If you think of- of the rhetoric of - of modern Democrats, it's often so focused on government that people don't accept - I think a lot of those - a lot of folks on the left don't appreciate that - that people don't want a handout. They don't want government support and they don't, from the right, want people to talk about the noble entrepreneur.
James VanceWell, I think it's just remarkable how wrong the conventional wisdom was. It was utterly shocking that Donald Trump won to people who live on the coasts, but to people who live in the areas that I come from, it was utterly predictable. And that suggests something really, really broken about our political culture.
James VanceThe issue that's really, really concerning is that you have eight million prime age men who have dropped out of the labor force, folks who aren't even looking for work. You can create job growth all day, but unless you start to do the things that bring those labor force dropouts back into the job market, you're not going to solve the problems.
James VanceMy personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair.
James VanceI can't blame anyone for being pessimistic when they look around, after all the blood spilled and energy spent to gain ground for working people in the past, and see it all happening again. I wasn't pointing a finger when I wrote the book, but sometimes the message is there even when you aren't actively trying to be the messenger.
James VanceI used to pile on the detail, which was probably a way of hedging my bets while I was working out my own way of doing things. I've cut it back over the years, but some of the descriptions can still be still pretty dense. So the answer is somewhere between fairly detailed and maybe too detailed. Fortunately, people are seeing the final pages and not my raw script.
James Vance