The decline of the white working class: Featuring J. D. Vance and Charles Murray | LIVE STREAM

good afternoon everyone good afternoon I'm Karlin Bowman and I'm a senior fellow here at AI and I'd like to welcome all of you and our c-span audience to the first Bradley lecture program of this academic year as many of you know who've attended these programs in the past they're usually lectures but with tonight's event we saw a rare opportunity to host a conversation about a culture in crisis we are as always grateful to the lined and hairy Bradley foundation of Milwaukee Wisconsin for making this possible midway through this extraordinary memoir hillbilly elegy JD van says that working as a cashier at the local grocery store where he lived turned him into an amateur sociologist as he watched what people bought how some people gamed the system and how the owners treated customers differently he says at that point he began to read books about social policies such as William Julius Wilson 's the truly disadvantaged and Charles Murray's losing ground he writes that both of these books were written about African Americans but could just as easily have been written about his family and neighbors he realized that no expert or single book could explain their problems mr. Vance's description is much more than a mature sociology it tells us what goes on in the daily lives of real people and here I'm quoting him directly when the industrial economy goes south he continues it's about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible it's about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it in this he echoes the concerns of many at AEI over the years including among others the late Robert Nesbit who wrote the quest for community in 1953 Peter Berger and the late Richard John Newhouse who wrote a short been influential AI pamphlet in the 1970s about the importance in the fragility of the countries mediating institutions families neighborhoods and communities and of course to my current colleagues Nick Evers debt and charles murray among others taken together JD Vance's hillbilly elegy in Charles Murray's coming apart offer vivid portraits of our country a country where millions of people live by JD's grandparents code of self-reliance and hard work while millions of others don't and they have lost touch with the virtues that give our lives purpose and direction and ultimately make us happy you will be able to purchase copies of copies of mr. Vance's book after this conversation and he's graciously agreed to sign them we will do so after after the conversation and we invite you to join us for a reception in the gallery outside mr. Vance will begin tonight's conversation about why he wrote hillbilly elegy and the reaction to it JD thank you well thank thank you guys for having me Charles thank you for being willing to do this hopefully I don't I don't worry after an hour and a half but so so the question of sort of why I started to write this book is that I was a third-year law student at Yale and I was you know listening to the same conversation that folks were having all across the country about open mobility and inequality and I was trying to sort of understand why it was that kids who grew up like me were so under represented in places like Yale and it wasn't just a sort of economic thing I recognized that I was a cultural outsider so people at Yale talked about things that just didn't make any sense to me so how they would make 160 thousand dollars a year but they didn't think that it would be enough because they would have to send their kids to some fancy daycare in Manhattan and I thought what is what are these people talking about you offer the keys who are these aliens and why are they the ones who are at Yale Law School and nobody like me is so the more that I thought about why it was that kids like me were really underrepresented at these sorts of places I started to think that it implicated not just something about my own life or my family's life but also something that was much more broadly shared across our neighborhood across our community and as the title of the book suggests across our culture and so the more that I you know research the more that I wrote the more that I interrogated family members who graciously offered to share their lives and histories with me the more that I realized that this was a very very real and significant problem this wasn't just something that was unique to a law school or to middle ohayo it was unique to the entire white working-class and as you've written about I think two groups much broader even than that so I started writing the book at the end of 2013 I spent probably two years writing it I was always working full-time so it was always a sort of nights and weekend endeavor and the more that I wrote it the more that I realized that there were hopefully some new sociological or economic insights in the book but what I really had to offer was sort of explaining what it's like when you grew up with these problems as I write in the book hung around your neck what it's like to actually grow up in these communities what it's like to be thrust into this very culturally alien territorial IKEA law school when you grow up like a working-class white kid so that's the book that I set out to write and I believe Carlin said something about the reception and the only thing I'll say about the reception that I expected is that before the book came out I told my wife that I really just hoped that it wouldn't be so under read that it would embarrass me and I think that I may be suffering from the opposite problem now yeah what we're going to get to the deep serious topics in a minute there are just a couple of things I have to ask which is you are really frank about the immediate members of your family those of you who have not read the book it is not a sociological treatise thank god it is it is it is deeply personal story very well written I'd like to know where you learned to write like that can't be Yale and and and the things he is telling about his family get really personal and a lot of them are not pretty and yet they agreed to have their real names used in the book that's right so you're still getting along with everybody still get along with everybody yeah you know one of the things I tried to do to sort of mitigate against the fact that I was going to be airing our family's dirty laundry so to speak is make my family part of the writing process and so it wasn't just sort of my personal memory that informed the writing it was also interviewing my aunt my uncle my sister and so forth I think because of that they felt like they were part of the story like it wasn't just my story but it was also theirs and so even though it is like you said very frank I think that people feel like it's frank and honest' but also said something that needed to be said because one of the things that happens when you grow up in a family like this you grow up in a community like this is that you're not totally sure why you feel the way that you do about certain things you're not totally sure why you have the attitudes that you have and I think my family really appreciates that I've sort of shed a little bit of light on that but also put it in a broader context I'm so sorry that is the first phone call I've gotten all month I think I do not get phone calls that was Lenny actually I just don't know the the the thing that struck me as I was reading the book and by the way this book is one which I read from beginning to end which doesn't happen very often I I'm going to be doing a panel on a book so I read in it and I get the things I need to get out of it but this one I was just completely engrossed in but I was especially engrossed because I am scots-irish and I would put up my lineage of scots-irish forebears against yours in terms of the they're there as far as Americans go pretty clean scots-irish blood they went to Appalachia the same as your forebears did they were in North Carolina a classic place for them to be and then another classic move they moved to Missouri early in the 19th century there are nothing like your people as far as I can tell there are bits and pieces that that sound familiar but the the culture did not look recognizably like the one that that you described furthermore I have had in addition to writing about the white working-class and coming apart I got to say my experience isn't just as a pointy headed intellectual I lived for the first 18 years of my life in a town of 15,000 which did have an upper middle-class because we had a corporation there but a lot of middle-class a lot of factory workers one high school one junior high best friends were sons of daughters of factory workers that was 18 years in the last 27 years I've lived in a little town rural Maryland which is also middle-class working-class farmers and a couple of oddballs like my wife and me and my our kids went to a working-class high school in a town just down the road here again I guess I can say I think with some fairness that I've had I've been rubbing shoulders with a white working-class for a long time bits and pieces I recognize from people we know and specific events it looks like you're describing a culture which in your words is a hillbilly culture which is distinct from all of those you have spent the last several weeks I'm sure getting people doing exactly what I just did saying hey you know I have the this is my experience can you give me a sense of how as you look at the mosaic of people telling you about the white working-class how do you piece this all together yeah absolutely so first it's it's a it's worth noting that if you look at the ethnographic studies in this area you find that the scots-irish are disproportionately represented in this area of the country so Eastern Kentucky eastern Tennessee West Virginia Western Virginia and so forth so there is definitely a sort of ethnic component to what's going on in a lot of these areas one of the things that I think is definitely true is that as these scots-irish folks have migrated out of Appalachia they've gone to Kentucky or excuse me they've gone to Indiana Ohio Michigan and so forth because that's where the industrial jobs were I think it's probably fair to say that there's been a lot of cultural intermixing so maybe some of the divisions that I draw that are very very stark and my family are starting to disappear maybe they've disappeared in generations past so there is something where the white working class culture is a lot more homogeneous than just the scots-irish part of it but I also think that because the scots-irish part of it is the biggest part of white working-class culture there's a sense in which Scotch scots-irish and white working-class are increasingly commingled and mean the same thing so it's not necessarily that my family's experiences or that the things that I described is unique scots-irish culture are only represented there but I do think that there's something about that particular part of America you know they're their authors that say we should just call it the United States of Appalachia it's there's something to be said for the fact that the scots-irish culture is both unique and regionally distinct but it's also spread pretty far and wide and has had a lot of effect on other parts of America yeah and and other authors have written about scots-irish culture Jim Webb of course born fighting and the statistics on what ethnic group contributes most to the American armed forces it's the scots-irish absolutely and I take great pride in this I have to point out that our leading characteristics though which I learned long before I read hillbilly elegy is being drunk and violent but we Nate we made great pioneers that's that's perhaps because people couldn't stand us so we had to keep moving west but I thought you said your family wasn't like mine oh well I've as I read in scots-irish culture if that's what there's a lot of drunkenness of course a lot of we're Islands in it but then I compare that to Fishtown my fish town is the Philadelphia working-class community in coming apart sure that I use as the label for the statistical characteristics of change over the last 50 years but there is also a couple of really good books that have been written about fish town one was a PhD dissertation that I quote extensively in coming apart and the other was an actual published book that came out in the 1960s and the book that came out in the 1960s is really interesting because the way that is described is first a lot of islands in that community but it was mostly structured violence so that so that when somebody came into the neighborhood and and burgled a house they might not bother to call the cops open to take care of it they took care of it in their own and personal disputes resolve a lot of cases with fighting there was too much spousal abuse to in the community there was a lot of violence there but the other thing that is made clear and a lot of hard drinking and fish down in the 1960s the other things made clear is the community really functioned and so people would say to the poverty workers who came in that they liked their community they were happy in their community and it drove the poverty workers crazy because these people refused to recognize that they were poor refused to recognize that they were miserable to what extent does that fit in or not fit in with the community you knew of when you were growing up in the 1990s yeah well so the first thing I'll say is that you mentioned not being willing to call the police even if people were maybe being a little violent and it's funny my I was talking to my sister a couple years ago and she knew a family in Middletown where all the Christmas gifts had been stolen not not long before Christmas and the person I think post about it on Facebook or told her friends in some other way and talked about how you know all of our Christmas gifts are stolen we called the police they're here everything's sort of taken care of and the most common refrain that they got from the responses was why did you call the police why don't you just handle it yourself and so there's there's definitely this willingness I think not just to sometimes engage in violence but also an unwillingness to engage in sort of you know involving the broader community and or involving some of the institutions of community in that that violence to answer your specific question how similar is the Middletown that I grew up in to Fishtown so it's similar in a lot of ways but it's also much more accelerated in its development right so some of the things that maybe existed in 1960s Fishtown that you're writing about is you know maybe 1990s Fishtown looks a lot like 1990s Middletown I suspect the answer is that it probably that does and what you find in these communities I think is is one they're not extraordinarily destitute right so if you go to Middletown Ohio you look you drive down the street you go to my old neighborhood this is not hardcore poverty there were definitely times in my life where we fell below the poverty line no doubt about it but I never felt that we couldn't put food on the table that we couldn't put clothes on our back I always felt that there was at least some sort of material baseline maybe you know because the social welfare state maybe because of my grand you know well that they had accumulated when they were able to have a middle-income job so there is definitely a refusal to recognize that you're poor and one of the things I wrote about in the book is that you know I built this sort of construct in my mind between the really poor white neighborhood and our neighborhood which I just thought of as sort of working-class and middle-class and the older that I get and the more that I think of Middletown in its geography those neighborhoods weren't actually that different they weren't geographically that different they weren't actually that different if you look at the houses but we had sort of built this thing in our minds because I think people don't want to think of themselves as poor and there's definitely an element of pride built into that right I mean one of the things I write that's very distinct about scots-irish culture is that we're very proud we're proud of who we are we're proud of our families and one of those points of pride is you don't want to tell strangers that you're poor how about the differences you say that physically in terms of housing stock the two parts of town weren't that different even at that time though did they see themselves the people who lived in what looked to you like the poor part of town did they see themselves as living in a different part of town for you it's hard to say because I didn't obviously have a ton of exposure to that you know as a kid outside of my broad neighborhood my sense is that no kid that I went to school with even the kids who were very clearly pretty destitute that they did not expect that they were poor they did not think of themselves as especially impoverished you know there definitely was a recognition that there were rich people out there and some middle town has a very nice sort of upper crust doctors and lawyers part of town that's very distinct from the part of town that I grew up in so there was some recognition that there were rich people out there and my grandma was very very cognizant of fact they were rich and you know in some cases dislike them because of it but there there really wasn't a sense that among the the lower income or the working-class kids that there was a lot of class division between them I do I do think that people really resented and and and weren't willing to say look we're really poor there was always there was this recognition there was the rich there were the hard-working middle-class folks and the poor folks were you know maybe somebody else but not us okay now let's turn to the labor market because you have lots of different interesting observations to make about the labor market and this is one of the great things about the book that you are start out one of the narratives and you think you know where he's going and then all at once the next turn of events takes you completely by surprise so in one sense this is a classic William Julius Wilson stuff that your grandfather worked the steel company was at it that's right yeah so it worked for the steel company we're getting really good working-class wages in fact he was close to six figures at one point wasn't he yeah there's a point where I write in the book where my family and I'm talking specifically then about my mom who worked in health care and my stepdad who worked as a truck driver they probably they maybe didn't make $100,000 a year you know I'm kind of speaking as a kid in that part of the story but they definitely I'm sure earned a pretty solid middle-class wage we had what I thought was a nice house we had you know two cars it wasn't that we were again it's not that we were destitute but definitely you know that sort of Economic Security didn't last very yeah and I think it didn't last very long unfortunately not because of the economy in our case but because of some of the decisions they made well you also have some interesting comments to make about when you were working at various kinds of menial jobs physical labor jobs and you talked about one guy and was working with you that would habitually take half hour the bathroom breaks and when he did this so frequently and it got to be a subject of considerable amusement around the workplace it got fired and at the point he gets fired he is very upset because my girlfriend is pregnant going to have a baby and why how can you be doing this to me under no sense that he screwed up and so take put together all of these semi contradictory pieces of your observations of people in the labor market whereby it is a weird combination of old-fashioned Protestant work ethic and post-modern of victimization it's not my fault what's going on there yeah absolutely so that guy this was in a tile warehouse that I worked at right before I went to law school I was trying to save up money for the the move to New Haven and I remember every time he went to the bathroom it got to the point where me and another coworker would call out you know the times of 15 minutes 20 minutes half an hour and it and it got it got to the point where it was it was it was literally two or three hours of the day he was not on shift he was doing something else I don't know if he had an alcohol problem or what his issue was we had a 19 year old girlfriend she was pregnant the guy who we worked for even offered her a time or a job briefly for a time working in some sort of administrative role and the thing is he made a pretty decent wage you know most of the guys who worked at this tile warehouse made $16 an hour which is plenty to live at or live on in this area of the country you started out at $13 an hour that's what I made and it occurred to me when this guy was eventually fired that he didn't recognize his own agency in the problem at all he was it was not a made-up feeling he was legitimately extraordinarily angry at his boss for firing him and thought that his boss had done something wrong and that was really really worrisome because you know people have to recognize that they still have some control over their own lives at the same time you see guys like that kind of coexist with people who are really hard-working who are trying to find a job and maybe they can maybe they were laid off from the steel mill at the age of 45 and it's really hard for them to reenter the labor force at anything like a wage they earned when they were a 45 year old steel steel mill worker and you see both of these things happening simultaneously and so when you're a kid growing up in this environment it's hard one not to recognize that you have the really hard working people I'd say the majority who just are trying to get ahead I think the labor market has been pretty tough on them and you have the people who are not doing what they should to try to get ahead and importantly they don't recognize it they don't recognize that they still have some control over their own lives and this is something that my grandma I think of you know a woman who didn't even have a middle school graduate education you know she left Kentucky when I think she was 13 years old she was incredibly perceptive you know she's classic Blue Dog Democrat she didn't believe that government didn't have a role in helping the poor but what she always told me was don't ever be like those effing losers who think the deck is stacked against him and she said that as someone who recognized that for some people the deck was stacked against them and so there was this remarkable perception about her where she could simultaneously recognize that things weren't always perfect but also say you can't let yourself give in to the worst defeatism that exists in our community because then you're completely doomed then you're like the kid who has a good job at the tile warehouse but just doesn't keep it generational here I mean if you try to do a timeline of this are the kids who think they have no moral agency increasing and the ones who are working hard under difficult circumstances decreasing my sense is that that's definitely true and you see it in some of the statistics obviously you see in the way that people were dropping out of the labor force but you also just and as I write about in the book you see it in these communities there was a very definite sense in the place where I grew up that for more and more people maybe their choices didn't matter this is a very destructive tendency that exists in these communities again I don't think that it exists completely out of nowhere you know that's what's so hard about this right is to sort of see the whatever you want to call them structural barriers maybe that life throws at you but then to still try to overcome them anyway that's really hard to do and unfortunately I think very few were and fewer kids are able to do it and so I think consequently you see a community that is really really struggling how about marriage because you know when I talk about coming apart and I'm trying to convey to people how much things have changed I go to marriage as being the building block of communities it's the prototypical institution of a free society and then I cite the numbers which are if we talk about non Latino whites ages 30 to 49 as of 1960 84% of them were married and as of 2010 when I reach for the numbers I used for coming apart that was down to 48 percent which is just talking about a sociological phenomenon of incredible magnitude right that was it so when you were growing up and also in to the extent you can look back to previous generations tell me about marriage in Middletown so you know I saw very personally the sort of Statistics that you're describing right so fewer and fewer people were married I want to throw in another statistic out at you which is that I believe in Sweden which is the country that has the second highest marital partners or sorry maternal partners it's 2.8 so the average kid will see their mom in Sweden with 2.8 maternal partners okay in the United States I think it's 12 point 813 so we have this unbelievable problem and of course that's concentrated in the working class you have this unbelievable problem not just of the decline of marriage but the decline of sort of home stability there are two sides of the same coin but it's important to recognize both sides of that right so is marriage declining it's it's definitely declining and I think the really interesting question is why is it declining why are so many fewer people in this community getting getting married and so one answer you might say and I know a lot of critics of coming apart would have said this is look you know the industrial economy has gone south created all these financial pressures that exist in these communities that didn't exist before consequently people are getting married as much I think that's a small part of it but it's a small you know part of it so if you think of for example median wages right after accounting for transfers median wages have been on a sort of flat but slightly upward curve that's a problem right but it doesn't quite explain how we've gone from 84 to 48% and I suspect lower especially when we haven't seen anything like the same trend among non working-class people so you know the the it's definitely there and it's definitely happening and the really difficult question I frankly don't have a fantastic answer is why it's happened okay you've got friends sure that are now in their early 30s hmm among the guys you know how many roughly what percentage of them have gotten married and stayed married of the the folks who went and got an education and either stayed in Middletown to work or you know left Middletown because there aren't a ton of high skilled jobs in Middletown most of them you know off the top of my head I can't think of one of my college-educated friends who either is isn't married or engaged interesting you know you're a small spot so maybe I'm not remembering all everybody so it's a lot another way it's a lot of minutes oh so every single one of my groomsmen very similar story small town Ohio went to college at Ohio State every single one of them are either married or engaged right now you think of the folks who didn't get an education maybe maybe stayed in Middletown or stayed in similar circumstances it's again it's it's tough to think of a good friend who has been married and stayed married and one of the things you definitely see in the working class is that people get married sooner so I definitely know of some folks who got married but then the marriage didn't necessarily last and so Wow it's a very it's very stark because I can't I honestly can't think of someone who didn't go to college who I grew up with in Middletown I think sorry anyone one person out there about the women that you knew in high school what's happened to them well you know my sense is that from a purely social perspective not a material perspective but from a purely social perspective maybe the women are doing a little bit better than the men and part of that comes from the sort of maternal cultural aspect that is very much at the forefront of my book where you have these women who a lot of times when the men aren't working in the men are taking care of the kids the women have to step in they have to do the things that a lot of the men aren't doing and so it's it's not uncommon to see in my community I write about my cousin for example I think this is very much her life story who have found herself in a marriage that fell apart very quickly but she had a young baby was the baby that got her life back on track because she had to take care of that kid if she didn't take care of the kid nobody else would and you see that story a lot of women you know when the family breaks down it's very rarely than men in these communities that are stepping up it's almost always the women it reminds me of this observation was made by one of the people in Fishtown as she was saying you go down the street and you see this woman with a baby in one arm and a couple of shopping bags in the other and walking behind her is a guy playing his video game and there is a kind of demoralisation of males using a polite word a forgiving word that seems again as both a combination of this what the statistics say and a combination of what I've observed in my own personal life there are there is simply a falling away from the old standards of hey I'm the guy I've got to put food in the table I've got to take care of my children because that's what a real man does right an incredible falling away from that and even though I know you can't give me a cut-and-dried answer as you think about your friends can you come up with some even quite specific reasons why they have fallen away from that specific reasons why they've fallen away from it I mean you know one thing that comes to mind is that there was definitely it's sort of tangential but it is a bit related there's definitely a culture of masculinity and a lot of these working-class neighborhoods that treats schoolwork as a feminine and ever right and that that's something that I've you know I wrote about it it's it's a demonstrable statistical phenomenon but it is also something that you see where you know if you're doing really well in school which of course I didn't do very well it's school for a lot of my life but you see kids you know use certain slurs I won't repeat them in front of these polite people but but definitely you hear certain slurs directed people who were doing well in school and there's a sense that hard work in school is a feminine endeavor but I think that can very easily translate to hard work and a lot of other life's endeavors right my sense is that you know psychologically the decline of the industrial economy has been harder on men than it is on on women and that that's something that I'm just sort of picking out of you know I don't have a statistical yeah basis in that but my sense is that because there is such pressure on the men you've got to be you got to take care of your family you've got to be the breadwinner that when it disappears in some of these working-class communities where that ethic of sort of masculine self-reliance is really strong that it's it's it's very easy for the men to say well I can't find a job and I'm not going to continue dealing with this psychological impulse that makes it really hard on me because I'm unemployed so you sort of fall away from in different ways that's that's you know again that's that sort of conjecture I haven't thought a ton about why men uniquely are struggling in this particular world yeah there's there a variety of other explanations too that I think often don't get said as bluntly as they should should get said and one of them is that in 1960 the fact is that if you wanted regular sexual access to a woman you pretty much had to get married yes were there other yet with was there sex outside marriage sure but was it easy was it was it the same way it is now not even close and insofar as 1920 21 year old males really aren't yearning to settle down and without any encouragement that was a pretty powerful incentive and if that incentive is gone you spend those years doing something else and that accounts for some of it as well there have been a variety of ways in which in which the acts of taking responsibility for your spouse and your children used to confer a lot of status on you because when you did get married in 19 and 22 the father of two the mother of your children you were doing the right thing and it was seen by the community as the thing sure and that status has pretty much disappeared as far as I can tell yeah yeah and what I want to switch to another topic that I have to raise because I imprudently co-wrote a book on IQ some years ago 22 years ago called the bell curve and in the bell curve we went to great lengths to document the relationships of IQ to a variety of personal characteristics such as impulse control such as delayed gratification the ability to calculate and consider long-term consequences of behavior now IQ is not a problem in the vance family or your relatives on either side of your parentage your mother was apparently solute solute oriented for class and this was in an age when there weren't 25 Celje torian's you know there were only one or two so that's pretty good and she also encouraged your academics and and then you yourself despite having not been a model student perhaps during your school years nonetheless managed not only graduate and get pretty good test scores then get into the marine corps and then get into house estate and then get into Yale Law School so I don't think you have an IQ problem and and let's say that's true the family so therefore dick Hearn Stein and I must emphasize IQ isn't everything because because you you and the audience who have not read the book have no idea how crazy this family is that in so many ways in terms of all sorts of things that happen and the case that the obvious case is that they were financially doing quite well for a while and and there were there were decisions taken that made it extremely likely that that financial security was going to go away and a variety of other things so as you've you've had to reflect upon this in your own mind Here I am the a law degree out in Silicon Valley what what is the difference if it's not native ability between you and the others who made such very different decisions well it's very it's very tempting to sort of congratulate myself and if everyone wants to tell me that I have a high IQ then you're more than welcome to do so but I don't necessarily think that that's that's what was really going on and in my background and so I say that for a couple reasons so one you know I never felt like an idiot when I was a kid I never felt like I was one of the kids who really really struggled with schoolwork but I also didn't feel much more intelligent than most of the kids that I grew up around I felt like you know sure I did fine maybe I was above average but I certainly wasn't brilliant and I remember thinking especially in in my home town where not a whole lot of kids go to Ivy League schools that the people who went to these schools were just unbelievably brilliant it's like you know 200 Steven Hawkings and I I recognized about three days after I got there that that's not actually the case so so so so to me the difference and you know that there was this this very good review that was of the book that was somewhat critical where one of the points that he made is the reviewer made is look one of the things that JD Vance benefits from is having natural innate ability that a lot of other kids don't have and again it's very sort of tempting to back slap yourself on the back and say great I was really smart and that's why I made it but my sense is that the people who didn't make it who had grew up in similar circumstances which was a lot of kids in my hometown versus the kids who did is that they had a couple of things one they had at least one really strong male figure in their lives and they had at least one really strong female figure in their lives they had a sort of maternal and paternal presence even if that wasn't their mom and dad right so for me that was my grandpa and later my biological dad with whom I reconnected and of course Mamaw my grandma who was this sort of force of nature when she died actually we made a CD of her favorite songs and we entitled it force of nature because that's the only thing that we could think of to describe her and so it was this constant ten tation to make bad decisions to hang out with the wrong crowd I mean when I was a kid the first time I smoked pot I was probably 11 or 12 and I remember the kid who was encouraging me to smoke and I don't think that I put this in the book but I remember when my grandma found out she wind in and whispered and said shady if you don't stop hanging out with that kid I'm gonna run him over with my car and no one is going to find out and I told you I told you and I remember thinking I you know and most people most kids ignore that that you know parents tell kids not to hang out with the bad kids all the time but when my grandma said it I was like oh my god maybe you know maybe I don't want to get this guy killed so I'm gonna stop and and and that was really something that she that was her that wasn't anything about me that wasn't anything even about my family that was a person who recognized that there were temptations to bad decisions and she was going to permit me from succumbing to those temptations so I think that's a huge huge part of it yeah something that you referred to there there were several things referred to I want to follow up on and one of them is that you didn't really spend much time thinking about how smart you are when you were a kid yeah the children of upper-middle class and especially new upper class parents spend a great proportion of their time worrying about how smart they are partly because their parents keep telling them you're so smart but but it is it is part of the it's an integral part of who they are not just an integral part but a central part and that reminds me of the experience that my wife and I have had in this little town in Maryland where we lived where the public high school there were lots of really really bright kids who weren't aware of how bright they were and there was not the that nobody was saying to them you know what you got a free ride at Yale or Harvard or Dartmouth Stanford if you nobody was saying that to them - and it's an the difference between that atmosphere in a white working-class community and the Atmos fear in Potomac and Chevy Chase and Northwest Washington is you know vast the the other thing that I want to follow up on with that is your experience at Yale because you say you discovered that you got there and they weren't all geniuses after all talk a little bit more about that and and here and and and the reaction of the kid from Middletown ex Marine Corps infantryman getting to Yale yeah well I I think the sense that to make it to an Ivy League school you had to be a genius was so powerful and so strong in my own life that I really expected to show up and for everyone to realize oh you know the admissions officer drink a little bit too much bourbon when she was looking at this at this application but you know again was sort of surprised to realize that what really set the kids at Yale Law School apart from you know other people that I've interacted with is it yeah sure they were certainly above-average intelligence they were very smart but they were extraordinarily hard-working and very ambitious right so they were willing to put in these insanely long hours in the library in a way that was just completely foreign to me if I hadn't joined the Marine Corps you know I remember the first sort of 20 hour workday that I put in the Marine Corps and I couldn't believe it but these kids at Yale I thought of as really coddled the one thing that we're really willing to do was lose sleep in order to get ahead in classroom or in some other way so that was definitely a huge difference I mean there is I think a cult of innate ability that we have in you know the upper class and in the lower class I'd say broadly in sort of American culture because I remember it was the the day that I asked my wife's father permission to propose to her we just went golfing we're eating breakfast and I was talking about you know her she went to Yale and Yale Law School and her sister is also very smart and accomplished and I was like how did you it raised these really smart kids they're just unbelievable and you know these are first-generation immigrant from India and he was like they're not very smart they're just hard-working and and I couldn't believe it because where I'm from my family think that my wife is this like otherworldly genius and I do too but too you know there is this sense I mean of course she's very very smart but even in her own family it was more about work than it was about about innate ability so I think it's it's not necessarily always true I certainly think my wife is is much smarter than the gross majority of folks I've interacted with and my life certainly much smarter than I am but one thing that she's really what we know one thing that is true is that she works harder than anybody I've ever met I I agree with all you've said but there is also another side to that coin that I recall from when my wife and I were working on a book about the Apollo program and one of the people in Mission Control was saying you know this the stuff you're doing with IQ is way overblown it's you know I I didn't go anywhere until I had motivation once I got motivation that's made all the difference and I said ah is it I said Jerry do you happen to know what your IQ is yeah that's 146 motivation really helps you have it but there's another thing there's another lead on the on the Yale business though that that fascinates because one of the other themes of my work is the kids at Yale too many of them haven't a clue about Middletown sure they haven't clue about white working-class America they haven't a clue about mainstream America and what I want you to do of course is to give me several vivid illustrations apply him exactly right but you've got you get my drift yeah ya know that that's definitely true I mean there's there's obviously a huge cultural disconnect and if he didn't think that there was then just look at the 2016 election of course yeah and and you know one of the things that was very that when I realized that this cultural disconnect was very real I was in a class it was a national security class I believe of or at least had some national security connection and one of the students after learning that I was in the Marine Corps before I went to law school asked me she was kind of surprised and like you went to you went to the Marines in the Marine Corps and I was like yeah yeah why is that so surprising and her response was like I just didn't know that people who joined the military were like you you know we're nice were like that and I and I remember at the time thinking huh that's an interesting comment to make but all but but but I definitely you know that there is you know a very remarkable cultural disconnect between that part of the world and the part of the world that I grew up in and you know it never really affected me in a negative way in law school I mean you know there are certainly a lot of stories in the book about how I didn't quite know how to navigate the elite world of via law school you know the first time that I had a really really fancy dinner I didn't know how what to do with the utensils so I excused myself to call my wife and say what do I do with why why are there two butter knives you don't even need one you can just use your finger tell me what to do with these things and you know she of course guided me through that a lot of similar experiences but there was definitely just a sense that the people don't quite understand anything it goes both directions right I mean the people that I grew up around don't quite understand the elites and the elites don't quite understand the people that I grew up around the difference being that the elites are the ones who make decisions that affect the lives of people Middletown whereas people in Middletown don't listen of you may mention the election and I'm going to ask you one last question before we go to the audience because in this election cycle we have had the white working-class be a huge story source of support for Donald Trump and we have also had race be an enormous story and you are kind of a unique observer resource you I don't know what the racial makeup was of Middletown or the rest of your life that you've observed the white working-class you've observed them in the marine corps race relations you've been at a large public university and you have been at Yale Law School the most to lead to the most elite and in all of those four areas I imagined that the issue of race and the way people talk about it the way people think about it has to be different and maybe in some ways the same and I just love to hear you reflect on that yeah so my takeaway from sort of my life especially my time at Yale Law School is that everyone probably is pretty prejudiced and if you don't want to be prejudiced you have to sort of recognize it and fight against it I just think the prejudice operates at different levels from back home and a law school so a big question is like how much is racial anxiety drive the Trump phenomenon and my answer this question I'm asked is I think it drives some of it I don't think that it's the main thing but I definitely think it's it's something that's going on but you know people al off school are still pretty prejudiced and if you're doesn't manifest itself well let's say you don't know a single Trump voter in your life but you say that about a trump voter he's the racist candidate that all these racist rednecks deserve right I think that's a form of prejudice and it's a form of prejudice yeah it's a form of prejudice that is extraordinarily real and that people back home feel very very passionate about right so my grandma once told me oh my god put this in the book but Hillbillies are the only group of people that the media that you know the elites that's not a term she would have ever used they're the only group of people you're still allowed to make fun of in polite company and it wasn't an excuse that you should be able to make fun of all the other people it was her saying there's something weird about the fact that we still say redneck or hillbilly in the way that we that a lot of people use it and that there's not even a little bit of Paul's about that now of course that's not an argument that it you know we should go around using racial slurs but it is I think a recognition that what exists in some of these elite enclaves is a certain amount of seclusion from people like my grandma and a failure to recognize that you're pretty biased against them a lot of times even though you don't recognize it and so one of the things I've tried to do since the book has come out is sort of you know recognize that a lot of the people who hear me talk they see me as the sort of representative of the Appalachian or the white working-class voter and my hope is that when they hear me speak they don't all their worst policies confirms I think that you are safe and not worrying about that I'm going to go to the audience now and we have I assume microphones that can be taken around yes we do and I see a hand up right the gentleman with the beard standing up right now thank you for being here a very interesting presentation I grew up in Cleveland Ohio in the in the 50s early 60s and of course Cleveland was in some ways a larger scale of Middletown very heavily industrialized very heavily unionized strongly Democratic and with a lot of folks that had moved up after the war from West Virginia the hillbillies as we disparagingly called them at that time but even at that time you could see the early signs of deindustrialization that took place particularly terms because of the heavy unionization the work rules the tax laws at that time that worked against industrial water do that we do need a question right my question is to what extent did you see even when you were kid did you see those same processes at work in Middletown and a follow-up question when I was a kid Middletown was a great basketball powerhouse Gerry LucasArts I thought was the role of athletics plus-or-minus in Middletown from your experience yeah so don't a public and speak very well to the role of athletics plus-or-minus so I do think that it gives people some measure of social capital something to gather around about and I think athletics it's still a very big deal in Middletown our basketball team isn't quite as good as it was in the Jerry Lucas days but still sports is something that that's very important in Middletown I mean the question about what to what degree I sort of solved the industrialisation going on I think the only answer I can give is that I saw it but I didn't quite realize what I was seeing you know I certainly realized that maybe there weren't as many open storefronts that maybe there were some businesses that were going out business and I definitely recognized that there was a problem you know maybe not quite as many people were able to get Armco jobs but that was something I sort of recognized when I was much older you know as a six or seven year old kid I think the writing was on the wall but I just didn't necessarily see it and it really hit me I will never forget it was I believe right after I came home from Iraq in 2006 a case steal which would be Armco steal had become a Casey Lewis Kawasaki had bought it there was a labor lockout and it was the first time that there had been a labor lockout I believe since my grandpa had been a pretty young worker at that steel mill and that was when it really hit me that some of these economic pressures were hitting Middletown in a very real way the last thing I'll say is that Middletown by some standards has been really lucky you know it's not you know dying in the way that lets say Youngstown or Detroit is it still suffers from a lot of deindustrialization problems but it's in some ways it's lucky because a case steal is still around which is something that probably most you know steel mill workers can't say that my mill is still there toward the front right here I want to press you a little bit on causality because you know we've taught you you obviously have this picture of this very sharp and pretty recent and pretty mark a decline that everyone you know can kind of take a snapshot up and you say kind of pointedly here and you've also said in the book it's an its economic but a little bit of visit economic and and and Charles has a theory that's kind of about it's really goes back to sort of very clear marriage that then had consequences how do you put it all together what the what the biggest factors of causality are I mean I kind of heard you saying people not resisting a change in culture but I still don't quite hear a theory of causality that's fair yeah I mean that I think that's a very fair point because one of the things that I don't necessarily do a lot of the book is try to have a theory of causality it's maybe lurking in the background but I'm much more interested in sort of you know what are the things that are going on in the hope that they can provide some measure of an eye idea of what the solutions might be whether they're economic or policy or cultural whatever you want to say you know my sense is that the the most underappreciated part of the causality story is the way that religion has changed in these communities and it's not it doesn't just operate at the level of family pressure but you know one of the things that Charles really you know made me realize in the book coming apart is that religion traditional religious practices decline in these communities but you know one of the things I write about is that it's declined but there is still a very weird way that religion is operating right it's the people aren't going to church as much but they still identify as conservative evangelical Christians they still wear their faith as a sort of badge of honor and my guess is that a lot of these trends and traditional religious practice from the mega church - the church relocating to upper-middle income communities - even substantive things like the prosperity gospel is really operating on these communities in a way that it's not the whole story it's may not maybe not even most of the story but the more I think about it the more I think that the decline of traditional religious practice is probably the least appreciated part of this problem interesting in the front row here by the way if you'd say your name and affiliation please yes my name is kami but I'm with the Pakistani spectated and my question is that why it's so rare to hear or read something about poverty among whites in America I've been in the city for more than 30 years and we always listen about poverty among blacks poverty among Latino and poverty about other minorities but this is the very rare chance that we are listening about poverty among whites and this is understood since majority of the people are white in this country so in absolute numbers there are more white poorer than blacks or any other minority and is that because media happened to be very elite and then the same context does media hate Donald Trump because he talks about blue-collar whites why people so our logic of this white poverty topic and is that the only reason they it Donald Trump because he talked about average person Thanks i-i've taken a personal pledge not to say the word Donald Trump from now until the election so I'm sure that I can't give make good on it but let me comment a little bit about the brunt of your question that the largest single group of ethnic group of poor people in this country are whites I do think that an awful lot of what we have seen in the last year is the sense of the white working-class of what about us that there has been so much attention paid to a variety of very serious and very real problems that affect ethnic minorities and and women and it's not just a white working class it's the white working-class male who is saying you know what am I chopped liver and it's worse than that because you talk about the way that you can get one of the few slurs you can use at a polite Georgetown dinner party and get no pushback is redneck but you can also say all sorts of things about males that are really awful some of them true but you say a lot of awful thing about males that aren't so true and you don't get any pushback from that either there's a really strong sense of everybody dumps on us and and then they go out and say we have to check our privilege you know and and I think that anger is visceral and real and it is a consequence in large part of what they see every day in as the priorities of interest that when they watch TV and read the newspapers you wouldn't want to add anything that yeah I mean the only short thing I agree with with with that the only real thing that I would add is that why does the media not talk about it so much and my guess is just that white poverty isn't politically meaningful right so the poorer you are you're less likely to vote if you're sort of struggling working-class you've been sort of the you know the property of the Republican Party for the past thirty years they have consistently voted with rare exceptions for the Republicans so I think maybe it takes a sort of political moment or some other way of expression for you know the you to wake up to some of these problems it's my guess yeah okay I'm not going to go to the center here and then I'll go over to the right John Quin Snyder red Zima photo I'd like to ask Charles Murray something in parallel to what you've been talking about about the the elite in this country not understanding what's going on in white working-class America twice this year in March you spoke to college on college campuses of Virginia Tech and then Williams College and in the case of Virginia Tech before you got there the president wrote an open letter which you very properly and quite frankly plain-spoken Lee refuted about what your work means at Williams College after you've spoken there the college newspaper characterized your your work again in a way which misrepresents it and I wonder in both cases did you get the sense when you spoke to those college communities that anybody was listening to you oh yeah look at the Virginia Tech there were half a dozen of aging meaning they were close to my age aging faculty members with signs and inside the hall were some hundreds of mostly students who listened to tentatively and ask good questions same thing is true of the Williams College appearance I think that one of the underappreciated things is the degree to which a lot of the idiocy on colleges college campus is a driven by relatively small minorities the faculty especially in social sciences and humanities and driven by relatively small minorities of students in the social sciences and humanities and the end that once you get outside those fields you have a lot of people who are intimidated by the atmosphere that has been created but I think they're being held hostage and so I welcome all chance to speak in college campuses because I have good experiences when I go there if I'd just ignore the idiots which I do yes over here and this will have to be I'm afraid our last question make it a good one John Graham National Center for Policy Analysis thank you very much my question is about the insularity of the Ivy League class and I think it's changed so my father was a stockbroker and my mother was a lecturer but when I was a teenager I bag groceries at the supermarket and my peers all did the same and we knew we were going to university we knew but that developing that work ethic was as important to studying and I get the sense that the Ivy League students of today haven't had that experience when they were younger is is that true that's by and large my experience I think it's very true and in some ways the way that I would I would describe this is that there was a sense that among this class of people life was a race and the goal of parents was to give as much of a leg up in that race as humanly possible and unfortunately bagging groceries doesn't do nearly as much if you're trying to get ahead in that race as preparing kids for the SAT so I definitely think there's some some a lot of elements truth to that I'll just add that I think that's hugely important I have a quiz the bubble quiz that I put in coming apart and that since has been online that says how thick is your bubble that isolates you from mainstream America and and the most important question I think in the 25 is have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day even if even if it's just your feet aching from standing up behind the counter because if you have never held such a job you're sort of fundamentally unable to empathize with a huge chunk of America who all those jobs every day and and more importantly than that you've you have a distorted sense of what work is that that separates you I think very fundamentally from the rest of the country well I can't say first how much I enjoyed the book it is a wonderful read that is not just saying nice things in Jade JD's behalf it is terrific and I urge all of you to go get a copy if you don't have one and read it immediately and and jdu in person have been as engaging and and insightful as you were in the book it's been a pleasure thank you you

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 29,281

Rating: 4.635179 out of 5

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education, #VanceatAEI, J. D. Vance, Charles Murray, Vance, Murray, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, The State of White America 1960-2010, The State of White America, Hillbilly Elegy, working class, economic decline, social decline, JD Vance

Id: Y_Idvppb_io

Length: 61min 58sec (3718 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2016