of analyze the very rich history of how the
Appalachian region became poor in the first place and
sort of why maybe that may have spread beyond Appalachia to
the broader industrial Midwest. But I do try to answer
this question of, now that people are
poor, now that they do have these certain cultural
and economic baggages that come along with being poor,
why do they stay poor? Why is it so hard for people
to overcome that stuff? And so I do come to a
cultural explanation, even though I think the
structural argument is also very important and is a
critical part of the story. The one interesting
thing about culture is you talk about culture,
and people necessarily assume that you're thinking
culture of poverty. Look at these people and
how pathological they are, and that explains why they're
not doing especially well. I think of culture in a way that
somebody like William Julius Wilson might use it,
which is a little bit more just intuitive to me,
that when you grow up in a certain environment
and you grow up in certain circumstances, it's
ridiculous to think that that doesn't leave its trace, that
the attitudes and the habits that you see around you don't
necessarily inform how you live the rest of your life,
even if you're lucky enough to achieve some measure
of material prosperity. Or that it doesn't influence
the choices that you make. Absolutely. There's a moment
in your book when your mom is, who's, I believe,
doing heroin at the time, she's a nurse and has
to provide a urine test. And so she comes to you. You were I think 12 or 14. You were quite young. I think I was 14 or 15. 14, yeah, And she comes
to you and asks if you would provide her with urine. And you're furious
and angry with her. But it turns out, too,
that you're also afraid, because you've been
smoking pot, that you're going to get busted. And then your
grandmother intervenes and tells you to go ahead
and provide the urine test. And so all these decisions,
all these choices that people make along the way, which
on the surface seem crazy, but yet in the
context of everything, you sort of understand why
you make those choices. Yeah, absolutely,
[INAUDIBLE] told me that I was probably
too much of an idiot, so I didn't inhale
properly, and so it wouldn't show up
on the drug test. And she was right. She was right. Mom did pass. But, yeah, no, it goes to
show that the sort of decision matrices that we
come up with for how to navigate life's
various obstacles, they don't exist in a vacuum. People aren't hyper-rational
in this sort of abstract way. Their life
experiences inform how they think about things, how
they weigh different options. And what's interesting
about that, if you think about
that moment in my life, it sort of created an almost
anti-institutional bias in the way that I thought. I don't talk about this
so much in the book. But the fact that I effectively
had to decide between my mom or between these sort of
supervisory institutions, and that choice
necessarily creates, I think, incentives
and pressures to make other choices later on. And as someone
who definitely has a bit of an
anti-establishmentarian mindset, I wonder
if the way that we approached some
of these questions actually informs that. Rght, it's funny. I think a lot about my reporting
on the South Side and West Side of Chicago, for instance. And just kind of as an
example, if a young man there is sort of seeking vengeance
because of a shooting, and on the surface it makes
absolutely no sense whatsoever, but then you sort of
come to understand, well, the police have been
really unable to solve crimes. And so there's no
sense of justice, and this fear that
if they're brought into this that they're going
to somehow be held culpable. And so people sort of take
matters into their own hand. And I'm not excusing
it, but what you do so beautifully
in your book is trying to understand those
choices that, on the surface, seem so wrong-headed. Yeah. Well, and your pride,
I think of that, and I think your
pride, when you grow up in a certain environment, is
the only thing that you really have control over, right? It's like your sense of
identity, your reputation. That's the one thing that
you can really control. And of course that
doesn't necessarily lead to hyper-rational,
productive decisions. But you sort of
understand it when you think about how they got to
that point in the first place. Right, and I also think
we have a really hard time in this country holding
together in the same hand this notion of
personal responsibility alongside collective
responsibility. You know, that for
conservatives, it's so easy. It's all about
behavior and choices. It's all about the personal
decisions you make. And for liberals, it's
all about the structural. But the truth of the matter
is that it's complicated. I mean, they're so, as you
suggest, so intertwined. Yeah, absolutely,
and we're often so ideologically separated
on these questions that it's sometimes very hard
to even have the conversation and acknowledge that the other
side has something to say, right? So a lot of the positive
conservative reviews of my book completely set aside some of the
economic arguments that I make. And a lot of the positive
left-of-center reviews of the book very
often just talk about, look at these various
problems that are going on in this community, and
they don't necessarily take the personal responsibility
side especially seriously. Which is always a sort
of worry that I have when you write a book
and you argue that things are just complicated. Does it allow somebody to
read it and just confirm their own biases, as opposed
to be challenged by it? And your grandmother
was kind of like this, she was kind of the
metaphor for that. Because on the one hand, she's
telling you to, goddammit, make these right choices. And on the other hand,
she's telling you, but you've got to know,
JD, life isn't fair. And she managed to hold both
of those in the same hand. Yeah, she did, and it was
very important to recognize that life was unfair. It gave me a certain
perspective when I encountered certain
things, and it made me appreciate that
it wasn't all my fault. I sort of could look at the
world and be OK with the fact that there were barriers for
us that didn't necessarily exist for everybody else. But at the same time, she
tried to instill in me this really robust sense
of personal agency. Don't sell yourself short. Don't think you don't
have any control. Because it is ultimately
very self-destructive, right? And one of the interesting
studies that I came across when I was writing the book
is about addiction and sort of the psychology and
the biology of addiction. And so we tend to
understand, neuroscientists tend to understand
addiction as having a fundamentally biological
component to it, right? It's maybe not right to
call it quite a disease. Different people disagree,
but there's certainly something going on
in people's brains that make them more predisposed
to addiction than other people. But at the same time, what's
interesting is some evidence suggests that when the
individual addict believes that their addiction
is a disease, they are less likely
to fight against it and less likely to overcome it. And there's this certain
sense of self-defeatism that if you see a problem as
purely outside of your control, then it can become
pretty self-destructive. Right, and I've got to say that
in reading your book, I mean, so much of it resonated
with my reporting on, again, the communities here
on the West and South Side. I mean, the kind of pessimism
that you talk about, the kind of hopelessness,
the sort of families that begin to crack under all
the pressures around them, the presence of drugs and
alcohol and addiction, and even the violence. I mean, your grandmother,
she had her share of guns. She may not have used them,
but she threatened to. Yeah, when she died, we found I
think 19 handguns in her house. And they were all loaded. And she was very
hobbled at that point. It was very hard for
her to move around. But we found them in various
strategic parts of the house so that if an intruder came
in, even though she moved at the speed of
tortoise, she could have a gun within arm's reach. Right, and if you
haven't read the book, you've got to understand
that his grandmother was kind of really what saved you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she's the one
who, given all her kind of internal
contradictions, she's the one who kind of knew
what you were capable of and what was what
you faced out there. Yeah, that's absolutely right. She was this really
powerful woman. That's the only word that
I can use to describe her. She didn't graduate
from high school, but she was incredibly
smart, incredibly witty, was very willing to
at least threaten violence on behalf of herself
and her family. I remember when she found
out that I was hanging out with one of the bad kids
in the neighborhood, one of the kids who was starting
to experiment with drugs. She just said,
very frankly, sort of in this menacing
whisper, if you continue to hang
out with this kid, I will run him over with my car,
and no one will ever find out. And of course that
was very good for me because I stopped
hanging out with this kid and sort of got away
from that bad influence. I don't think she
would have ever actually ran over a
small child with a car, or at least I hope not. But the fact that I thought
that she would, right? The fact that I even
entertained the possibility, as she was sort of this wild
card, was really important, and it made me listen to her
when she threatened things like that, which was
ultimately in my benefit. Well, let me ask, before we move
on to conversation about Trump, but a couple of questions. One, at the center
of your book is this notion, this
kind of recognition of the importance of family. I mean it is ultimately I think
the most important institution out there. I don't think there's anybody
who would disagree with that. I think where we begin
to have an argument and debate is how do you,
in the end, fortify family? I mean, it's the issue
in places like, again, like the South Side of Chicago. And so I wonder whether you've
thought about that at all, about how we sort of find
ways to strengthen and fortify family, given how
absolutely essential it is. Yeah, I've thought
a lot about it. And this is one
of the areas where it's hard to think
of an obvious policy intervention or nonprofit
intervention that's really going to help. I mean, there
certainly are things that are going to
help on the margin, but there obviously
isn't a magic bullet that we found for
how to stabilize some of these more chaotic families. Because if we had found it,
we would already be doing it. I do think that one of
the blind spots that exists in policymakers is
a sort of preoccupation with the nuclear family as
the most important unit. And very often we don't think
of the extended family as also a very important unit. And so my grandparents, my aunt,
my uncle, all of these people played a really stabilizing
forces in my life. But I remember-- and I
talk about this, obviously, in the book-- that the first time that I
ever, and the only time I ever went into the sort of child
welfare services system, I was given an option,
and not from a person who was menacing and malevolent. But the caseworker
basically said, JD, if you keep on
talking, if you keep on talking about all the things
that are going on in your home, I've got to remove
you from the home. Not put you with your grandma
or with your aunt or uncle, but I've got to put you with
a licensed foster care agent. And so I think that
reveals a certain bias for institutionalized
foster families as an alternative to
the nuclear family. But there's a lot
of good evidence that suggests that
the extended family is an especially
important bulwark when the traditional nuclear
family destabilizes. And there's obviously an
important cultural element to this too, right? I mean, this is
something that I've talked a lot about with
a lot of black folks who've read the book, where
the extended family, this idea of the big matriarch who
sits over the superstructure, is something that's very
natural to me coming from an Appalachian family. But it's also
something that I've heard a lot from black folks
who also feel like their family superstructure is very similar. Right, no, I think you're right. And I think the
real question is, sort of from a public policy
standpoint, is what do you do? And I think you're right. There's a lot to do
along the margins. I mean, obviously
the provision of work and providing adequate
housing, all the things that we kind of know. But again, it all comes
back to this notion that somehow we've got
to figure out a way to create a strong family. And I think most of the public
policy efforts, I think, have been pretty clumsy. I mean, I think
of Bush's efforts, for example, to get
poor people married, this kind of short-lived
effort right before 9/11. But it was kind of
ludicrous to think that somehow the idea that the
government could play Cupid, or that the idea that
actually a two-parent family was necessarily
inherently better than a single-parent family. That's where
Match.com came from. It was the government's effort
to build a matching database. So I agree with you,
and I'm definitely cynical about these things. But I do think that, on
this point of thinking of the extended family as a
useful unit, as a bulwark, I mean, maybe we can't
stabilize every marriage. But can we make it
so that the effects of a marriage that's gone
south or a relationship that's gone south doesn't affect
the children of that union quite as much? And I think the answer is yes. And there are a couple of
things I suggest in the book. One, legally make it easier-- and some states are better
on this than others, but legally make it easier
for the child of a broken home to go and live with an
extended family member so that they don't
have to sever all bonds of familial relationship. But also financially
make it easier, right? This is something that's a big
problem in Ohio, especially with the opioid epidemic, is you
have all these grandparents who are doing OK on Social Security. But all of a sudden, mom goes
to jail because of an overdose. Dad dies because of an overdose. And the children are living
with the grandparents, sometimes outside of the
superstructure of the child welfare system that isn't
necessarily a legal regime, and the grandparents are plunged
into poverty because of it, because they can't support
four children on an income that was designed to support
two elderly folks. So I do actually
think that this is one area where policy levers
could be somewhat successful. But you're right. It's not going to repair,
necessarily, the family chaos that's there right now. It just may prevent some of
the negative consequences from really enduring. Right, so let's-- as David
said, the book came out at a propitious moment, and
you became kind of the Trump whisperer to help us understand
sort of what was at work. So let me ask, I mean,
before the election, obviously everybody sort
of turned to you and said, oh my god. Here we've got a guy
who can explain this to us, what's going on,
and explain this support. So maybe-- I mean, I
know the answer to this-- but maybe it would be helpful,
I think, to sort of begin here, is to sort of help
us understand sort of why that support of Trump,
what was at work there. Yeah, so I was talking with
David about this earlier, but there are a
couple of things that really come to mind
for why folks were so willing to support Trump. So the first is we talk
about economic anxiety, and we sort of have this
debate about how much it's driving the Trump phenomenon. But the sense that
I always got is that the folks who were
most likely to support Trump were those whose
lives were going south in a lot of other
different, maybe hard, difficult to
quantify measures. So it's not just that
jobs are hard to find, that that's important. It's that you walk
down Main Street, and there isn't a single
operating business. It's just a bunch
of empty stuff. People were dying of
drug overdoses at a rate that they haven't died
in your community ever. It's something that you've
never really seen before. Families are breaking apart. More and more people
are going to jail. And that's one of
the things we see is the incarceration
rate's going down. Lifetime mortality
rates are actually going in the wrong direction. So all of these things create
this general sense of decline, and people are incredibly
frustrated at it. And they're looking
for an answer that's different
than whatever they've been offered in the past. And I think this is
one of the reasons why you have this group that
has swung from one pendulum to the other in our
electoral system. And a lot of the people who
voted for Obama in '08 voted for Trump in 2016, and I suspect
they're going to be relatively unstable politically
for the long haul, because a lot of these problems
are going to take really long and long-term efforts to fix. Can I stop you
here for a moment? Yeah, yeah. So you make, I think, a really
important point that many of these people voted for
Obama and then voted for Trump, which seems on the
surface kind of like, how do you get your
head around that? But I wonder whether part
of it is that for Obama, and you talked a little
about this in a recent piece you did for the Times, but
outside of the issue of race, whether they saw some
of themselves in Obama. I mean, here's a
guy who grew up, single parent home,
struggled, found his way. He kind of broke the
myth of social mobility. And so I wonder where they saw
some of themselves in Obama, and saw something very
different in Trump, obviously. But I just, I wonder
what it is that they saw in each of them that
brought them to support an Obama and then to support a Trump. Well, a big part of Trump's
appeal on this question is that, in style and tone,
he was a massive middle finger to the entire elite
system that people feel like has screwed them, right? I mean, he's the
guy who criticizes, is sort of a firebrand. And he really says
things to America's so-called coastal
elites that they wish they could say themselves. So I think that you can't
disconnect the fact that Trump was a very successful
candidate at a time when people were very cynical. They're frustrated
because they're cynical, and they're angry because
they're frustrated. And Trump really channeled
that rage in a certain way. I'm sure that there's definitely
an element of people seeing themselves in President Obama. Certainly he's an
admirable person, you look at his personal story. But I also actually think that
there's something a little bit really difficult about President
Obama in terms of being able to connect with it. I mean, everything from
the way that he speaks, the uniform that
he wears to work, the fact that he
very clearly is just made for this moment
in American history. He's this guy who
all of his skills-- intelligence, education,
eloquence, on and on and on-- seem made for this
particular moment at a time when a
lot of people don't feel like their particular
skill set or the things that society values
necessarily apply to them. So I don't know that a lot of
people felt really personally connected to President Obama,
as much as they just felt like, here's a guy who's
promising change. And clearly we need a change. And you were going to mention
the other thing about Trump. Or was it the fact that he
was giving the middle finger to everybody. Yeah, there's this style and
tone element to Trump, right? There's also something
that, despite the fact that he's a millionaire,
and somebody once said that Trump
is a billionaire. He obviously doesn't live a
life that a lot of these people can really understand
or appreciate. But he's a billionaire in a
way that's much more relatable. So people compare Trump's
apartment in Trump Tower to Elvis Presley's
house in Graceland, with the gold-plated toilets
and the really ostentatious displays of wealth. And they say, this is what a
person who isn't wealthy acts like if they have
a lot of money. And there's something
to that, I think. And there's the related point,
just in terms of the way that he communicates, right? He's much more
relatable in the way that he speaks than
politicians of either party have been for a very long time. And so at what point
does Trump begin to, does that base begin
to crack for him now? Or does it? I mean, do you think
people are paying attention to these first-- I mean, these first
14 days or 13 days have been so chaotic,
and in some ways, as David said earlier,
somewhat dangerous. Sure. And at what point do people
sort of begin to think, boy, I wonder if this is really
in our best interest. Well, my guess-- and this is a
really hard question to answer because it's so complicated-- my guess is that
people are going to give him a pretty
long leash, that the time scale for whether folks
will start to abandon Trump is in years, as opposed
to weeks and months. And so a lot of people, they're
not paying as close attention to the day-to-day news cycle. A lot of the things
that are obviously animating those of us who
spend a lot of time thinking about politics are not
necessarily on their radar. And my guess is that if
his support, if his core base really starts
to crack, then that's going to be something we see
two, three years from now, as opposed to a couple
of months from now. The related point
here, which is why it makes it so hard to predict
this, is that a lot of this depends on the
opposition, right? So there were a lot
of people I knew, even people who didn't vote
for President Obama, who just did not like Donald Trump. They didn't like his rhetoric. They didn't like something
about his personality. And they voted for him
anyway because they felt like Hillary Clinton was
such an unacceptable choice for a variety of
different reasons. And so you can
imagine a situation where Trump's base really
has started to fall apart, but where he's still able to win
a presidential election in four years because the
alternative may still be unpalatable to a lot of people. Well, we'll see if
we get that far. [LAUGHTER] I'm curious, have you
been back to Middletown since the book has come out? And I guess I'm
wondering if you've had this conversation
with people in Middletown about Trump. Or is it really that they just
want to talk about the book? Well, people are definitely
more interested in talking about the book and
about me personally. I go back to Middletown
all the time, so definitely have been back
since the book came out. I try to, partially because
I'm on TV all the time talking about the Trump voter,
I try to really get a sense of what other people
were thinking so I don't end up in the trap of substituting
what I think for, what is the white
working class or what is middle America
thinking right now? So I do sort of start
conversations about politics just so I can have some
of those discussions. But the sense that I've
gotten this early in is that folks just don't
know what the big fuss is. The last time I really
had a serious conversation with somebody about Trump was
in the wake of the crowd size debate right after
the inauguration. And the sense that I got was,
why are we talking about this? That's what we all
wanted to know. Right. And I think that,
to them, why are we talking about this
reflects poorly, definitely on the president, but also
reflects poorly on the media. And there was this
sort of dual sense that neither one of these
guys is really getting this conversation right. Yeah, I mean, I think it's
one of the questions that certainly those in
my profession have, is how do you find a way to-- I mean, I think journalism, I
mean, I'm saying the obvious, but is so essential to the sort
of foundation of any democracy. And it's going to be
especially essential now. But how do you get beyond this
echo chamber that we're in, and how do you find
a way to provide news to people in places
like Middletown, news that they feel they can trust? And that's a really tough one. Because I think that part
of what's going on too is this sense of misinformation
that is so difficult to overcome in light of that. Yeah, I really worry about this. And unfortunately,
I don't necessarily think there's an
easy answer to this. I certainly don't have it. Part of it is just it's
a symptom of the broader geographic segregation that
we have in our country. So you live in Middletown, Ohio. You don't know anybody who works
at a mainstream media brand. You don't interact with the
mainstream media a whole lot. Even your local newspaper,
if it exists at all, is really struggling. So there's a sense in which
the fact that the people don't trust the mainstream
media is a symptom of some of these much broader
cultural problems that we have and the fact that they
just feel disconnected from that entire
grouping, whether they're working in finance or media
or politics or whatever. And part of the
problem is definitely just the 24-hour
news cycle, to be critical of the
media for a second, has not been especially helpful
to the credibility of a lot of these reporters, right? And the reporters haven't done
themselves a lot of favors. We were just talking
about this earlier. It seems like every single
day, there is a story. It's typically a small story. It doesn't really
matter a whole lot. But it explodes on Twitter for
two or three hours, and then half a day later,
whoever originated the story has to say, oh no,
it actually wasn't that bad. This wasn't that true. And that constant cycle, even
if it's relatively unimportant stuff, where, here's a fact. Here's a partial
retraction of the fact, really destroys the credibility
of these institutions. Right, and making it worse. The best example of that
is the report initially that Trump had removed Martin
Luther King's bust, a really small, minor thing. And quickly they
retracted that story. But my god, Trump
kept that story alive for two or three days
to just sort of, again, talking about the fake media. But you talk in your book
about this other part of this equation, which
is that in communities of deep pessimism
and decay, how easy it is for conspiracy
theories to grow. And you've talked about
that among the people that you grew up with. Yeah, it's a significant problem
I write about in the book. And it was one of
the things that was more politically prescient. Obviously the book
isn't hyper-political, but that section was, because
I was talking about fake news before most folks were
talking about fake news. I just wasn't calling it that. But I do see it as symptomatic
of some of these broader issues in mainstream credibility
and cultural segregation, as opposed necessarily
to a cause of some of the social mistrust. I mean, somebody asked
me not too long ago about some conspiracy related to
the president, President Obama, and was trying to interpret
something the president had done in light of the
fact that maybe he's this subversive foreign agent. And they were asking me this
question in a very honest way. What do you think about this? And I said, actually
I don't believe-- we may not agree
with the policy, but I don't believe
this guy is a bad guy. I know people who work for him. I was lucky enough
to meet him once, and I just don't
believe the worst things that you're hearing. And the response was, oh,
that's really good to hear. He seems like a good guy. And it just goes to show
that actually knowing people who were sort of in
these social networks makes people more willing
to trust them and have faith in them. But if you don't know
a single person who's working in the media,
it's really easy to believe the
conspiracy theories, because why would you trust
somebody you don't know over somebody you don't know, right? It's just a free-for-all
at that point. And it's, I think, one of the
great paradoxes of our country is this notion that we're
kind of all in this together. And yet I think we lead
such disconnected lives. Obviously Middletown,
incredibly isolated, disconnected from those of
us here in Chicago, but even here in our own city,
where we live in a place like Hyde Park on
the North Side, so incredibly disconnected
from places like Englewood, or North Lawndale. And so it leads to these kind
of myths that grow and take on lives of their own. And without any contact, it's
hard to dispel those myths. Yeah, and it's easier
to live in a place where you don't have
much contact, right? I mean, the main source
of information and news in my life right
now, despite the fact that I think it's terrible
for my health, is Twitter. But Twitter is, in
its own way, a sort of self-selecting universe
where you follow the people that you want to follow. And unless you're really
diligent about getting sources of information from folks
who may not agree with you, it's super easy,
and probably easier than it's ever been,
to cloister yourself in your own little
information network. So let me ask. I take it you're not a Trump
supporter from what I've read. Am I right? Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. So what do we do now? I mean, how do you talk
to people in Middletown about Trump? What do you say to them to
convince them that perhaps it's time to take a stand? Or do you not even have
that conversation yet? I think it's way too early to
have that conversation just because people are still
in some ways recovering from the 24-hour news
cycle of the election and are taking time
off, in some ways. People just aren't paying
as close attention to a lot of the stuff that we think. And this implicates something
I said earlier, though, that there's this question
of the alternative. I didn't vote for Trump. I am hopeful, like I think
most Americans, that he'll be successful because
his success is now the country's success. But I didn't vote
for Hillary either. And so there's this
issue where, even for me, as problematic as I saw
a lot of Trump's rhetoric and his ideas on how to
fix some of these problems, I agreed with him that
the problems were there. But it was just really hard for
me to vote for Hillary Clinton. And that goes to show that,
in our oppositional two-party system, that unless you have
somebody else to vote for, then people are
going to accept a lot of bad stuff from their
candidate right up to the point that they're not going
to anymore, right? And so I heard that a
lot from Trump voters. Like, how can you
like what he said about this group of people? Or how can you think
that he's really going to solve our problems? And very often the
response that I got was, well, I don't, but I'm
not going to vote for Hillary. And where do you think
race played into all this? Because I think
the sort of myth is that all these Trump
supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you
think it played in? Well, race definitely played
a role in the 2016 election. I think that race will always
play a role in our country. It's just sort of a constant
fact of American life. And definitely some people who
voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him
for racist reasons. I always resist the idea
that the real thing driving most Trump voters was racial
anxiety or racial animus, partially because
I didn't see it. I mean, the thing that
really motivated people to vote for Trump,
first in the primary and then in the
general election, was three words-- jobs,
jobs, jobs, right? And it's very easy-- to get back
to this point about information bubbles-- it's very easy for somebody like
me to watch the sources of news that I watch and to only see
the really offensive stuff that Trump did replayed
over and over again. But if you go to
one of his rallies, it's maybe 5% him being really
outrageous and offensive, and 95% him talking about,
here are all the things that are wrong in your community. Here's why they're wrong. And I'm going to
bring back jobs. That was the core thesis
of Trump's entire argument. And so it strikes me
as a little bizarre to chalk it up to
sort of racial animus. Because, one, the country
is less racist now than it was 15 years ago. And we weren't electing
Donald Trump 15 years ago. And two, that wasn't the
core part of his message, and that wasn't what
a lot of his voters were really connecting with. And the final point
that I'll make on this is that the political
dialogue in 2016 and 2015 was obviously hyper-racialized. There was all these
alt-right people, and I'm in an
interracial marriage, and I got a lot of
stuff directed at me and my wife on online
message boards and Twitter and so forth. So I definitely buy that this
was a racialized discourse unlike any that we've had
in a really long time. But I don't blame
Trump's voters for that. The people that I blame
for that are actually typically well-educated,
coastal elitists, people like Richard
Spencer and the alt-right. It's telling that
the alt-right is driven by primarily very
well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It's not driven by people in
the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Michelle Obama
in these really nasty ways. It's 2,500, I mean, whatever
the number of people is. I've heard estimates
up to like 100,000. But these are people who
are really well educated and are cognitive elites
in their own weird way. Right, like Steve Bannon. Right. Yeah. I don't know how well
educated he is, but he's-- He's very well educated. I know, I know. But it's interesting, though. I do wonder, though, whether
this notion of jobs, jobs, jobs, I mean part of that
was also finding scapegoats. I mean, I think it was
why all the sort of animus towards immigrants. I mean, that clearly was
part of that equation, was they're coming here. They're taking our jobs. We need to send them back. Yeah, and so the question I
have, and I have my own answer, is, do we think of that, which
direction is that going in? If people worried about
jobs, consequently they're worried about immigrants
either stealing their jobs or depressing wages. Or are they worried about
immigrants because of some sort of xenophobic or racial reason? And so jobs gives them excuse
to worry about these things. My sense is that it always goes
from jobs to the immigrants and not in the reverse
direction, because that really is the thing that people seem
most concerned about, right? It's, I can't get work. Or I can get work, but
it's at a much lower wage. Or somebody that I
know can't get work. It's just, it's
hard to overstate how ubiquitous of
a thought that is when you live in
these communities where steel mills
are closing down, coal mines are closing
down, and so forth. And I think there's an element
of, if you see the problem, you get to name it. So the person who
saw Halley's Comet, I believe his name
was Halley, right? And so what Trump saw is that
a lot of Republican base voters were really unhappy
and that they were dissatisfied with the
standard Republican answer to those problems. So if for 15, 20, 30 years
Republicans had been saying, you want more jobs. You want better livelihoods
for yourself and your family. What we need to do is really
get that top marginal tax rate from 35 to 29, or
whatever the case may be. And we've got to deregulate
as much as possible so that the noble businessmen
can create jobs. Trump was the first
person who realized that narrative had
no more real salience with the Republican base. And so he came up with
a different narrative. And in some cases, I think
his narrative was right. I mean, I do think that
trade hasn't necessarily been in the best interests of
a lot of these communities. Now, the question of whether
you can go backwards in time, I think the answer is no. But he at least was
identifying something real. And more importantly,
he was identifying something different,
and people were fed up with the old explanation. Right, so one question before
we open up to the audience. So you've move
back to Ohio or are in the process of moving
back, with what intent? Are you planning
to run for office? Are you going to
keep on writing? Are you-- I'm sorry. I didn't hear that question. To the audience-- No. Well, you're all set now. So I am not planning
to run for office. And I'm going to start
a small nonprofit that's really focused on this
opioid crisis that's hit Ohio especially hard but
has hit a lot of communities hard across the country. And, as I was telling
David earlier, I've wanted to move home
since I was a little kid-- not a little kid, sorry, 2003. When I was a teenager and I
left for the Marine Corps, I've been homesick
basically since that moment, and so I've always been
looking for an opportunity to move back home. And this crazy time is
as good a time as any. Cool, cool, well it's
actually interesting. I mean, one of the things
you talk about in your book is the brain drain, the
people leaving communities like Middletown, or again
like an Englewood or Lawndale, and moving on. But I think what
people don't recognize is the number of people actually
who do come back, in some ways, to sort of rebuild
what they know needs strengthening
and fortifying. Sure. So my hat's off to you. So let's open up
to questions, yeah. I think we've got a
microphone in the middle if people want to
ask a question. Hey. Hi. My question is,
what mistakes do you think liberal
politicians are making in striking up
meaningful dialogue with the white working class? Well, one, I think that one
of the critiques that I agree with about the 2016
election is that it seemed to be focused much more on
cultural issues from the left, as opposed to economic
issues from the left. And a lot of the themes that
Donald Trump picked up on were classically
left-of-center arguments about declining wages and
declining jobs and so forth. So I do agree broadly
with the critique that Democrats should be
talking a little bit more about issues close to home,
about economic concerns, and not as much about some of
the cultural issues that really animate, frankly, the elites
of the Democratic Party but not necessarily the base,
even, of the Democratic Party. That's one answer
to that question. The other answer to that
question is this inability to cross ideological
boundaries in our conversations is, to me, a symptom of
something much bigger and much more important, which is what
we talked about earlier, which is you have this massive
geographic segregation of opportunity and talent. And that's just reflecting
itself in our politics. I think it's really easy for
me to sit up here and say Democratic politicians should
be more compassionate to Trump voters. I agree with that,
but it's really hard to be compassionate with
somebody you don't actually know. And so I think that my advice,
especially to young Democrats, is, to borrow a line from the
Alec MacGillis article that came out right after Trump
won, go Midwest, young hipster. Because if people
continue to live in-- if this sort of problem of
people going and getting an education and setting up
shop in these hyper-elite areas continues, you're not going
to be able to talk to somebody that you don't really understand
and you don't even know. Right, and I think
also there's also this tendency to be sort
of set in your ideology. And one of the things I really
admired about your book-- and I may be wrong
about this-- is that I sense a little
bit that you set out in part to make this argument
about personal responsibility. And then, in sort of
exploring the history of your family
and the community, began to sort of recognize
how complex it was, and that this issue of,
again, personal responsibility and collective
responsibility, of we've got to be able to talk
about them at the same time. I meant to write about
both, though I come maybe from the right, and so the
personal responsibility stuff was a little bit more
in the front of my mind. But I definitely set
out trying to harmonize these two divergent
thoughts a little bit. But it's a fair comment. I think my question is kind
of a follow-up to that. I'm a Midwesterner,
but I've never lived outside a major
metropolitan area. And this election, I
think, really drove home how disconnected a lot of
us are, even in the Midwest, from rural areas. Sure. And so what would
be a functional way to just reconnect
with these areas, not having family
or experience there, in terms of not political
discussions, but just empathy and getting to
know people better? My best advice is-- and it's not very good
advice, so I apologize. But there are a lot
of civic institutions that are working in rural
areas, where I suspect no matter what your ideological
preferences are, whether you're extremely to the
left or extremely to the right, there are civic
institutions in rural areas that are really trying to
work on those issues, right? So get involved
in a church that's maybe a 20 or 30-minute
drive from your house. Get involved in a community
organization that's working on some of the issues
of poverty and inequality that maybe you really
care about but you've only seen in a metropolitan context. So I think there are a lot
of ways to get involved. But there are just
a lot of good groups that are doing a lot of
important work out there. And it's amazing that you
get involved with them, and you just necessarily
meet a lot of people who you might not
have otherwise met. So that's my one
piece of bad advice. Hey there, so you
talked a fair bit about the geographic
divide, and that's always been really salient for me. But while you suggested the
hipsters should go Midwest, which I follow,
I'm curious why you wouldn't suggest
for the rural areas to instead not
live there anymore. Sure. The argument is
that the research suggests that technology
has made most of those jobs disappear. And the smaller communities
are simply less productive, at least relative to a city. To what extent do you
think we as a society should consider making it
more urban than it is now? Well, yeah, I think that
both things should be true and can be true. So it can be the case that
people who are really talented or have been very fortunate and
afforded a lot of opportunities should go back to
their communities or should go to communities
that need their talents and need their hard work. And also that people who live in
really high unemployment areas should be moving, typically to
urban centers where there's not so much employment
and where there are a lot more
economic opportunities. So I think both things
should happen simultaneously. There are a lot of
real barriers to moving from a place like
Eastern Kentucky, even in places where the
poverty rate is approaching 50% and there aren't a whole lot
of reasons to stay there. But there are real
barriers, right? Moving from Eastern
Kentucky to San Francisco is really expensive. And more importantly,
it's really hard to get an affordable
house, partially because-- not just partially,
I think largely because of really
ill-advised government policies about land use
regulations and zoning and so forth. So it's a very important point. It's a point where policy
levers could be really important and really impactful. But so long as we're
charging $4,000 for a one-bedroom apartment in
New York City or San Francisco, or maybe not as much
in Chicago, but still I think an elevated
amount, you're going to create real
disincentives for people to actually move
to urban centers, to move to places where
there are more opportunities. And I think the
other issue there too is that, if we suggest that the
answer to all this is to move, and you have a colleague at
National Review who said, just get your U-Haul and move
if things aren't working out for you, is again, this goes
back to this notion of family and how important family is. And so if you begin, if
that's sort of your fix, you begin to disrupt the
very institution that's so essential, so important. Yeah, there are definitely
drawbacks to the idea that really poor folks, folks
living in low-employment areas, should be moving elsewhere. But it strikes me that
the alternative, which is what we have now,
which is a really ossified geographical labor
market, is not a good idea. So there are
definitely downsides, but my sense is the
positives probably outweigh the downsides. But there are also ways to maybe
mitigate some of those family disruption issues. Hi there. Hi. So it seemed that, for
you, very early on, the strongest interventions you
had with regard to education were from your grandmother
and grandfather. You write about
them very fondly, both in terms of setting
higher expectations for you and also studying independently
outside of school. Sure. Later on in life, you
encountered a professor at the law school, Amy
[INAUDIBLE], no stranger to controversy in her own books. Sure. Could you speak to what
sort of interventions would have been useful to
someone like a young JD outside of having a extended
family with individuals strong willed enough to
advance their education on their behalf? That's a really tough question. And I'll answer it
rhetorically first, and then I'll answer it
in a real way second. But one answer that I'd
ask people to think about is, given the types of
interventions that really worked in my life, and I think
there's a lot of evidence that those interventions work in
a lot of other people's lives, right? I mean, having an
adult that a kid, even from a chaotic
household, can rely on really builds resilience. It builds grit and so forth. So what are policy
levers that we could pull to make a kid's
environment look a little bit more like the environment
that I grew up in, where you had access to
somebody who could be a really helpful mentor, or you
had access to somebody who was really going
to focus on making your life a little bit
better, despite all of the negative things that
are going on around you. So a couple answers
that come to mind are, one, we should
really be thinking about how to build
mentoring relationships between low-income kids and some
of the teachers in their lives, other people in their lives. We could do a lot more
on that front, I think. And another answer is that there
are different organizations, folks like the Nurse
Family Partnership and so forth, that actually
try to go into these homes and go into these communities
and try to give them knowledge that they don't have. Because a lot of
these parents, they're not not reading because they
think that it doesn't matter or because they don't
love their children. They just don't know
that, for example, if a kid knows 30,000 more
vocabulary words when they start kindergarten, they're
much more likely to have a successful life. So there are people
that actually go into some of
these communities and try to teach
these parents, look, if you raise your
voice, that can have really negative
consequences for your kid's brain chemistry. If you read to
your kid more, that could really promote
the opportunities that they're going to
have down the line. That's a very communitarian
answer to this problem, but one that, from the
evidence I've seen, actually looks like it
might work pretty well. Thanks. Yeah. Hi, so the power of
check and balance will still continue
in Trump's presidency, like the bureaucracy
and civil society, even though the
Republicans control both houses of the Congress. But the staying power of
the civil societies' check and balance is
still questionable. So the women's march is amazing
from the media perspective. But if we compare that to
the Tea Party movement, we see that it might
have a long way to go. Because Tea Party movement,
even though the content is questionable but it has
very widespread influence. And also we see that lots
of times the civil society check, power can sometimes
descend into violence, as you can see in the Berkeley. So what do you see that this
kind of check and balance, power from the civil society? What kind of strategy
it should adopt in order to better exert its influence
on the presidential power? Well, it's a tough question
and pretty far outside of my area of expertise. But my sense is that
the thing that's most powerful about
civic society in some of these institutions-- the fourth estate,
the media, churches, a lot of these institutions
that exist sort of in the middle
layers of society-- what's so important about them
is that they have credibility, right? So they're able to sort of
channel certain passions and certain interests
in a way that's typically pretty productive. Now I don't know that I
would called the Berkeley protests, and the anarchists
who were setting cars on fire and so forth, I
don't know that I would call them civic society. But one thing that came to mind
when we were talking about this is, what's an institution
in our society that still has incredibly
broad support across the political spectrum? And one answer is the military. That's not what
I'm thinking about. Another answer is science. Scientists have really,
really high rates of approval and
rates of credibility, even now in our society. So when I think of something
like the science march, one thing that really worries
me is that to the degree that we insert these things
in this political conversation in a hyper-partisan way,
we destroy the credibility of these institutions
that are super important. And frankly, scientists
marching on Washington are not going to do
a whole lot to affect policy one way or the other. But what they may do is further
the politicization of science that makes it harder
for people to trust so-called scientific experts. So I really worry about that. And my advice to
those who are worried about civic institutions
and civic society is to ask yourself, is
the thing that you're doing building the credibility
of this institution, or is it destroying
the credibility of this institution? And if it's not building the
credibility of the institution, then it's not worthwhile,
because that's what we really need right now is civic
institutions that people actually believe in. A friend of mine was at a Trump
rally in St. Joseph's County, South Bend. And he commented
that he was just so taken with the response. It was packed to the gills. And I think Sanders was
there the night before, and he had a fairly good
crowd, but nothing like Trump. And he commented
that he knew then that there was
something in the works. Because St. Joseph's County
was deindustrialized, like so much of the Midwest. And as you probably know, so
many of the employees back in the '50s, '60s
were from Appalachia. In fact, I worked with
Appalachians in the steel mills here in the Southeast
Side at Republic. And the deindustrialization just
devastated those communities, in large measure
the Appalachians. In fact, one of our
graduates at Washington High School, a kid named Walley,
she wrote a book about that. It was called Project 0. I think she presented here. Maybe you guys might remember. She's an anthropologist at MIT. But what this guy
was commenting is that this jobs, jobs, jobs
mantra, Trump's, really resonated. And if he can
deliver, God love him. Now the skepticism, I'm sure,
is all over this room right now. But if he can somehow,
maybe through education, retrain these kids, they'll
get better secondary training and the vocational
education, maybe there's some hope with some
new economic initiatives. And one final comment
is you haven't really talked about your
Marine Corps service. I served in the Army with a lot
of Appalachians, and trust me. They were the best
soldiers I had ever seen. Thank you. And what about the two
generals Trump picked? You impressed? They're both Marines. Yeah, well, I love both of the
generals that Trump picked, especially General
Mattis, who's sort of a folk hero for
those who served in my generation of Marines. Look, I would be
Trump's biggest fan if he's able to
bring a lot of jobs back and do the things that
are necessary to train folks for the next generation
of American jobs so that people could actually
find dignified, stable work. I would be incredibly happy. And it's definitely a
message that resonates. And frankly, it's
not just a message that resonates among
those who voted for him. And one of the things that's
so fascinating about the Trump argument is that you
talk to a lot of working and middle-income Latinos,
black Americans, folks who didn't vote for
Trump because they just couldn't stand his rhetoric,
but they loved that emphasis on jobs. And I've heard more
positive remarks from communities that
didn't vote for Trump-- maybe they voted for Hillary,
or maybe they just stayed home-- than I expected. And I think it goes
to show that there's a real frustration with
the way that things have been going for a
long time in this country. And whether it expresses
itself in the way that folks switch their
votes from Obama to Trump, or just go from Obama voters
in 2008 to not voting at all, it's equally important. And it could affect our
politics over the long haul. There seems to be a lot of
effort put forward by the left to sort of try and understand
and vindicate the average Trump voter or the average
middle American. Sure. But if you hear Trump
talking about Chicago as full of carnage,
there doesn't seem to be that
same sort of effort among the right reading the Wall
Street Journal and the National Review and sources like that. So I was just
wondering if you could speak to sort of that
divide, where the left seems to be trying to sort
of reach across, but also in sort of
a condescending way. And the right seems to
be largely ignoring it. I agree with you. And, first of all,
those on the left who are trying to understand
the Trump voter, it's a really
admirable thing to try to take a group of people
who didn't vote for you and to really understand what
makes them tick, not just necessarily because you want
them to vote for you next time, but because you are actually
concerned about them and worried about them. That's a really admirable trait. And frankly, I think
that we've really lost it, not just on the right. But increasingly
folks on the left are less willing to
play that game, right? They're less willing to
play the compassionate game. And I think it
speaks to the fact that our politics has become
increasingly segregated and sort of bipolar. That worries me. I've written articles
about why Republicans should be a lot more concerned
about black Americans. There's this phrase
that you hear, and it's relatively offensive if
you run in Republican circles, where folks will say, why
aren't black people voting for Republicans? And the answer is, well,
they're sort of addicted to all the entitlements. Or a more offensive way
of putting it is they're stuck on the Democratic
plantation, which is language that I'm sure, if you pay
attention to politics, you've probably heard. And the thing that I
always say is, look, guys. People are actually pretty
good at voting for the things that they really care about,
and they're not as stupid as you think they are. So the reason that a
lot of these groups aren't voting
Republican is probably because they don't
think Republicans are offering them a whole lot. So maybe we should be
having the same conversation and trying to show a little bit
more empathy to those voters. I worry that there's
just not that much space, over the next couple of years,
for anybody to show empathy. So I think, as opposed to
seeing more of it on the right, my suspicion is we'll see just
even less of it on the left. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, Mr. Vance. Thank you for writing the
book-- three quick comments. I also get frustrated by
people who use big words. My alcoholic grandmother,
who has dementia now, I call her [? dotty. ?] I'm glad
she never met your grandmother. And third, I have
never been more proud in my life
than the time I first bought a meal from my
little brother and sister. I give you a lot of respect for
writing that down in a book. My question, you mentioned
a lot about family, and this might get
a little personal. You talk about the
fortitude of the family. A lot of families in these
areas, mine in particular, they're defined by trauma. I'm curious how you think
about adding to your family and what things related
to your upbringing, different mechanisms that you
had your grandmother there, what things might you do
differently with your children? Have you given
that much thought? Yeah, I think about
that a great deal. I mean, the thing
that I want most of all in how I raise my own
kids is that I don't want them to be afraid that when
things are rough for one reason or another, if I'm upset
for one reason or another, that the shit's
going to hit the fan. Excuse my language. So I worry especially,
and I think of that as the enduring thing that I
hated most about my childhood, was just how chaotic it was,
that we were always walking on egg shells, and
we just never knew that a stepdad or a
boyfriend could come home from work in a bad
mood, and it would be like a battle royale for
the next four or five hours. And so what I want
most of all is to never, or at least
to as rarely as possible raise my voice to my kids. And to just give them
an environment where they feel stable, they
feel like they can always go home to that place. One of the things that always
really bothered me as a kid-- I didn't write this down
in the book I don't think-- is that I hated when
people would send me mail, because by the time they
sent it to me, very often, my address would have changed. And I want to have
a sort of situation where if somebody
sends my kid a letter, it's going to come
to their home, and they have some
confidence in that. Thank you. Yeah. And that you'll run over your
kid's best friend if need by, right? Or I'll threaten. I'll threaten at least, right. We have time for just
one more question. All right, so I
really appreciate you coming to talk
today because I come from kind of a
similar background as you-- low-income, single-parent
family, in a rural community where all the businesses,
all the people are leaving, where heroin overdoses are just
another thing you read about in the newspaper. And, while I do
agree that there's reasons for so many of the poor,
working-class people to vote for Trump, because
for them it's a vote against this establishment
and these failures of the government. But a lot of the narratives
that I get from people when I go back home is also,
they have this sense of blame for their problems. And they place that blame
on marginalized communities, whether it's
immigrants, whether it's this idea of black folks
being just welfare abusers. And a lot of times, I feel like
that's also a huge, huge factor in their argument for Trump. And I'm wondering if you
think that something that existed before or
if it's something that got a lot worse
as Trump's rhetoric got more and more intense
throughout the campaign. And then also, how I can have
conversations with those people when I go back and try to
explain to them that it's not the fault of those
marginalized communities, that it's the fault
of the government or this establishment or
these macroeconomic policies. Sure, well, in some
ways, we're all slave to our own experiences, right? So we see the
things that we see, and that obviously informs
how we interpret the world and how we understand some
of these different phenomena. And I haven't seen nearly as
much of what you're describing. I'm not saying you don't see it. But having not seen
it as much myself, it doesn't inform as much of
how I think about the Trump phenomenon. Obviously you try to
root these things in data so that you're not just
speaking purely anecdotally. But at some level, the data is
really open to interpretation in certain ways, right? And so it's sort
of relatively easy to fit your biases or
the things that you've seen into the data in
one form or another. So I think that clearly
that's out there. And my worry with Trump,
and one of the complaints that I raised
during the campaign, is that political rhetoric
actually really matters. The way that politicians
talk about things actually manipulate
the conversation. And so George W. Bush,
right after September 11th, reminded everyone that
the gross majority-- 99.999% of our
Muslim citizens were fantastic people and
patriots and so forth, that the War on Terror was
not a war against Islam. And voters responded to that. Republicans and
Democratic voters responded to that, right? But when we start, talking
having conversations, for example, about a Muslim
ban, which thankfully President Trump retracted
later on in the campaign. But as soon as he talked
about a Muslim ban, all of a sudden a lot
of voters actually supported the idea
of a Muslim ban. I just don't think
that's surprising, because again, people follow the
rhetoric of their politicians. And so I did worry about that. I continue to worry about that. And that, to me, is
a much bigger driver than a sort of
inherent, I really hate these
marginalized groups who are sort of to blame for
my problems in one way or the other. So the question about how to
have a conversation with folks, I think that the way that
I always try to frame this is to remind them that any
of the problems that they're talking about that exist in some
of these other communities also exist in our community. And that tends to break the
ice a little bit, right? So you have a
conversation about, well, maybe people who don't
look like us are taking too much in welfare benefits. It's useful to
remind people, well, hey, what about that
guy down the street? Or what about all
of these people that JD writes about
in Hillbilly Elegy who are not other groups. They're just part of the
sort of white working class demographic. So there's utility,
in other words, in finding commonality, and
pointing out that commonality, and really identifying the
ways that things have not been supremely good for some
of these other groups of people too. The one thing I'll say, and
especially conversations about race, is that if
you frame criticisms of what's happened to
minority groups in the United States in your
conversations with maybe some white working class folks,
if you frame it in terms that are accusatory, so if you
talk about white privilege and talk about how they
benefited from it even though they can't see it
or they don't notice it, if you talk about that
problem in an accusatory way or in an abstract
way, you're not going to get anywhere, right? Whether it's true
or false, you're just not going to get anywhere. But where I've have had a lot
of luck in talking to people, let's say about why are
black Americans living in these terrible ghettos? Why don't they just get out? Why don't they do
something else? Actually talking about how
housing policy was really, really bad to those communities,
and that's one of the reasons that they're trapped in
these ghettos, that's a really powerful argument. And that's something I've never
heard people push back against. So my argument, in other words,
is point out the similarities, and have specific examples
about people and the way that they're affected
by some of these things. Don't make it abstract,
and don't make it about all of the things people
who can't see their privilege have done wrong in their lives. Great. JD, I want to thank you
so much for being here. Somebody asked earlier about how
you sort of bridge the divide. And I think one of the beauties
about JD's book, Hillbilly Elegy, is it does just that. I mean, it's the
power of storytelling, which is that it brings us to
places we otherwise might not go, and it introduces us to
people we might not meet. And I think you do it again
with this incredible honesty, and also with this
tenderness, and a sense that you're still grappling with
questions about your own life and about all these issues. And so I just, I deeply
admire you for that. And I'd urge you,
if you haven't, you ought to really read this book. And I hope you keep on writing-- Thank you. --whatever else you may have. Let me just add,
Alex, because you won't, that you've performed
the same service in the books that you've written. Absolutely. And it's really a pleasure
to hear the two of you in dialogue because
you represent something really important. We live in times in which
reasonableness, thoughtfulness, the willing to hear one another,
the willing to contemplate the notion that maybe things
aren't as we suspected, is really damaging. And so we are so grateful
to the two of you for engaging in
this conversation. And let me just say this. It not only gives
me hope that there are people like Alex
Kotlowitz and JD Vance around and offering some guidance
through their storytelling that might draw us together. But I just want to say how
proud I am of the questions that were asked today, and
how encouraging it is to see thoughtfulness on the
part of all the young people who asked questions today. Because ultimately that's
the greatest hope for us, and that's really why
the Institute of Politics exists, to create this
kind of environment for you to ask those questions. So congratulations
to all of you, and thank you so much
for being here today. [APPLAUSE]
