American - Author | August 2, 1984 -
It's not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don't recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.
J. D. Vance
WorldFaceThinkEasyYouPoor
Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.
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I didn't come from the elites. I didn't come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America's working class.
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I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn't learn how to get ahead.
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It's hard to strike that balance: to tell a kid that life isn't fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter.
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We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn't teach me.
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I happen to think that conservatism, when properly applied to the 21st century, could actually help everybody. And the message of Trump's campaign was obviously not super-appealing to Latino Americans, black Americans and so forth. That really bothered me.
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If you're graduating from high school, and you come from a lower income family, you're effectively given two options. One is get a four-year college degree; two is work at a low-wage job, potentially for the rest of your life. We've got to do better on that front. We have to provide more options.
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Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.
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When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.
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I don't think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban.
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Violence and chaos were an ever-present part of the world that I grew up in. And unfortunately, it wasn't just in my family. Sometimes, you'd see, you know, Mom fighting with one of her boyfriends. But a lot of times, you'd see people exploding on each other in a local restaurant or on the street.
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