J.D. Vance Quotes

American venture capitalist, author, and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Ohio since 2023

Solutions are complex, and I continue to worry that Trump didn't fully appreciate the complexity of what's going on. Consequently, I worry about whether he's going to make the problems a whole lot better... But I am a Republican, and we really should give the guy a chance to govern and hope he's successful. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about. I eventually got to the point where I was like, 'Well, if I can't believe in the Big Bang Theory and be a good Christian, then maybe I'm not a good Christian.' One of the most interesting social trends of the past 20 years is the rise of residential segregation. So rich are living with rich and poor are living with poor. If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don't understand them, that the political elites don't care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things. We watch our sons go to war, disagree with the rationale for sending them, loathe the men who ordered them to battle, and then, when the veterans come home, beg and plead with the local V.A. to ensure they have access to proper care. 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. I've always just felt a little out of place. I still feel out of place in San Francisco. It's this place where everything is going great, and everyone feels super optimistic about the world. It's a little different about how I grew up. It's jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse. And I've suspected that this optimism blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country. So I decided to move home to Ohio. If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, 'Well, what's going to happen to this kid?' you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility. If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class. Church gives people a sense of community, a sense of how to behave... social support when times get tough. In a world where white working class folks are going to church less and less, they're losing that when they might really need it. My grandma always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew. It's very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, 'Everyone is against us. You can't believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they're all conspiring against Christians.' The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world's finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting. Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal. My fear with Trump was always that he didn't have great solutions. Undoubtedly, church fish fries and picnics help build social cohesion. It was at my dad's medium-size evangelical church - my first real exposure to a sustained religious community - that I first saw people of different races and classes worshiping together. I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money. Not every town can or should be saved. 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. The regulatory approach of the Food and Drug Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office has driven up the costs of generic drugs. In communities like mine, we send our best and brightest to our armed forces. Our culture's elites, on the other hand, encourage their children to do just about anything else. Anger about the wars isn't the only reason voters support Mr. Trump. But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won't reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite. 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. I think what Trump will be judged on by the folks that voted for him... is whether things start to get a little bit better over the next few years. And ultimately, that doesn't depend on whether Jeff Sessions is the attorney general. It seems that in the rush to be the first one to the story, the media overstates things. Not maliciously; I don't think they're intentionally misleading. But the credibility gap is already there, and in this rush to get to the story first, a lot of mainstream outlets just erode their credibility further. While faith need not be monolithic - it can motivate both voting behavior and character development - focus matters. A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror. I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head. 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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