J.D. Vance

Folks like me have to feel a little indebted to the communities that they came from. And if they do, I think we\'ll start to see a little bit more of a geographic integration in the country because people will start to think, \'You know what? I owe that place something, and I should return to it in one form or another.\'

During my first round of law school applications, I didn\'t even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford - the mystical \'top three\' schools. I didn\'t think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn\'t think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed.

We are so isolated in our own little worlds, in our own little geographies, that it\'s pretty hard to understand where someone else is coming from. And so I think that we have to really think about what that means as a country and, frankly, whether this segregation that we have is durable over the long run.

The evangelical Christian faith I\'d grown up with sustained me. It demanded that I refuse the drugs and alcohol on offer in our southwestern Ohio town, that I treat my friends and family kindly, and that I work hard in school. Most of all, when times were toughest, it gave me reason to hope.

Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains. Yet the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons.

We spend our way to the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don\'t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.

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.

Whether I\'m speaking to conservative or liberal audiences, I don\'t find that people are close-minded about the things I say. I\'m still optimistic that we can bridge a divide between these various bubbles. But I do think that it requires a little bit of effort.

To serve in the modern military - or to be the uncle, parent or sibling of one who does - is to treat the necessary service and sacrifice of war with a sacred honor. In my community, we pile into cars and drive hundreds of miles to watch our children\'s graduation from basic training.

I believe that I\'m a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don\'t want to lose that. I think it\'s possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you\'re self-reflective and meaningful about it.

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.

From the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale, from other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had.

The increasing segregation we have in our country geographically and culturally has led to these pretty monolithic views of different classes of people, and because of that, we\'ve lost a certain amount of cultural cohesion.

I used to go on chat rooms on AOL, back when those things existed, and argue with believers in evolution and argued with them that it was against God\'s law to believe in evolution. It was something I believed really personally.

It\'s not just that government has failed us. It\'s not just that we have failed ourselves. It\'s government. It\'s individuals. It\'s sort of everything in between, from families and communities and neighborhoods, churches and so forth.

I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.

I needed a lot of the good things that church provided. But as I grew older, it became increasingly hard for me to rationalize the importance of church in my life with the beliefs that it required that were at odds with modern science.

We must have the courage to confront dreadful views even in the people we love the most. But that\'s difficult to do when we cast large segments of our fellow citizens into a basket to be condemned and disparaged, judging them even as we ignore that many of their deplorable traits exist in us, too.

Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it\'s a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate \'poor\' in our public consciousness with \'black.\' Terms such as \'welfare queen\' and \'culture of poverty\' became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

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.

Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades.

I never thought, when I was a kid, that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently - they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we\'re both poor, but that\'s kind of it. There wasn\'t much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship.

It seems to me an indictment of the Republican Party that if you talk about issues of poverty and upward mobility, people assume you\'re a Democrat.

The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs but also a sense of purpose and community.

Trump\'s biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.

The idea that working a blue-collar job and living in a working-class community provides barriers that are unique to your circumstances - that\'s not a very controversial subject anymore. I think it\'s something that people on both the Left and the Right probably accept.

Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world\'s money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.

On my first day at Yale Law School, there were posters in the hallways announcing an event with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. I couldn\'t believe it: Tony Blair was speaking to a room of a few dozen students? If he came to Ohio State, he would have filled an auditorium of a thousand people.