JD Vance Quotes

As a cultural emigrant from one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn — recently, an acquaintance used the word “confabulate” in a sentence, and I just wanted to scream. But I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damned game.

Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations — premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.

Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t.

And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I'm skeptical. But it really didn't work out for the kids of those marriages. [...] And that's what I think all of us should be honest about, is we've run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that's making our kids unhappy.

I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That's a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.

I just don’t understand a person in American politics in 2024 who’s whining about what happened to them instead of using their leadership and using their influence to make the lives of American citizens better.

In other words, bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs.

Our large group left an awful mess...I couldn't imagine leaving it all for some poor guy to clean up, so I stayed behind. Of a dozen classmates, only one person helped me: my buddy Jamil...I told Jamil that we were probably the only people in the school who'd ever had to clean up someone else's mess.

For there are no villains in this story.

despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me.

There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.

My professor gave me permission to be me.

I'm telling you, every single person who’s watching this, the Trump campaign is in a very, very good spot.

Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and, later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were “sissies” or “faggots.” I don’t know where I got this feeling.

If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.