JD Vance Quotes

Whenever something bad happens — even a hint of disagreement — you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.

But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself — that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.

The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small hometown just last year.

We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people — that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.

But experience can be a difficult teacher, and it taught me that this story of economic insecurity is, at best, incomplete.

Reams of social science attest to the positive effect of a loving and stable home. I could cite a dozen studies suggesting that Mamaw’s home offered me not just a short-term haven but also hope for a better life. Entire volumes are devoted to the phenomenon of “resilient children” — kids who prosper despite an unstable home because they have the social support of a loving adult.

She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal.

Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.

The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle. As sociologists Paula Fornby and Andrew Cherlin found, a “growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families.” For

So I think that any successful policy program would recognize what my old high school’s teachers see every day: that the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home.

So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich.

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?

You can’t just cast aside family members because they seem uninterested in you. You’ve got to make the effort, because they’re family.

And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.

A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’!