J.D. Vance on his new book Hillbilly Elegy

a graduate of Yale Law School our guest today grew up poor in the midst of the dysfunctional culture of Appalachia I believe we Hillbillies are the toughest goddamn people on this earth he writes in his new memoir but we Hillbillies must wake the hell up today on uncommon knowledge JD Vance and his hillbilly elegy uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson JD Vance grew up in the Rust Belt city of Middleton Ohio and the Appalachian town of Jackson Kentucky raised for the most part by his grandmother Mamaw did I pronounce that correct right his grandmother Mamaw whom he credits with saving his life we will come to that after high school mr. Vance enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served in Iraq he then graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School now a principal with a Silicon Valley investment firm of mithril Capital Management mr. Vance is the author of hillbilly elegy a memoir of a family and culture in crisis JD Vance welcome thank you for having me your grandmother Mamaw once told your grandfather papaw that if he ever came home drunk again she'd kill him he did and she almost did tell us that story yeah that's right so she when he came home drunk he passed out on the couch and my grandma was not one for sort of taking things lying down so she decided she was going to honor her word and she poured gasoline on him as I write in the book and lit a match to him and he sort of you know part of him caught on fire and it was my aunt who at the time was 11 or 12 years old who sort of left into action and saved him from potentially burning to death it's it's funny or maybe just morbid but I think a little bit of both that when I was talking about the story with family later you know someone said you know JD I think maybe you didn't get that story quite right and I think oh no you know what what detail of I messed up and I put in the book and they said I think it was lighter fluid not gasoline and so there's some some debate about what the actual substance was but I think it goes to show one that the the house that my grandparents built after they moved from Appalachia to southern Ohio was pretty chaotic and second that they were they were pretty extraordinary people in their own way okay so that's your family we'll come back to your family let's talk about the people a little bit more generally from hillbilly ology I do not identify with the wasps of the northeast shore instead I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of scots-irish descent okay quick history lesson make it this big who are the scots-irish when did they come to this country what makes them distinctive yeah so scots-irish is a bit of a misnomer because it's the Scots the Irish but also people who tend to come from the northern parts of England who you know so basically rural people who came from the broad UK they tended to settle in the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries and they tended to cluster along the Appalachian Mountains so Western Virginia what we now know is West Virginia Tennessee Kentucky you know southern Ohio I you know I don't have a fantastic argument for why they clustered in those regions I mean some people have argued that they were drawn to the mountains of Appalachia in the same way that they were drawn you know to sort of the mountains back in the Highland but they were a very distinctive subculture and what's relatively you know interesting if you look at the ethnography of these areas they still are very heavily over-represented in these parts of the country so even though there's been a lot of assimilation a lot of dispersion there's still a disproportionate share of the scots-irish in Appalachia and the important point is that these people who now live in Appalachia and have spread out as you as you said again will come to the your story about moving from Kentucky to Ohio they come to this country in the 18th late 17th mid early mid 18th century when the borderlands of England and Scotland and when Ireland are still very rough violent places correct and they bring with them a sort a certain they take a certain level of violence for granted it's part of their lives and they also family plays in those regions as opposed to southern England which is much more settled and becomes wealthier and more frankly I suppose the term would be more civilized much earlier in those reason regions much more is based on clan family has a different weight among these people is that correct yeah I think that's right I mean whatever the causes there's a lot of evidence that suggests that the scots-irish valued honor and family loyalty in a very very personal and deep way and because of it they weren't totally afraid to enforce that family honor code in a way that sometimes led to violence so you look at these areas they tend to be much more violent than similarly situated demographic areas and to this very day to this very day and again the cause is something that's interesting that I don't have a great insight on but it's just there you know whether they brought it from the old country whether it's something they developed after they landed but there's definitely a very clear sense in which one the extended kinship of family is very very important to these people but also that they suffer disproportionate rates of violence not just violence against others but also violence inside the home which is something I obviously write about and one more characteristic of the scots-irish of your people so to speak as a whole before we move on you mentioned tended to settle in Appalachia you named the state's West Virginia Kentucky and so forth they've spread out but tend to spread out to the upper south and the Midwest and the point I'd like to stress about that is implicit in your book they're a long way from the media centers of the East Coast and the west coast so we are talking about a distinctive culture of people who've been here for a couple of centuries that the rest of the country the media culture in the rest of the country tends to overlook is that fair I definitely think that's fair the one caveat I would say is that though there is definitely a regional distinction in a sort of cloister of the scots-irish in a part of the country that is very cut off from the media centers of the country I do think it's fair to say that scots-irish culture has been very very influential on what we call American culture more broadly this is a really interesting book by a guy named Jeff burgers United States of Appalachia which really chronicles the ways in which Appalachian culture is very very influential on mainstream American culture and you know I think that's that's Roommate that that's still true today so there's still a sense in which what a lot of the things that we think of as American are at least somewhat related and influenced by scots-irish culture obviously a lot of other cultures too but I do think scots-irish culture plays a pretty big part okay they break through at the national level with Andrew Jackson that's right he's a scots-irish president that's right and we'll come back to politics in a moment first your family the move from Jackson Kentucky which is Appalachia proper yeah to Middleton Ohio why well for very very stark economic reasons so this is the 1940s this is before especially generous social welfare programs and I think at a very stark level if my grandparents hadn't moved from Jackson Kentucky they faced a choice right poverty potentially starvation maybe scraping by a relatively successful life but if they move to the industrial powerhouses that we're developing in the Rust Belt what we now call the Rust Belt but back then was the land of opportunity they had an opportunity at the steel mill er at the paper mill to earn a decent middle-class livable wage and so that's what brought not just them but millions of others into those those Midwestern factories okay and yet you argue and you argue you describe you're observing you state that in hillbilly ology that when they move to middle-class Ohio they did not behave like middle-class Ohioans they did not become suburban yeah that's right it took a while to really adapt to the cultural norms of Midwestern middle-class life and one of the takeaways from the book is that culture is really sticky in a certain way right you don't just all of a sudden acquire a material comfort and then all of the habits all the attitudes that you grew up with you you know completely cast off at something my grandparents learned when they were integrating into 1950s nuclear family middle-class life in Ohio it's something I of course learned as an adult myself that you know culture is sort of sticky so they did struggle to adjust in a certain way alright so here you are growing up in Middleton Ohio your mother this is painful to read painful to discuss she you said you counted 15 stepdads quotation marks around the stepdads husbands boyfriends and so forth moved through her life and your life when you were still a child sure and let me quote from hillbilly ology our homes are a chaotic mess we scream and yell at each other at least one member of the family uses drugs we don't study as children and we don't make our kids study when we're parents and that was your way of life until you were 13 or 14 years old or so more or less yeah more or less yeah that's absolute right so what are you ignore --ml definitely struck me as normal and in fact I would say the alternative struck me as abnormal right so when you know my my aunt the same one who put the the fire out on my grandfather when she married my uncle then I remember you know and I love these people very much we're all very close I remember thinking that his extended family was odd because they were so nice to each other they didn't bicker and fight at Christmas and Thanksgiving they didn't talk bad about each other behind their back and because of that I thought that they were a little bit weird so that there definitely was a sense in which the family environment that I grew up around which was very foreign and very chaotic to you know sort of upper-class American mindset was very normal to me alright let's stick with your life story for longer when you're about 15 you stopped moving from home to home to home with your mother and moved in with your grandmother Mamaw sure this same woman who doused your grandfather with lighter fluid and tossed a match on him sure once again from hillbilly ology those three years with man MA under uninterrupted and alone saved me she was uneducated she swore like a sailor and she could be dangerous how did she save you well the the part of my grandma that would you know potentially set somebody on fire if they crossed her it had had a good side to right so or at least a partially good side so you know I was like a lot of kids who grew up in this environment I was very close to you know I was not doing especially well at school I was starting to experiment with drugs and alcohol I was starting to hang out with the real wrong crowd and I remember when I was a kid not quite 15 probably 12 or 13 and my grandma even though I wasn't living with her a hundred percent of the time I still spent a lot of time with her she still had a big influence in my life I remember start hanging out with this kid who was sort of known to be a local druggie and my grandma found out and she leaned in and said JD I want to tell you something if you don't stop hanging out with that kid I'm going to run him over with my car and no one is ever going to find out now do I think that Mamaw and hindsight would have actually ran over a 13 year old kid absolutely not but she knew as a real book I'm not so sure but yeah but mammal was always very protective of kids and I think in her own way she probably felt very bad for him but what she did believed and what I believed is that she would enforce that rule she knew that I thought she would enforce that rule and so when she made that promise unlike a lot of kids who grew up in that circumstance who would say aw screw it I'm gonna hang out with the bad kid in secret or maybe just ignore what my parents say I believed her and so I completely cut off contact with that kid there are a lot of little things like that where my grandma provided some you know whether it was discipline or whether it was stability in the home standardise all reading remorse she expected you to do your homework to behave and if you didn't she was going to come after you no that's absolutely right she was she was very hard on me in a way that I needed she demanded that I get a job that I work hard in the job that I pay my own way she demanded that I go to school and then I get good grades you know she did she had by the time that I lived with ma'am all that was probably the poorest I ever was growing up we had very very little money I remember that she went and bought a ti-89 graphing calculator because I was in the advanced math class at school that was the hot calculator the calculator at that stage and exactly and Mamaw said look you lazy bastard if I can pay for this calculator with as little money as I have then you are going to work hard in school you're going to do well and that meant something to me that really meant a lot and so I did in a lot of different ways she had this influence on me that really set me on the right path well again we'll continue with your story here I want to get back to your people so - sure but your story because here you sit beautifully articulate wonderfully well groomed high flying young man at a to tell my wife capital management Oh better than right so briefly how you got from there to here so to speak after high school United States Marine Corps right which which meant what to you well it meant that it was an organization to me that had a really high standards that had a certain place in American history two of you know in my generation of grandkids there were six of us three of us join the Marine Corps two of my older cousins and both of them encouraged me to join the Marines especially my cousin Rachel who I'm very close to so it was a big part of just getting out and seeing the world learning certain standards and also being exposed to certain values that the Marine Corps had certain educational traits that I didn't acquire when I was a kid the Marine Corps really instilled those things and gave me a lot of opportunities because of it and then Ohio State and then Yale Law School in hillbilly ology you write well but I won't quote you let you let you die since I have you right here just tell about tell what it was like to hear your classmates talk about the Armed Forces of the United States when you had just served in the Marines well so I should say that most of my classmates were you know very good people and and if they were you know if they were unfamiliar with the military which a lot of them were they at least thought it was a curiosity not a negative curiosity they were just you know they wanted to know what was it like they didn't know many people who had served before so there was definitely an element of that you know some people were a little bit more hostile to military service and to those in the military I think that came from not really knowing anyone who served so are you cutting them a lot of slack well I I'm the reason I'm cutting them a lot of slack is because most of them really were good people and and I and I don't want to give the wrong impression that you know I had a couple of bad experiences and this is something that a lot of people you know not to get too political but a lot of people on the left I think will take a couple of bad apples and say well the whole group is bad and so I want I want to resist that but definitely there were some people who were very be first here's the feeling I get correct me if I'm wrong the feeling I get is that when you move from Middleton Ohio into the United States Marine Corps you are not moving from one world into a completely foreign world this United States Marine Corps had enough continuity with the best of the tradition in which you grew up these people are patriotic they understand the importance of hard work what the Marine Corps gave you was standards right it forced you to perform but it didn't seem as I read hillbilly ology a really foreign world to you that's right when you move to Yale you were on another planet is that fair or am i overstating it oh that's that's absolutely fair I mean you have to think demographically the marine corps was not all that dissimilar wrink was very racially diverse but in terms of experiences in terms of income classes it's primarily middle income working-class kids it's not kids who are especially poor or especially wealthy so there was a sense in which the experiences of the kids in the Marine Corps was very similar to my own that wasn't true at Yale Law School okay all right immigrants to new countries I knew this if I there was some immigrants when I was growing up for who were all kinds of wistful talk about Italy in the old days but also almost a certain sense of guilt that left people behind sure do you feel any kind of strange sense of dislocation having you are not a hillbilly anymore Katie or if you are a hillbilly you are the best you make you make Jed Clampett look like a you're doing beautifully Yale Law School San Francisco do you feel any strange sense of dislocation that you've left good people behind well let me say first I do think I'm a hillbilly and I think that if if you think that I'm so different from hillbillies then my sense is that you ought to give them just a little bit more credit if I if I would say that sure so are you less maybe or me less yeah that's right so so a lot of the folks that I grew up with I think would defy the stereotype in a lot of different ways and hopefully I you know sort of give give credit to my to my people though I'm sure like you said I maybe make them look a little bad in some ways but you know my my sense of whether I have a certain sense of survivals guilt or a certain remorse for left the answer is absolutely yes hiiii I definitely feel maybe it's just because of the way that I am or maybe it's because the familial culture that I grew up in I definitely feel that I owe people back home a lot more than I'm currently giving and I don't know you know there are a number of different ways to get involved and I've thought since the public publication of the book what is the best way for me to really give back but I definitely have this sense that I owe something to the folks back home and III think that's a good thing I think it's good to be attached to a community and to feel like you should be doing a little bit more maybe you know it comes along with some some feeling of survivor's guilt but I don't think that's a especially heavy burden to bear okay I look forward to the JD Vance scholarship for hillbillies so back to the people you left behind now alone among all American ethnic and demographic groups working-class whites in recent years have seen their lifespans get shorter sure this is the most fundamental measure of well-being every other kind of American is living longer and your people are dying sooner sure there are also the most pessimistic people in America I'm quoting hillbilly ology well over half of blacks Latinos and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have among working-class lot whites only forty four percent share that expectation now you provide a kind of a very disheartening survey you go aspect by aspect by aspect of life among your people and I just like to go down in a certain sense your list and have you explain how this came to be family violence and breakdown quote we didn't live a peaceful life in a small nuclear family we lived a chaotic life in big groups of aunts uncles grandparents and cousins close quote how come is that something where you can draw a straight line all the way back to the Scots Highlands or is this something that's developed since say the Second World War but my things have gotten worse that's what we know things one way or another gotten worse in recent decades sure so so my sense is that that connection to extended network of kin has always been there that's something that maybe traces back to the highlands but that a lot of the trends since the 1940s and 50s have taken that cultural impulse to the extended can Network and sort of warped it and produced a lot of bad consequences so one the geographic dislocation caused by a lot of people moving north it sort of forced my parents out of that extended Network and required them to live in a nuclear family which is not it's something they took at least awhile to adjust to the economic pressures that have been caused or that had been caused by factory closures and decline of the Rust Belt economy and so forth I think that further buttressed these new nuclear families for people who weren't necessarily primed or trained to live in a nuclear family in the first place and so I think that combination of the economic pressure placed on these families and the fact that for the first time in many generations they found themselves outside of the extended network of kin created a lot of family pressures that produce some of the things I write about a book the collapse of religious practice quote in the middle of the Bible Belt active church attendance is actually quite low close quote what happened how come that's a good question I the causal mechanism there I'm not totally sure of why this happened at least one problem that I think is very real is that Protestant evangelical Christianity has increasingly been practiced in mega churches and those mega churches are geographically confined to typically middle-income and upper-middle income neighborhoods so I think that one of the things that has happened is that the Community Church that existed in a lot of poor communities also a lot of middle-class communities has sort of consolidated towards the mega church which may be good in some ways but it's definitely taken religious institutions out of the life of a lot of poor folks ok the erosion of the work ethic quote people talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown you can walk through a town where 30% of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness close quote once again explained that well my guess is that there is a certain measure of hopelessness and a consequent lack of agency that sets in to some of these areas so if you think about this in the 1970s if you're a working-class white person you had a lot of confidence and that confidence was well-placed that even if you only got a high school diploma you were going to be able to where in a middle-class wage in 30 40 years that supposition and that confidence has completely been pulled out from underneath you so I think one of the consequences of that is that a lot of the people who assumed that they were going to be able to have those jobs sort of create an alternative explanation for why they don't have these jobs in the first place right so they're not working but they have to they in some ways have to create or reinforce that work ethic mindset that they developed over their entire lives even though they themselves are not necessarily living that work ethic okay so these this is also causation and histories although they're very hard to tease out so you mentioned the 1970s I think think back to the 1870s or for that matter the 1770s if you drive in the back country the hill country of North Carolina I mentioned that just because I'm familiar with that sure you can't turn a corner on some dirt road and not find some remarkably small piece of land that obviously used to be farm or some little in other words it's not as if this is a lazy or shiftless culture those people worked hard to survive on that land for a couple of centuries before they started moving out to do the coal mining they did this is hard physical labor so your contention is that at least a large component of what's taking place now is not that a culture of laziness is taken over it's just that there's not work to do in the same way well that that's an important part of it but I think in the face of the absence of the work to actually do people have to deal with that psychologically right and I think one of the ways that they've dealt with it psychologically is to sort of give up to say that no matter how hard they work no matter how you know much they do to try to get ahead it's not actually going to produce good good consequence now that's partially true of course in an economy where there aren't as many good middle-class wages but it's also very self-destructive and so one of the things I try to hit upon in the book is that these attitudes can simultaneously be right but also self-destructive and we have to strike a better balance as a community in the white working-class between those two very real prospects ok welfare dependency you wrote you write when you were working at a grocery store quote I learned how people gamed the welfare system they buy packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount discount for cash most of us worked hard but a large minority was content to live off the dole close quote so have we have we come upon a large explanatory factor here that people can get but so here's the question sure this is all very I mean I'm doing this is it such a simplistic you lean over and slap me if you want to because I'm talking about your family and friends here but good lord 200 years ago they had the the gumption the courage to get up and leave the Scots Highlands or Northern Ireland and come to this country they know how to get out and start over again they've done it again and again across the generations and now suddenly they're stuck yeah what explains that stuckness and part of it is part of it that now the government picks up the tab for a lot it let's give them just enough to keep them in place and dependent yeah it's very complicated right so our core part of it is the lacking you say you know yeah part of his lack of jobs part of his is the despair the hopelessness that sets in because of the lack of jobs but part of it is I think the fact that the government anti-poverty programs that we have are designed for a different time and a different purpose what is the purpose of the 1960's Great Society whether you think it's good or whether you think it's bad it is fundamentally to provide subsistence it's so that people don't starve to death so that basic needs don't go unmet that I think is a valuable purpose and a valuable thing that government could be doing but we also have to recognize that when the government does that it can also provide disincentives and reasons not to work it can do things that make it harder to be self-sufficient so my sense is not that the government has sort of caused this problem and therefore we should completely pull away a lot of these programs my sense is that we should recognize that the government has had a role in playing a part in these problems and so that we should be thinking about how to create a social safety net that is geared more towards work and towards participating in some of these institutions to society because if we don't do that we're going to be you know I think we're going to be continuing the same path we have for the past 30 years and it's just not working okay this brings us to you you are conservative politically conservative you're right I think you have to accept that title because you write for National Review that's that's wrong you're not when you're not scouting companies for mythril and yet through this whole conversation you've been extremely moderate and balanced and well there's that through some of this and there's some of this and I am looking for the firebrand I'm looking for Mammal when it comes to politics I haven't seen it why are you conservative well so I I think that don't you don't you feel the urge to take some lighter fluid and and and squirt it over some of these welfare programs toss on a torch no sometimes I feel the urge to do it but I think that the the best part of conservatism is maybe it's moderation I don't think that moderation and conservatism are at war I certainly don't think that you know Burke or Russell Kirk would think that there they're totally at war I mean so so I'm a conservative for a couple of reasons I mean one I recognize growing up and I continue to recognize now that these people who I really care about a lot and I want to have better opportunities that a lot of things the government has done have either not been super helpful or have even been counterproductive again that doesn't mean that you should completely eliminate these programs but I do think that it means that we have to you know think about the social safety net with much different goals in mind because the past 50 years worth of goals has it necessarily worked the second reason that I'm a conservative is that people on the Left I think you know and I'm going to paint with a broad brush I don't think this is true of all liberals but liberals tend to have a certain discomfort with talking about actors other than the state and other than the if you read this book the theme that runs throughout it is that family is an important actor that community is an important actor that neighborhoods that churches are important actors and so that's a long way of saying that culture matters in a way that is distinct from the way that individuals act and the way that the state acts and conservatives seem to be much more comfortable and recognizing that and dealing with it in the way they approach public policy okay so Kevin won't answer that no no I'm going to come back to that one more time I take another run at you JD in the first up Kevin Williamson your colleague at national review this is this is a long passage but he wrote this in part in response to hillbilly ology it's long passage but it's worth quoting sure you know what's coming this is Kevin Williamson if you spend time in upstate New York where I happen to grow up sure our Eastern Kentucky where you grew up or West Texas where Kevin grew up and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency the drug and alcohol addiction the family honor anarchy you will come to an awful realization it wasn't Beijing it wasn't even Washington as bad as Washington can be it wasn't immigrants from Mexico nothing happened to working-class whites nobody did this to them they failed themselves the truth about these dysfunctional downscale communities is that they deserve to die the white not the people the communities the white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious selfish selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles what they need isn't Donald Trump will come to him they need real opportunity which means that they need a u-haul if you want to live better get out well that's fair it's powerful if their ancestors were able to move from the Scots Highlands to West Virginia what's to keep folks from leaving Middleton Ohio for Austin Texas or for Tallahassee Florida go someplace where there are jobs an opportunity for goodness sake don't use booze and heroin in Middleton yeah so I'm gonna maybe gonna take the camera oh no no I'm not this is where I want the lighter fluid I'm so so all over this art I'm going to take the coward's response to this argument which is to hide behind complexity but I also think it's the true response to this argument so what Kevin is talking about though I wouldn't say it as strongly as Kevin does there is an element of truth to it if you look at this problem and you're trying to figure out how much of it is what Kevin's writing about there how much of it is sort of individual moral failing that has to be part of the conversation it's one of the reasons I say in the book look government policy can help but at the end of the day we have to have a role in fixing some of these problems where I disagree with Kevin and where I think he's being a little unfair is that there were things that happen to these communities I mean there there are a lot of good economics papers that have come out in the past few years that show that for example the areas of the country that were most exposed to free trade are the very areas where you have rising mortality rates rising heroin rates particularly facing giantess right okay particularly trade from China right so there there is a sense in which globalization may be its net good but has been very very hard on these communities and at a more personal level I think it's very easy to sort of take a step back look at these behaviors in the abstract and say look there they're clearly a lot of individual moral failings here but I always bring it back to myself and I think about myself when I was 14 years old and I was nearly one of those people the Kevin writes about I was nearly one of those people who really gave up on myself why I was giving up on myself is ultimately very very complicated and part of it's what Kevin's writing about but a lot of it is a lot of other things too and we've got to recognize both that Kevin is partially right but there are there other things happening okay we're recording this not quite two weeks before the election all the polls show that Donald Trump is losing in every ethnic group I think that is literally the case every ethnic group Asians Latinos african-americans college-educated whites but he's winning in one the scots-irish your people sure your pee people who are poor and having a hard time and located in Appalachia and the Upper Midwest and the upper south I beg your pardon the Midwest and the upper South have fallen in love with a billionaire from New York City you explain that would you please I'll try my best you know so I think there there are two things that are happening here with Trump one is that the tone and the way that he conducts himself in politics people are just sick of hearing people whether it's Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney or Barack Obama who are so unfamiliar and unrelatable the way they talk about politics how filtered and clean their accents are there's something about Trump's offensiveness something about his brashness that is appealing to you know the to the people who I write about in the book the people who grew up like I did I mean I even feel and I'm not a trump supporter but I even feel a certain attachment and at you know I get a little bit cheery when he says certain things on the campaign trail when he criticizes the elites in such strong language it's a little refreshing even if you disagree with the substance of the remarks the other thing that is true about Donald Trump is look as I write I went to a fancy Ivy League school and did not assimilate he did he apparently did not simply at all but but uh but but the other thing about Trump and this is you know where and when you run for office you're gonna have to understand I'm not okay all right back to trump but but you look at this you look at the substance of what Trump is going after the people in this book are obviously struggling in a very very profound way and it's not just an economic struggle right it's the addiction it's the family breakdown it's the rising mortality you say it's not just an economic struggle as a matter of fact I was struck at several points you write and I'm sure it felt this way and I'm sure it's some sort of objective level is true that you were poor even when you said with your grandmother the poorest moment in your life when she had very little money but she was still able to afford a calculator yeah everybody had a television yep everybody had a house you write that diabetes obesity is a problem this is the let's just put it this way poor people who are overweight is not poor as it has been understood in human history for right for millennia right that's right so in some basic way it's not poverty as poverty has historically been understood it really is social pathology it is a failed or sick or maladjusted approach to life that's the real problem well that's definitely again that that's definitely a big part of the problem and it's true right it's not the people are starving to death it's that they're typically eating foods that cause diabetes and obesity that's a different problem from material deprivation there is still you know there deprivation is of course all relative and I think it's a fundamental flaw of the human condition well they soso part of it excuse me again why not I'll just go back and forth three places so that that I've trip made this point a little bit earlier about how this here they are in the middle eastern middle of the country from the Appalachian Mountains over to hi-oh and upper Alabama and so forth and that's a long way from New York City in Washington and Los Angeles in San Francisco the media centers and I couldn't help feeling over and over again reading hillbilly ology the part of the sort of subterranean anger discontent is they feel left out overlooked and left out yeah that's that's absolutely true and that that was actually going to be you know the other part of the okay answer to the to the Trump question is look you know things have not been going well for the past thirty years it's not just the economic stuff it's not just material deprivation deprivation it's also partially a feeling that the coastal elites the people who have financial and political power look down on people like you and for the past thirty years the Republican Party has basically run the same candidate right you look at that state you think about the debate stage where there are seventeen people on that stage and all 16 of them were fundamentally running a campaign not on all that Dems dissimilar from the one that George W Bush John McCain and Mitt Romney ran and every single one of them lost to the one guy who was saying look we're going to blow the whole thing up everything that the elites have been telling you is wrong this is why your life sucks we're going to go in a new direction politically totally substantively and that's appealing I think to a group of people who feel left out but also feel a little bit left behind in the way that their lives are going so Trump really tapped into that now by the way yeah so they feel a resentment toward the elites who they feel are looking down on them you now having switched teams I haven't switched what okay you want to get out of that let's put it this way you're capable of judging for yourself the way elites actually were they write about the elites here you fancy San Francisco Yale Law degree do the elites look down on them or was this just another mistaken sort of self-indulgent self-pitying attitude of I people I I think they're partially right definitely you look at the attitudes the elites you know people who I know who are very well educated who typically have pretty sophisticated attitudes about politics we'll talk about Trump supporters as if they are just Donald Trump is the dumb redneck candidate that these dumb racist rednecks deserved all along and who they've wanted there is a complete failure and you see it in the way that a lot of people in the elite media talk about Trump supporters there's a complete failure to recognize that folks are fundamentally complicated and that they can be driven to vote for someone beyond just racism right it's so one-dimensional the way that they think of people that it proves in a lot of ways the very worst suppositions that my people have about the elites which is that they don't really care about us they don't try to think and understand us they just judge us and as much as I disagree with so many folks back home about Trump in particular I think that the reaction of a lot of elites to Trump ISM or the Trump voter feeds into the very worst narratives of how elites feel about the rest of the country last questions what would you say to what would you say to your fellow conservatives the polls now suggest who knows who knows they're still not quite two weeks to go troodontid Trump may pull it off who knows we don't know that sitting here likely on the polls as they stand today that he will not pull it off what do you say to your fellow conservatives about putting them together a conservative party that says something to these people well what I would say is that we've we've got to do better you know I'm a conservative but fundamentally for the past thirty years the Republican Party has had very simple answers to the problems of its middle and working class base and I don't leave those in tax rates cut the top marginal rate free trade immigration whether you think those ideas are good or bad and I have my own views they're not addressing the crisis that I write about in this book so we've got to offer more to these people or we should be surprised when they go for people like Trump all right and what do you say to Hillary Clinton what do I say to LRE Clinton oh is she watching right now she actually is the least likely person to be watching this but what would you say to Hillary Clinton what I would say to Hillary Clinton is if you really want to help the people that I'm writing about and consequently if you want to help make the country a little bit more culturally integrated than it is right now you've got to do better than basket of deplorable --zz and you have to resist the very worst impulses of the elite which after this election will be to sort of wipe their heads say whoo we got away with it and look those those we've got to deal with those dumb idiot Trump supporters and if you if you approach them like that if you approach them as one-dimensional then you're going to further drive a divide between them and the rest of the country okay last time I'm going to ask you to talk to somebody let's suppose that someplace in Jackson Kentucky or Middleton Ohio there's a boy watching this interview whose father left when he was little whose mother in and out is in and out of rehab and so he's sitting in front of a computer screen with his grandmother down the hall in the kitchen making dinner in other words there's a boy coming up the way you came up sure what does JT fans want to say to that boy well I would say to that boy the same thing that my Mamaw said to me which is that look life is unfair for you you are going to face barriers that other kids in similar situations don't have to face but you still have control over your life never be like those kids who think the deck is stacked against them what your job is is to recognize the unfairness to overcome it and then to give back once you've overcome it and I think that's something that kids like me really need to hear that even though the maybe slightly stacked against you you've still got to believe in your own agency or your note you'll never make it out alive JD would you close this interview by reading a passage from hillbilly ology I will I believe we Hillbillies are the toughest goddamn people on this earth but are we tough enough to do what needs to be done are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children we don't need to live like the elites of California New York or Washington DC we don't need to work 100 hours a week at law firms and investment banks we don't need to socialize at cocktail parties we do need to create a space for the JDS of the world to have a chance I don't know what the answer is precisely but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better we hillbillies must wake the hell up JD Vance author of hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture and crisis thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution I'm Peter Robinson

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 190,271

Rating: 4.8424907 out of 5

Keywords: Hillbilly, US Marines, Yale, Appalachia, Trump, Clinton, poverty, alcohol, abuse, culture

Id: wVvuTKWzOcs

Length: 43min 30sec (2610 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2016