J.D. Vance

“We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for…

— J.D. Vance

“On our particular mission, senior marines met with local school officials while the rest of us provided security or hung out with…

— J.D. Vance

“As I began to think a bit more deeply about my own identity, I”

— J.D. Vance

“We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves.”

— J.D. Vance

“Consider my life before I moved in with Mamaw. In the middle of third grade, we left Middletown and my grandparents to…

— J.D. Vance

“What is more surprising is that, as surveys have found, working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America. More pessimistic than…

— J.D. Vance

“She didn’t just preach and cuss and demand. She showed me what was possible—a peaceful Sunday afternoon with the people I loved—and…

— J.D. Vance

“Mamaw often told a parable: A young man was sitting at home when a terrible rainstorm began. Within hours, the man’s house…

— J.D. Vance

“Each time someone stole a bike from our porch (three times, by my count), or broke into her car and took the…

— J.D. Vance

“Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores…

— J.D. Vance

“I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.”

— J.D. Vance

“Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.”

— J.D. Vance

“I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at.”

— J.D. Vance

“This has occurred for complicated reasons. Federal housing policy has actively encouraged homeownership, from Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act to George W.…

— J.D. Vance

“But as I realized that in this new world I was the culture alien, I began to think seriously about questions that…

— J.D. Vance

“However you want to define these two groups and their approach to giving—rich and poor; educated and uneducated; upper-class and working-class—their members…

— J.D. Vance

“Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off.…

— J.D. Vance

“Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do…

— J.D. Vance

“But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”

— J.D. Vance

“I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. We take an electric saw to the hide of those…

— J.D. Vance

“How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance…

— J.D. Vance

“These were quirks, and at first I understood them as little more than strict rules that I could either comply with or…

— J.D. Vance

“Dad embodied a phenomenon social scientists have observed for decades: Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are…

— J.D. Vance

“compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005–09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners,…

— J.D. Vance

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

— J.D. Vance