The Ben Shapiro Show - J.D. Vance | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 109

00:00:00.000 People have to be able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time.

00:00:04.000 You can believe that people have very tough circumstances and that we as a society have a responsibility to give opportunity and hope to people no matter the circumstances they came from.

00:00:16.000 And then on the other hand, that people still have some responsibility and some personal agency despite rough personal circumstances, right?

00:00:24.000 Four years ago, Hillbilly Elegy was a well-regarded memoir.

00:00:27.000 Now, with its 2020 Netflix adaptation, the work has become critically panned and the subject of endless controversy.

00:00:33.000 Critically panned, but widely enjoyed by audiences.

00:00:35.000 The book's author, J.D.

00:00:36.000 Vance, joins us today to answer the question, what the heck happened?

00:00:40.000 In his book, J.D.

00:00:41.000 wrote about his upbringing in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky and the Rust Belt area of Middletown, Ohio.

00:00:46.000 A look into the history and values in this area of the country was recommended by mainstream outlets and cultural leaders en masse for insight into the plights of white working-class people that impacted the 2016 election.

00:00:57.000 The praise was short-lived, however, when the nearly unanimous edict came down from the media that the trials of impoverished white Americans were insignificant and should be ignored.

00:01:05.000 In our conversation, J.D.

00:01:06.000 tells us why his story fell out of step with postal elites.

00:01:10.000 In the Netflix film adaptation, seasoned director Ron Howard tells J.D.' 's story with much of the political sensibility and value of the original work not in the adaptation.

00:01:18.000 It's just not a political work.

00:01:19.000 Despite that, nearly every major left-wing journalistic outlet, The Guardian, Vox, The Atlantic, Vulture, Observer, New Yorker, they've ripped the film apart.

00:01:27.000 and I analyze Hollywood's and legacy media's frenzied relationship with hillbilly elegy.

00:01:27.000 J.D.

00:01:32.000 We look at the culture of poverty J.D.

00:01:33.000 grew up in and the interwoven role government plays in it.

00:01:36.000 and how conservatives can connect with the Appalachian and Rust Belt regions of the country moving forward.

00:01:41.000 Hey, and welcome to the show.

00:01:51.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.

00:01:53.000 Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:02:01.000 Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with JD Vance.

00:02:04.000 The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.

00:02:07.000 Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member.

00:02:09.000 You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.

00:02:14.000 JD Vance, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:02:16.000 Great to see you.

00:02:17.000 Thanks for having me.

00:02:17.000 So for folks who haven't read Hillbilly Elegy, which of course was your huge bestselling memoir, three million copies sold, became sort of the talk of the country for a solid six months there.

00:02:28.000 What is sort of your personal story?

00:02:29.000 The book really is a journey through your personal story.

00:02:31.000 And then I want to get to sort of the socioeconomic analysis that you do in the book, but what's your personal story?

00:02:36.000 Yeah, so the basic story is I grew up in a Midwestern steel town, like a lot of folks that grew up in that area.

00:02:43.000 Very strong cultural connections to Appalachia because there was this massive migration of Appalachian people in the post-war era, especially into the town that I grew up in.

00:02:51.000 It was a pretty successful middle-class town.

00:02:53.000 The industrial decline hit it pretty hard.

00:02:56.000 Jobs disappeared.

00:02:57.000 Drugs moved in, sort of a lot of the sociological things that we associate with the modern industrial Midwest started to happen to my family.

00:03:05.000 And the story is sort of how this combination of cultural, social, economic factors really influenced three generations of my family, my grandparents, my mom and her siblings, and then my generation.

00:03:18.000 And kind of eventually things sort of worked out for me.

00:03:20.000 I ended up going to Yale Law School.

00:03:22.000 I have a nice job.

00:03:23.000 We now live in Cincinnati and we have You know, sort of a normal happy family.

00:03:28.000 And it's sort of, what I try to do is sort of take some of the lessons from my own life and infer, based on the sociological evidence, a sort of broader narrative about what's going on and give people a real sense, not just statistically of what's going on in some of these communities, but via my own family, some insight into what that actually looks like, what it feels like, and to really sort of immerse people in a broader story.

00:03:51.000 So I want to jump into a rundown of Appalachian culture with you right now.

00:03:54.000 Some of the positives, some of the negatives.

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00:05:12.000 So let's start kind of with Appalachian culture.

00:05:14.000 For folks who don't know anything about Appalachian culture, you know, in the United States we tend to focus on cultures of poverty that exist in sort of racial minority communities more broadly in the media.

00:05:23.000 But you talk at length in the book about Appalachian culture.

00:05:26.000 What are the sort of positive aspects of Appalachian culture and some of the negative aspects of Appalachian culture that come to the fore?

00:05:31.000 Yeah, I mean, one thing is that Appalachian culture is very influential in the broader country, right?

00:05:36.000 So there's this interesting book called The United States of Appalachia, and a lot of other folks have written about this, that because it's such a big region of the country, because it's sort of important in critical American moments, you know, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Civil War stories, there's this way in which the art and culture and history of Appalachia has this sort of broader sway across the country.

00:05:57.000 And that's sort of one of the things that I'm kind of teasing apart in the book a little bit, But like at a high level, and it's always tough to generalize, but I'm going to try to do so.

00:06:06.000 I think, one, people are very patriotic.

00:06:09.000 They're very proud of their country.

00:06:10.000 They're very proud of their hometowns.

00:06:12.000 They're proud of where they came from.

00:06:14.000 Very resilient and very loyal.

00:06:16.000 And so it's the sort of place where people don't take lightly to insults, especially to insults of their family.

00:06:22.000 People like Malcolm Gladwell have even written about that and that dynamic in Appalachian culture.

00:06:27.000 And it's a place that's really attached to the land and the things that people have done on the land.

00:06:32.000 So people talk about coal mining, for example, as an economic force, as something that people do.

00:06:37.000 It provided good jobs and good wages for a lot of people.

00:06:40.000 But if you actually talk to coal miners, there's a real pride in the sense that their jobs weren't just meaningful jobs.

00:06:47.000 But they also power the American Industrial Revolution, that they provided, you know, the sort of the core raw material necessary for America to wage and win World War II.

00:06:56.000 And so there's this weird combination of like pride in the land, but also real pride in sort of the way that people have used it and manipulated it over time that you get when you talk to people.

00:07:06.000 I think, you know, the flip side of it is that there are, you know, like a lot of places, there are a lot of downsides.

00:07:11.000 And I think, you know, one of the things that's always been true is that you've had higher rates of addiction in Appalachia.

00:07:16.000 That was true 50 years ago when the drug of choice was alcohol.

00:07:19.000 Now, of course, it's a different drug of choice, which has much more substantial downsides.

00:07:23.000 Heroin, carfentanil, other synthetic opioids.

00:07:27.000 There's definitely a sort of tradition, of course, not of everybody, but there's a lot of people who have experienced some significant element of family trauma or childhood chaos.

00:07:38.000 And that's, of course, one of the significant parts of my story.

00:07:41.000 So, you know, depending on the statistics used, 30-40% of children in that region of the country will have experienced substantial elements of childhood trauma and chaos by the time they grow up.

00:07:52.000 And this, you know, sort of pride of place, I think, has a very positive aspect to it.

00:07:56.000 But also, it can mean that people are a little insular.

00:07:58.000 They don't like when outsiders come in and try to investigate or even to help.

00:08:02.000 And so, there's this sort of combination of real self-sufficiency, but also resistance to people supporting and helping them, which has all of these sort of complicated factors, right?

00:08:11.000 So, talk about the war on poverty, which was in some ways started in the mid-1960s in Appalachia, at least as a marketing campaign.

00:08:19.000 And people both on the one hand, you know, feel a certain attachment to certain programs that have helped them, you know, access health care and so forth, but also a real resistance and almost a shame at having access to those programs in the first place.

00:08:31.000 And you have all these complicated dynamics going on at the same time, and I try to capture that a little bit in the book.

00:08:37.000 How much does religious observance play into Appalachian culture?

00:08:41.000 Because obviously Tim Carney's written a lot in Alienated America about, you know, sort of differences in areas of the country and very similar populations acting very differently based on religious observance.

00:08:52.000 Yeah, so it's interesting because it's a very religious place, right?

00:08:56.000 And I talk about this in the book, that growing up, my grandma was a very religious woman.

00:09:00.000 You know, we had portraits, a very strong Christian faith.

00:09:03.000 We had portraits of Christ all over the house.

00:09:05.000 We had Bible verses and Bibles laying around.

00:09:07.000 We talked a lot about God in the Bible.

00:09:10.000 But in a lot of ways, it was more deinstitutionalized than you might expect, given how powerful and influential the faith is.

00:09:17.000 And so it's a place where people profess the Christian faith very strongly, but where church attendance rates are actually lower than you might expect, given how many people in the area are Christians.

00:09:27.000 And so you have this combination of, you know, a lot of, obviously a lot of very powerful, a lot of very strong and important churches, but also a lot of people who have very strong Christian faith, but are sort of disconnected from any real faith community.

00:09:41.000 And I think that's an important part of understanding the region because people are very religious.

00:09:46.000 At the same time, they're maybe more isolated from a traditional church than you might expect.

00:09:51.000 Just if you ask, you know, do a Gallup poll and ask people how Christian they are and compare that to religious attendance rates, it doesn't tell the whole story of how a lot of folks, you know, whether it's on TV or radio, very often get their faith more through that channel than through an actual church.

00:10:06.000 You speak in the book about how economics plays into all of this and how the sort of transformation of the American economy from a very industrial-based economy and originally an agricultural-based economy to a service-based economy really hit these areas of the country hard.

00:10:18.000 How did that impact the places where you grew up?

00:10:21.000 One of the things that happened, of course, is that You know, and I think this is a mistake folks on the left often make, right?

00:10:27.000 They look at this area and they say, well, if people just had more money, if there was less poverty, if there were more resources, everything would be fine.

00:10:33.000 And of course, there's an element of that that's true.

00:10:35.000 More resources certainly do help.

00:10:37.000 Material poverty is, of course, very hard.

00:10:39.000 But if you look at the actual income numbers adjusted for government transfers, like, a lot of people are actually doing as well today as they were 30 or 40 years ago.

00:10:48.000 What's really different is that the fabric of work and community provided by good work has sort of disappeared, right?

00:10:55.000 And so, you know, in my grandparents' generation, 50s and 60s, Middletown, Ohio, most of the workers in that community, you know, they didn't just have a good job and a good wage, which is obviously important, but they had work that was proud, right?

00:11:09.000 They liked doing what they did, and they were proud of it.

00:11:12.000 I remember talking to my grandfather, you know, we'd see an old car, In an old, you know, sort of used car parking lot, and he'd say, you know, Armco Steel, he worked at Armco Steel, built that car.

00:11:22.000 Like, I know that car.

00:11:23.000 And he was proud of that fact.

00:11:25.000 But it also provided a real sense of community, right?

00:11:27.000 I mean, there were sort of labor unions and other institutions of work that existed, you know, that just don't exist in the modern service sector economy.

00:11:36.000 And so, you know, sort of, I know sort of labor unions are controversial in conservative circles.

00:11:43.000 I tend to sort of be more pro-union.

00:11:44.000 We can talk about that.

00:11:45.000 We can not talk about that.

00:11:46.000 But people, I think, always miss the thing about labor unions is not just that they were sort of economically important to a lot of people.

00:11:54.000 It's that they were actually useful as a sense of community.

00:11:58.000 And when that sense of community sort of started to disappear, then you had a lot of people feeling more isolated.

00:12:03.000 And that's when that, as you called it, a culture of poverty starts to take over and really starts to influence and affect how people build their lives.

00:12:10.000 So let's talk about that culture of poverty because obviously your mom particularly gets sucked into that. 1.00

00:12:16.000 You talk about in the book the fact that she ends up being addicted to drugs and how this affected your childhood.

00:12:21.000 So how does that transition happen from more of a solid middle class industrial base to a more poverty stricken, largely, well not largely, but at least more addicted population?

00:12:35.000 You know, it happens in very subtle ways, right?

00:12:37.000 And, you know, one of the arguments that I make in the book is that sort of the seeds for this dysfunction are already there, right?

00:12:43.000 A lot of people had tough lives, right?

00:12:45.000 My grandparents came from very, very deep poverty of southeastern Kentucky, coal country. 0.98

00:12:50.000 You know, my grandparents' lives were in some ways much, much more difficult than my life certainly.

00:12:56.000 And so, you know, in some ways people already kind of came from pretty chaotic circumstances.

00:13:01.000 There was this way in which the community sort of worked in the 50s and 60s.

00:13:05.000 My grandparents certainly had chaotic family life.

00:13:08.000 It wasn't perfect.

00:13:09.000 There were a lot of issues with it, but the community more or less held together.

00:13:12.000 And there's this way in which when The good jobs disappeared and people started going to church less, and there was less of that community infrastructure that the seeds that existed started to take over, right?

00:13:23.000 And so you had people, maybe, you know, addiction was there, but it was suppressed a little bit.

00:13:28.000 If somebody got addicted to alcohol, if somebody was a really mean drunk, Then the community would envelop them.

00:13:34.000 They would help people get off the drink.

00:13:38.000 They would, in some ways, very aggressively help them get off the drink.

00:13:41.000 I mean, this wasn't always like, oh, we're going to come over to your house and help you stop drinking and get you the treatment you need. 0.82

00:13:47.000 Sometimes it was like a dad talking to the kid who married his daughter, saying, if you don't stop drinking, I'm going to shoot you. 0.89

00:13:53.000 Right?

00:13:54.000 But those ways of community infrastructure actually did kind of hold things together.

00:14:00.000 And what happened in the 70s and 80s as those good jobs started to disappear, as some of these broader sociological trends started to sort of become more overwhelming, is that that just stopped happening.

00:14:11.000 That when people were really miserable, when they were really unhappy, there wasn't anything to kind of pick them up and help them.

00:14:17.000 And so, you know, you saw rising rates of addiction, you saw rising rates of childhood trauma and abuse.

00:14:23.000 And of course, that becomes a multi-generational thing.

00:14:26.000 One of the things that I try to really get readers to understand in Hillbilly Elegy is the way in which family dysfunction is not just an immediate reaction to sort of economic circumstances or whatever else is happening.

00:14:38.000 It can very often take on this multi-generational life.

00:14:42.000 And so, you have families like my grandparents' generation that sort of held together when the community was working.

00:14:48.000 But by the time that my mom came around, the community wasn't working.

00:14:51.000 You had these sort of really traumatic moments from people's childhood that were still very much with them.

00:14:58.000 And consequently, family life started to fall apart in a much more obvious and much more substantial way.

00:15:03.000 So in a second, I wanna get to this sort of debate on the rights that I think is really fascinating between sort of the libertarian answer to this and the more economically interventionist answer to this, which have been provided by different sides of the debate.

00:15:18.000 We've had those conversations a lot on this program with folks ranging from Oren Kassin to Tucker Carlson to Kevin Williamson on the other side.

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00:17:00.000 Alrighty, so let's talk for a second about some of the solutions that have been proposed to some of the sociological and socioeconomic issues that you talk about in Hillbilly Elegy before we get to your personal story.

00:17:11.000 I find this stuff fascinating because it really has broken down into a sort of fascinating internecine debate on the right.

00:17:17.000 On the one side, I would say you have sort of Orrin Cass and maybe Tucker Carlson who have suggested they're a bunch of people, they're not going to move.

00:17:24.000 They want to live and die in the town where their grandparents lived and died.

00:17:27.000 The industry is gone.

00:17:29.000 Essentially, we have to come up with some sort of subsidy in order to rebuild community economically outside in.

00:17:35.000 Tucker, for example, on this program on the Sunday Special suggested that we should ban, for example, automated trucking so as to preserve truck driver jobs because jobs have meaning and we don't want even if it lowers the price of shipping and creates new jobs in different sectors, we have to make sure that people who are capable of being truck drivers can still drive trucks and then live in the areas they want to live in. Orrin Cass of course has pushed a much more interventionist view with regard to international trade. He's pushed tariffs and subsidies in certain areas. And then on the other side, you

00:18:04.000 have folks like Kevin Williamson, I'll admit I tend to be more on this side too.

00:18:08.000 And that is, OK, well, if the areas are hollowed out, politicians have a lot of ability to make false promises about how they're going to bring jobs back to these areas and make these areas flourish again.

00:18:19.000 But politicians have a very poor history of being able to do that, bringing jobs back to impoverished areas simply through the force of redistributionism, government or subsidies.

00:18:28.000 And so maybe the solution is that you actually have to pick up and move, but that cuts against some of the cultural influences you're talking about in Appalachia particularly.

00:18:35.000 So is there a happy medium there?

00:18:37.000 Where do you come down in that debate?

00:18:38.000 Well, I mean, I guess if we're drawing the distinction, I tend to be more on the Orrin and Tucker Carlson side of that debate, though I do think that it's important to sort of remind people that these problems aren't all economic, right?

00:18:51.000 And, you know, so if I can sort of give a little bit of credit to, you know, if you're casting your lot on that side, to your side of this debate, I mean, I do think that we often forget That there's this really complicated interaction between economics and society, right?

00:19:08.000 And so you can't, for example, say that if the goal is to eliminate childhood trauma and to rebuild stable families that we just need to provide good jobs.

00:19:18.000 I think that's a really important piece of the equation, but that's not all of it.

00:19:21.000 A lot of times, as I talk about in the book, You're talking about, like, the effects and the symptoms of multi-generational poverty, of dysfunction, of chaos that are showing up in these communities.

00:19:35.000 And if you think you can sort of wave the magic economic wand and fix that, I don't think you can.

00:19:40.000 That said, I do think the economic piece of it is important, especially if we understand that the economy is not just the way that people provide for themselves materially.

00:19:48.000 But they also sort of need that community that comes along with a stable job and good work.

00:19:54.000 And I also think at a fundamental level, we have to meet people where they are, right?

00:19:57.000 So it's one thing to say to people, well, you've got to go get a U-Haul, you've got to move to where the economic opportunities are.

00:20:05.000 That's fine for some subcategory of people.

00:20:07.000 I think some people are going to want to move.

00:20:10.000 But if, in reality, a lot of people don't want to leave the homes that made them where they are, maybe they're willing to move a few hours away, maybe they're willing to move 45 miles up the road, but they're not willing to sort of drop everything and move from West Virginia to San Francisco, I think we just have to accept that's how people are.

00:20:25.000 Even if Kevin Williamson may not like that that's how people are, that is a fact of life.

00:20:29.000 And so we also have to, if we care about people, and I think all of us do, We have to accept that we have to try to rebuild some sort of real economic and manufacturing base all over the country.

00:20:41.000 At a sort of broader level, to kind of cut away from the geography of it, I tend to think that on the economics of this, That a lot of libertarians under-appreciate how important a manufacturing base is, completely independent of whether you're trying to help people, or whether you're trying to rebuild communities, or some of these other more social consequences that we're talking about.

00:21:02.000 So, the U.S.

00:21:04.000 Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer, I think, has written and spoken about this in very interesting ways.

00:21:08.000 And one of the arguments that he makes is that we have this economic supposition that we could disconnect the making of things from the designing of things, that we could design all the things in America, we could make all the things in China or Malaysia or Mexico, whatever the case may be, and that that's sort of the natural evolution of the economy.

00:21:27.000 America would be the more advanced economy where we designed the iPhones.

00:21:31.000 China would be the less advanced economy where they manufactured the iPhones.

00:21:35.000 And eventually, we'd reach a new phase of development Heiner was designing those things and we were designing something new.

00:21:40.000 And I do think there was sort of a fundamental conceit there because if you're not actually making things, if you're not actually working on the logistical processes, the supply chain interventions and innovations, Then you start to lose and atrophy your ability to make things, too.

00:21:54.000 And so there is this way in which there was a sort of arrogance about how we could disconnect the manufacturing side of our economy from everything else that I think is important for us to sort of recapture some capacity in manufacturing and designing.

00:22:11.000 You know, we haven't lost all of it, of course.

00:22:13.000 We've definitely been more de-industrialized than I think pretty much every other Western economy, except for maybe the UK.

00:22:19.000 But we haven't lost all of it.

00:22:20.000 We still do have a pretty powerful manufacturing base that we could build on.

00:22:24.000 I think in the process, you're going to be able to provide more good jobs to people.

00:22:29.000 And if I could say one final thing, I know I threw a lot at you there, and I'm happy to sort of go down any direction.

00:22:34.000 But I do think, you know, there's this weird conceit that's on the left, and I haven't seen it on the right so much, even the libertarian right, which I appreciate, that you can just sort of easily reskill people into new jobs very quickly, right?

00:22:49.000 And so you saw, I think Rahm Emanuel made a comment about this on some national network a few weeks ago, that what we're going to have to do is just go into, you know, suburban, rural Ohio, go into West Virginia, and teach all these people to code.

00:23:00.000 And, you know, one, I think that's like a pretty bizarre view of human nature that you can just sort of easily do that.

00:23:06.000 That's not an easy thing to do, to transition people from one skill set to the other.

00:23:11.000 But I also think it sort of mistakes that one of the reasons we had a very viable middle class in this country for so long is that we did have a real manufacturing base, right?

00:23:22.000 If people can't just learn to code, if they're not just going to pick up and move to San Francisco, You might not be able to save every small town, but I do think that if you have a more stable manufacturing base, you're going to be able to have a more viable middle-class economy, which I think is just really important for political stability, for economic stability, for growth and innovation downstream.

00:23:42.000 It's just really important that we not give up on the idea that we're going to have manufacturing jobs.

00:23:46.000 There's been a lot of talk about this from obviously Trump and the Trump administration with regard to interventionism in the economy, particularly in these areas.

00:23:53.000 He suggested he was going to bring back a lot of manufacturing jobs.

00:23:56.000 There have been some manufacturing jobs that have been added, although not a huge number and not in specific places.

00:24:03.000 And that's where I sort of start to get dicey on the proposition that the government has the capacity or should be engaging in a sort of redistributionism from consumers to particular producers in certain areas.

00:24:16.000 I guess my biggest question when it comes to this sort of stuff is whether this is a promise that can even be fulfilled, meaning that if you look at the history of American economics, I mean, the fact is that the manufacturing base driven by the United States, particularly in the 50s and 60s, was almost directly as a result of the fact that the rest of the world was rubble.

00:24:33.000 I mean, after World War II, we were the only untouched major industrial nation on planet Earth.

00:24:38.000 And then we proceeded to blow out our budgets on massive union contracts that would eventually bankrupt most of the auto manufacturers in the 70s and 80s, making us nearly uncompetitive on the world stage before regulatory cuts and before de-unionization.

00:24:51.000 And so a lot of the things that we love about the 50s and 60s, and we suggest they're a product of the American system, Actually, maybe products of the fact that no other industrialized country was capable of producing at that point, and we got bloated and inefficient, and then we were forced back into more efficiency that required industrial scale back in the 70s and 80s.

00:25:09.000 Yeah, there's a fair critique here that I'll sort of agree with, and then try to maybe encourage you and the listeners to sort of think about this in a slightly different way.

00:25:21.000 So on the one hand, you're absolutely right.

00:25:22.000 The 50s and 60s are probably never coming back.

00:25:24.000 They were the consequence of a very particular moment in history.

00:25:28.000 And it's hard to imagine that level of manufacturing power relative to the rest of the world.

00:25:34.000 So that's fair.

00:25:36.000 On the other hand, I think the story of American economic development has not been primarily one of, you know, the sort of the market, Pushing and turning these things on in its own way.

00:25:52.000 In other words, you know, one way of understanding the 50s and 60s is just like America was the only place to do business and therefore that was the place to do business.

00:26:00.000 But I think if you take a sort of a longer view of American history, we always had a very strong developmentalist mindset.

00:26:07.000 It wasn't anti-market, but sort of what's interesting is it was almost in some ways hyper-commercial.

00:26:12.000 If you talk about Alexander Hamilton or Henry Clay or Abraham Lincoln, these were all people who did not necessarily just want to protect the old industries.

00:26:20.000 And I sort of, I imagine you feel like this.

00:26:22.000 I certainly think some of the industries are just going to die away, right?

00:26:26.000 Some of them are not going to be economically viable.

00:26:28.000 You can't save every manufacturing job that's out there.

00:26:32.000 But we also have this very discreet idea that while the government shouldn't be controlling the American economy, we should have as a policy Consensus, a view about what we want the economy to be, what we want the market to be able to produce, and to put a little bit of a thumb on the scale to make that possible.

00:26:51.000 So, you know, in the early 20th century, that was a manufacturing thing.

00:26:56.000 In the late 19th century, that was primarily an infrastructure development thing, but certainly the steam engine was a very important piece of this.

00:27:03.000 You know, in the last 50 or 60 years, we have had specifically an American economic policy around two core industries, Not only two core industries, but two core industries stand out.

00:27:13.000 One is information technology.

00:27:16.000 Aggressive government policy to try to make us the information technology leader of the world.

00:27:20.000 And two, around biopharmaceutical development, which has been a little bit more implicit because the American economy is basically the only place where you can get monopoly rents for developing new drugs, which is why so much of the biopharmaceutical innovation happens here.

00:27:34.000 And I think that when I think about economic development in the context of American history, that's sort of more where I wish we would go.

00:27:42.000 Call it export promotion more than import substitution.

00:27:45.000 I think that you have to do some import substitution so that the Chinese don't just sort of undercut all of your manufacturing workforce with slave wages among the Uyghurs. 1.00

00:27:54.000 But what I really would love us to do is have a theory as a society of like, where do we want the economy to go?

00:28:01.000 Okay, we have a view about information technology, we have a view about biopharmaceuticals, and you're not gonna have the government creating these industries, you're not gonna have the government, I think, intervening a ton of these industries, but it at least should have a discrete view about what it wants to promote, where it's gonna spend research and development dollars, how it's going to sort of maybe protect its nascent industries from foreign competition.

00:28:22.000 And that's just what we've sort of lost.

00:28:25.000 And it's an interesting historical question about why we lost it.

00:28:28.000 And to go back to your point about the 50s and 60s, which I think is largely correct, there's a way in which we lost it because we were so powerful, right?

00:28:36.000 In the 50s and 60s, we didn't have to think about a national economic policy in any way.

00:28:41.000 We just did everything because we had the best workforce, we had the only economy that hadn't been destroyed, the only advanced economy that hadn't been destroyed.

00:28:49.000 And I would love to actually have us get back to a world where we recognized, like You know, like Hamilton, like Clay, like Lincoln, that we're in a national and an international economic competition with other countries.

00:29:02.000 We can't just ignore that fact and we need to actually pursue the industries of the future that we think are viable.

00:29:08.000 I think that's just been missing because American policymakers didn't have to think about it for 50 or 60 years.

00:29:13.000 So in a second, I want to ask you how we draw the line between that and how we prevent that from sliding into sort of the government runs the economy, the government picks winners and losers mentality that we see on the other side of the political aisle.

00:29:24.000 I'll get to that in just one second.

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00:30:31.000 Alrighty, so one of the questions I had when I had Oren Kass on the program was how we don't slide from basically sort of Tucker Carlson's point of view on economics to Bernie Sanders' point of view on economics.

00:30:43.000 And Tucker's actually been rather unclear about this.

00:30:45.000 I asked Tucker this directly and he said, well, I kind of agree with Bernie Sanders on a lot of this sort of stuff.

00:30:49.000 In fact, Tucker has praised Elizabeth Warren's economic plans in the past.

00:30:54.000 And it seems like not even necessarily a slippery slope, but an inexactitude of principle.

00:31:00.000 How do we, how do we prevent a principle, you know, suggesting that we should be able to forward particular industries or pick the direction of the economy from the wholesale picking winners and losers, the government decides which industries ought to thrive and which industries ought not to.

00:31:15.000 How do we, how do we distinguish between those two proposals?

00:31:17.000 Because as we know, you know, the democratic party, for example, right now is pushing pretty hard in the direction of we're going to spend every available dollar in dollars that are not available.

00:31:26.000 on the development of quote unquote green technologies for which there is no actual record of success at this point. So how do we prevent the cylindering of the American economy along these lines? Well, you know, one thing I'll say about Tucker and Orrin in particular, because I think they're very aggressive on this point, is that there's this weird meta-narrative within the American right that I think they're very explicitly trying to push on and to try to rip the band-aid off a little bit. So I don't think that Tucker's economic views are...

00:31:52.000 are the same as Bernie Sanders.

00:31:54.000 Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I do think what he is trying to get folks to think about is let's stop with that part of our brain that says we're not allowed to go there because we're conservatives.

00:32:05.000 Let's actually figure out what's in the best interest of the American nation, the American worker, and let's just figure that out from there.

00:32:11.000 And so I sort of see his ambition there, not so much as having the same economic policies as Bernie Sanders, but more as saying, we need to stop with that part of our conservative brain that immediately reacts to everything that reeks of government as, this is bad because it's government.

00:32:29.000 And I think that's a useful corrective, because I think basically what's happened is that a lot of You know, wisdom from the 60s, 70s, and 80s is ossified into a little bit of a dogma.

00:32:41.000 And to the extent that people are pushing back on that, I tend to think that's useful.

00:32:44.000 To answer your specific question, I mean, I tend to think that we're probably going down this road or have gone down this road already.

00:32:53.000 And to the extent conservatives sort of evacuate the field, we're just giving this up to the left.

00:32:59.000 And what I mean is, We have, whether we like it or not, an American economic policy.

00:33:05.000 We had one in the 50s, we had one in the 60s, we've had one every single year that this republic has been in existence, even when the scope of the government was much more limited as it was, of course, in the late 18th and early 19th century.

00:33:20.000 You know, I mentioned earlier, we have a pro-IT, pro-software, pro-hardware economic policy in this country right now.

00:33:28.000 We have an economic policy that's been very beneficial, of course, to the technology giants in Silicon Valley that's been very protective of their particular ways of regulating content.

00:33:38.000 I mean, that didn't exist in a vacuum, of course.

00:33:40.000 That's not the free market.

00:33:42.000 That's really just a specific policy choice that we made.

00:33:45.000 And I happen to think it was maybe defensible 30 years ago, 10 years ago even.

00:33:49.000 It's less defensible today.

00:33:50.000 And so I think that what we have to recognize is that at some level, the American government is going to be doing something in the American economy, and we should have a discrete view about what we want that to be, and we should be pushing back against the excesses of the left, which it's hard to do if your view is, well, the government shouldn't be doing anything vis-a-vis the economy, which I'm not saying, of course, is your view.

00:34:13.000 I don't want to caricature it.

00:34:15.000 That's pretty close, actually.

00:34:16.000 I think you're caricaturing it.

00:34:19.000 Well, but I think that basically, you know, the government sets laws, right?

00:34:27.000 It says contract laws.

00:34:29.000 It sets capital markets laws.

00:34:30.000 Right?

00:34:31.000 Every single public company is able to be a public company that's shielded from liability, which is, of course, I think you can make a good argument, is not a free market intervention into our corporate law.

00:34:41.000 They are able to access incredibly liquid capital markets because of policy choices that we have made as an American economy, that we want them to be shielded from liability but also have access to easy credit, easy debt, and also easy equity financing.

00:34:55.000 So I guess my view on this is, look, we have an economic policy, whether we like it or not.

00:35:01.000 Do we want that economic policy to pursue broad-based prosperity for the American middle class and the American working classes?

00:35:10.000 Do we want it to be able to make The types of things that allow that we stay ahead of our economic competitors, especially in Asia, or are we just going to sort of say we don't want the government to do that even though the government is already doing that, effectively ceding the ground to the left?

00:35:26.000 I think that we have to accept that there's a role to play here for us, even if we don't think there should be.

00:35:32.000 I mean, the reality of politics is that there is, and I don't want the conservatives to abandon the field.

00:35:37.000 So what's funny about this conversation is in this conversation, I'm the libertarian and you are the more interventionist.

00:35:44.000 If you look at the reviews of Hillbilly Elegy, the book, and now the movie, it is precisely the opposite.

00:35:50.000 So the critique of the movie and of the book from the left is, of course, that it is a libertarian fable.

00:35:54.000 Because your personal story, to get back to that, is growing up in these somewhat impoverished circumstances, although your grandparents weren't poverty stricken, but your mom obviously was.

00:36:05.000 And then moving from that to Yale Law School by essentially making some difficult decisions on a personal level to break with the past.

00:36:13.000 So maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

00:36:15.000 Yeah, it's always funny, you know, because you're obviously a much bigger political or public figure than I am, Ben, and have been writing about this stuff for much longer than I have.

00:36:24.000 And to the extent that I've been in the public eye at all, you know, if you go back to national review articles that I wrote in 2004, 2015, you know, my politics have always been a little bit on this side of the conservative divide, right?

00:36:35.000 I'm a social conservative.

00:36:37.000 I'm certainly not what I would call an interventionist, but if we're sort of putting the libertarian versus intervention side, I'm more on the intervention side on some of these big questions.

00:36:48.000 And it's funny that the reaction to the book is to treat it as sort of some libertarian manifesto from the left.

00:36:55.000 I even saw a movie review, which is hilarious, that said that it was a libertarian work of art or something like that, and they meant that critically.

00:37:04.000 Which I find just so bizarre because to me, you know, people have to be able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time.

00:37:13.000 You can believe that people have very tough circumstances and that we as a society have a responsibility to give opportunity and hope to people no matter the circumstances they came from.

00:37:24.000 And then on the other hand, that people still have some responsibility and some personal agency despite rough personal circumstances, right?

00:37:33.000 I always felt, and this is probably one of the reasons psychologically I started to identify with the right from a very early age, is that even if I didn't necessarily agree with the right's prescriptions on everything, I at least felt like conservatives treated people like me as if we were actual people.

00:37:48.000 We weren't just hopeless victims.

00:37:50.000 And I always hated how the left brought all the sympathy, right, for people like me.

00:37:55.000 They wanted to help us with this program or that, and of course a lot of the programs that are out there haven't done the job that the left hoped that they would do.

00:38:03.000 But just at a more fundamental, emotional, psychological level, the lesson that the left tend to have for people is like, well, you're a hopeless victim.

00:38:10.000 The only way that you're ever gonna have any good opportunities is for us to sort of come in like saviors and fix your lives.

00:38:17.000 And consequently, even though they didn't say this explicitly, it was implicit, you should just give up on yourself, right?

00:38:23.000 If you're a hopeless agent, or hopeless non-agent, and you have no real opportunity, then why work hard?

00:38:29.000 Why try to build a good family for yourself?

00:38:31.000 Why try to go and find a good job?

00:38:33.000 Why give back to your community if your community is just this desolate place that has no hope?

00:38:38.000 And I always resisted that.

00:38:40.000 And I resisted in the book, and I certainly resisted in the way that I talk about these things now.

00:38:45.000 Consequently, I think people assume that like I am, or at least some people on the left assume that I'm a libertarian.

00:38:51.000 But, you know, I'm not and I really am frustrated by the fact that people on the left can't believe both that people have agency and also that people have disadvantage.

00:39:03.000 Both things can be true at the same time.

00:39:05.000 You know, my grandma, like a lot of people who grew up in tough circumstances, I mean, if you look at the statistics, most people who are in poverty don't vote.

00:39:13.000 Or at least, I shouldn't say most, but a lot of people who are in poverty don't vote.

00:39:17.000 My grandma, I don't think, ever voted for a president her entire life. 0.92

00:39:20.000 But she was like a classic Blue Dog Union Democrat. 1.00

00:39:23.000 Her husband voted for Democrats.

00:39:24.000 She was sort of on the side of the Democrats.

00:39:27.000 And if I had to guess, my grandma would have voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016.

00:39:35.000 Maybe she would have voted for Trump in the general election. 0.99

00:39:37.000 You know, again, she didn't vote, so it's always hard to tell.

00:39:39.000 But the way that Mamaw talked about some people in our community would have other people calling her a hyper-libertarian, right?

00:39:47.000 Like, it's a fact of working-class life.

00:39:50.000 This is a well-observed phenomenon that people have Sympathy with a lot of their neighbors.

00:39:55.000 They recognize that a lot of them have tough circumstances, but they also get pissed off at the people who aren't making good decisions, right?

00:40:01.000 And it's amazing that, like, your average working-class Democrat can hold both frustration at some of their neighbors, sympathy with other of their neighbors in their head at the same time.

00:40:12.000 I wish the same was true of our elite media environment, but unfortunately it's not.

00:40:16.000 So let's talk about the elite media environment and the treatment of the book.

00:40:19.000 So the book comes out in 2016.

00:40:20.000 It sells like hotcakes.

00:40:22.000 It becomes for a while sort of the decoder ring for everybody, particularly in the media, to Trump country.

00:40:28.000 The idea is that this is sort of, if you don't understand anybody who voted for Trump in the middle of the country because you literally have only flown over that part of the country, then this book is going to help you understand those folks.

00:40:39.000 And then, almost just as quickly, by 2017, there is a turn in the media where this book becomes almost a terrible book.

00:40:48.000 All of a sudden there is this kind of revisionist history where the book becomes bad.

00:40:52.000 In that kind of brief span where it was the toast of the town and the span where it became burnable, there was this moment where Hollywood was like, you know what, this thing has sold three million copies, probably should make a movie out of it.

00:41:02.000 But I want to talk in just one second with you about that turn from the book everybody should read to the book nobody should read.

00:41:08.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:42:25.000 So let's talk about that shift.

00:42:27.000 So in 2016, everybody recommends this book.

00:42:30.000 Oprah Winfrey suggests that people read the book.

00:42:33.000 A lot of people say that you should read the book on the left.

00:42:35.000 And it becomes sort of a common area of agreement that if you want to understand what exactly is happening in Trump country, you have to read the book.

00:42:43.000 So, number one, I want to ask you about whether that is an accurate take, like whether this is whether it was really about Trump countries you mentioned, you know, the politics in this area are not quite clear cut.

00:42:54.000 And on those lines, I want to ask you also about whether just the appeal of Trump in general, do you think was more economic or was it more cultural?

00:43:00.000 Because I do get the feeling that a lot of Trump is basically just a giant middle finger to all of the people on the coast who look at people in the middle of the country as groups who can't handle their own their own lives.

00:43:10.000 And then I want to get to, you know, that shift that happened and why you think that happened, why it went from the book everybody should read to the book that everybody should burn.

00:43:17.000 Yeah, so first on the Trump country thing, I mean, I always felt a little bit weird because people would ask me about these Trump voters, you know, in a way that I imagine, and this is, of course, my, like, friends and family, in a way that I imagine, you know, people ask, like, Jane Goodall about, like, the great apes, right?

00:43:34.000 It was like, you know, you've actually seen these people.

00:43:36.000 You've seen them, like, pick bugs out of each other's hair.

00:43:38.000 What are they like?

00:43:39.000 What do they talk about?

00:43:41.000 So there was this sort of weird Trump country safari element to it, which, On the one hand, I mean, you know, sort of everything I said is, of course, sort of an implicit criticism of it.

00:43:50.000 But on the one positive thing I'll say about it is at least people were asking questions, right?

00:43:55.000 It caught a lot of people off guard.

00:43:56.000 They weren't appreciative of Trump and his appeal.

00:44:00.000 And so I at least appreciate that people were sort of trying to read books like mine to understand Trump voters better.

00:44:05.000 I think that's sort of good when you live in a country of people with different political views.

00:44:11.000 You know, the thing that, of course, is ridiculous about it is, like, Trump's voting base.

00:44:15.000 I mean, he got, what, 75, 80 million votes in the last election.

00:44:18.000 He got a lot of votes in 2016.

00:44:19.000 That's, like, a very complicated group of people, and you can't just read one book to understand them.

00:44:24.000 Though certainly it is true that Trump accelerated a trend that had been true where the white working class became more and more conservative, more and more Republican.

00:44:34.000 And so to the extent that people are sort of trying to project, you know, white working class hillbilly elegy onto something that's going on in the broader American politics, I don't think that's totally off base because of course that was happening.

00:44:45.000 People were becoming more sympathetic to the Republican Party.

00:44:48.000 People like my grandma, you know, or people like my grandma, I should say, who were classic blue dog Democrats who started to evolve their politics.

00:44:59.000 That's something I certainly saw happen, not with my grandma because she was dead well before Trump came on the scene, but certainly with people like that who were really attracted to Trump and to his message.

00:45:12.000 The second element of this, which is this question of why it shifted To a very popular book, to a very unpopular book in the mainstream media, something that I've thought a lot about.

00:45:24.000 I mean, I think part of what happened is that people recognized, like, my own politics, right?

00:45:31.000 Like, I don't shy away from it.

00:45:32.000 And there are ways in which I sort of fit comfortably within the conservative coalition and ways in which I don't.

00:45:37.000 I'm very clearly on the American right.

00:45:39.000 And so I think that there was a little bit of just, you know, we're giving this conservative too much airtime.

00:45:43.000 And so let's, let's change that.

00:45:46.000 I think the more fundamental thing is that for a few weeks, maybe a few months, there was this sort of empathetic moment in America, right?

00:45:54.000 Trump had lost the election.

00:45:55.000 I remember I was invited to write on the New York Times basically about what sort of, you know, Coastal America had missed about Trump voters, and, you know, people published the columns that I wrote, and it was this really interesting moment of empathy.

00:46:08.000 And then two things happened, right?

00:46:10.000 First, the Russia thing happened, right? 0.58

00:46:12.000 It was like, the reason Trump, one, went from because there were a lot of really pissed off white working class voters, to because it was stolen by Russia, right? 0.67

00:46:21.000 And I think because of that, people were just much less interested in the types of people that I was writing about in the book.

00:46:26.000 I think the second thing that happened, and this was initially led by the Academy, But it became very mainstream is that Trump voters are not economically dispossessed.

00:46:37.000 They're not culturally affected, except for the fact that they're racist.

00:46:43.000 And the reason they voted for Trump was because of racism, right?

00:46:46.000 And, you know, I've spent a lot of time trying to understand this academic literature.

00:46:50.000 I mean, typically what happens is they'll call people using some sort of opinion polling, and they'll rank them according to their racial resentment score.

00:47:00.000 And then they'll compare how likely are the people who are most racially resentful to vote for Donald Trump.

00:47:05.000 But of course, the way that they measure racial resentment is by things like, you know, they'll ask the question, well, previous generations of Americans like Irish and Italian Americans were able to assimilate and join the American family, live the American dream.

00:47:19.000 Mexicans or black Americans or whoever, you know, take your pick of whatever identity group, they should be able to do the same thing.

00:47:25.000 And of course, what's crazy about those poll responses is that if you ask Latinos and Black people, they often score higher on those metrics than white people do, right?

00:47:35.000 So to the extent that white people are like racially resentful, then the same is true of like every other group in the country. 0.66

00:47:41.000 And so there was this weird way where we created this bizarre way of measuring racism and then painted with this very broad brush where now all Trump voters are racist, right?

00:47:52.000 And one of the things that bothers me so much about this is that you see that in the reaction to Hillbilly Elegy the book and Hillbilly Elegy the movie.

00:47:59.000 It's like, why are we talking about these white people? 1.00

00:48:02.000 The reason they voted for Trump is because they're racist, because they're dumb, because they're bad. 1.00

00:48:06.000 We don't want to hear any more about them. 1.00

00:48:08.000 And again, I think that's just a terrible way to think about these issues.

00:48:11.000 It's a terrible way to think about your fellow countrymen and women.

00:48:15.000 You know, the other thing that I'll say I think is going on, both in the appeal to Trump, but also the sort of the reaction to Hillbilly Elegy or the white working class more broadly, is that there's this bizarre thing that's going on with American language.

00:48:30.000 I know you've sort of talked about this, written about this, and thought about this.

00:48:33.000 But whether it's the Latinx or Latinx thing, whether it's sort of describing people who talk about the American dream in a favorable way as racist, there's this really strong divergence between the way that college-educated Americans talk about public life and the way that everybody else talks about public life.

00:48:51.000 And that divergence, I think, drives a lot of what, you know, attracts people to Trump.

00:48:56.000 I do think it's economic, and we can sort of get into that if you'd like, but I think a lot of it is that Donald Trump doesn't sound like a totally disconnected college professor when he talks about issues of immigration or race or economics.

00:49:10.000 Like, whatever the case may be, he doesn't sound like a pointy-headed weirdo.

00:49:14.000 I mean, I just can't believe, and I didn't think this in, like, 2013, That there was such a disconnect between the way that human beings talk on each side of our educational and class divide, but now it's just bizarre.

00:49:27.000 It's turned up to 11.

00:49:28.000 And I think, you know, if the left wants a bit of maybe unwelcome advice, if you actually want to win Non-college educated white voters in the heartland.

00:49:37.000 The main thing, it's not policy.

00:49:39.000 It's not any particular issue.

00:49:41.000 It's stop sounding like everything is an academic sociology seminar because people can listen to that and they go, this is weird.

00:49:49.000 I don't want any part of it.

00:49:51.000 I think that there's also an element there of a certain sneering that attaches.

00:49:55.000 And I think that that became clearer with Trump than it was even with Mitt Romney.

00:49:59.000 It seems to me a lot of the Trump support is driven in a certain way in direct opposition to the sort of coalitional politics that Barack Obama was building.

00:50:06.000 There was a lot of talk in the early 2000s and then through the Obama coalition, particularly in 2012.

00:50:11.000 about the building of a new political coalition that was going to be majority-minority with sympathetic white voters, and it was going to overwhelm the historically white and racist American system. And I think a lot of white voters went, hold up, that's not me and you're talking about me in a way I don't like, and I'm going to react to that. And I'm especially going to react to that because the way that you talk about Trump is the way you talk about me.

00:50:31.000 You talk about Mitt Romney like he was a disconnected CEO who liked to fire people so their wives would get cancer.

00:50:36.000 And whether or not that's true, I mean, he is a CEO type, right?

00:50:39.000 I mean, he's president of business in the Lego movie, right?

00:50:41.000 I mean, that's what he is.

00:50:42.000 But Donald Trump is a des dos and dem type in terms of how he speaks.

00:50:48.000 And the way that you speak about him is exactly the way you speak about me, right? 1.00

00:50:51.000 You call him an idiot. 1.00

00:50:52.000 You call him a bore. 1.00

00:50:52.000 You suggest that he's a Bulgarian. 1.00

00:50:54.000 You suggest that he's a con man and a grifter and that his sort of gut level, whatever you think of Trump, he sort of does have a gut level love for the country and love for the flag, regardless of what he thinks of those things on a philosophical level.

00:51:05.000 And I think a lot of people reacted to, I really think that Trump's major appeal more than anything else is one is something that he has said many times, which is they don't hate you because they hate me. They hate me because they hate you. And I think that's right for so many Americans.

00:51:18.000 Yeah, I think that's, that's very smart. And it's, it extends like further.

00:51:24.000 It's not just about criticism of them personally, which I do think a lot of people feel to their core.

00:51:31.000 It's also about the things that they hold dear, right?

00:51:36.000 This wasn't true when Bill Clinton was running for political office.

00:51:40.000 It wasn't true, by the way, when Barack Obama was running for political office.

00:51:43.000 One of my favorite lines to give in speeches is that I give a paraphrase line from a Barack Obama speech in 2007 or 2008 when he was running for president, where it's basically, you know, the quote goes something like, you know, I really don't like it when people bring non-American flags to protests in America. When I see a guy waving a Mexican flag at an American protest, I get a flash of resentment. And you know, you give that speech to college-educated audiences in 2017, 2018, and you see people shift in their chairs.

00:52:14.000 They're like, oh, where is this going?

00:52:15.000 This guy is a little uncomfortable.

00:52:17.000 And then you say, well, Barack Obama said that like, you know, eight years ago, 10 years ago.

00:52:20.000 And they're like, oh, wow, that's surprising.

00:52:22.000 And it just goes to show how different it is that people are talking about these issues.

00:52:27.000 But to go back to this sort of People feel insulted personally, but they also feel insulted, I think, about core parts of their identity.

00:52:35.000 So my grandparents, again, classic Blue Dog Democrats, but like, when you talk to them about World War II, And they were kids in World War II.

00:52:45.000 My grandma's older siblings and her father were in the Navy.

00:52:49.000 My grandfather didn't fight in the war.

00:52:51.000 He just missed the sort of age cutoff.

00:52:53.000 I think he was 16 when the war ended.

00:52:55.000 They would get like teary-eyed, right?

00:52:57.000 I mean, it was this incredibly proud moment of American history.

00:53:01.000 And that moment was important to them as people, right?

00:53:05.000 Their identity as Americans who felt that their country was good was really important to them.

00:53:11.000 And of course, there are all kinds of things that America has done wrong.

00:53:14.000 You sort of have to issue that caveat.

00:53:16.000 But people like, you know, they recognize that there are a lot of things wrong with their family.

00:53:20.000 They still love their family.

00:53:21.000 They still think things are good.

00:53:24.000 The American nation is, in a lot of sense, a sort of extended family for a lot of people.

00:53:28.000 They care about its history.

00:53:30.000 They're proud of its history.

00:53:32.000 And if you're operating assumption as a potential leader of American politics is not that America's made some mistakes, but America's fundamentally terrible, then a lot of people are going to feel personally insulted because America is something they actually care about.

00:53:45.000 It's not just fake.

00:53:46.000 And I actually think that this is, it sort of reveals the cynicism of a lot of our sort of leadership class in the country.

00:53:52.000 Is, I don't think that they were, well, they were caught off guard by the reaction that a lot of people had to this because they really don't think that patriotism is something that folks actually feel, right?

00:54:03.000 They think it's all manufactured.

00:54:04.000 They think it's all like, you know, Koch brothers or somebody else's propaganda to make people feel good about America.

00:54:11.000 But a lot of people actually just feel good about America because they care about it and it's theirs and they love it.

00:54:16.000 And if that feeling is genuine, it's very often, I think, foreign to a lot of folks in America's leadership class.

00:54:21.000 It is pretty incredible.

00:54:22.000 I was rereading Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 DNC, and it is unrecognizable when you get to Barack Obama 2012.

00:54:27.000 It is just not recognizable.

00:54:29.000 His 2004 speech, he talks about how in inner city communities, kids need to be taught that getting a good education is not acting white, which is something he would, you know, he's repeated it maybe twice since then, and every time it's a major headline.

00:54:41.000 2004, you go back and Howard Dean was talking about how he wanted to be a candidate for people with pick up with Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks.

00:54:48.000 And everybody was just like, OK, well, that makes sense.

00:54:50.000 I mean, there are a lot of people like Yeah, I mean, Howard Dean would be not just banished from the Democratic Party, but from polite society if he uttered that same thing in 2020.

00:55:04.000 And again, yeah, you're right.

00:55:08.000 It shows just a fundamental disconnect.

00:55:09.000 And there is something, you know, There's something weird here going on about the class dynamics that I haven't quite teased apart.

00:55:20.000 And this is a little bit of a detour, but I hope you'll forgive me.

00:55:22.000 But I remember when Kevin Hart was basically kicked out of hosting the Oscars, which of course I'm sure was a big career moment, would have brought him a lot of additional wealth and money.

00:55:33.000 So it had a real economic effect on his life.

00:55:37.000 And basically, it was for the sin of tweeting, you know, some things.

00:55:42.000 I forget exactly even what he had tweeted.

00:55:43.000 Yeah, it was in 2010, he tweeted something.

00:55:45.000 It was some joke about how he didn't want his son to be gay in 2010.

00:55:48.000 Okay, okay, yeah.

00:55:50.000 And I remember, like, the reaction to that revealed a way in which you're sort of penalized, again, for not adopting the vocabulary of, like, modern, 2020, professionally educated America.

00:56:07.000 So, you know, like, people joke about things in all kinds of ways.

00:56:11.000 They're very often politically incorrect.

00:56:13.000 People say hateful... I mean, I can't imagine.

00:56:16.000 Thank God Facebook didn't exist when I was 16 years old. 1.00

00:56:18.000 I'm sure that I said a ton of stupid and hateful things when I was 16 years old. 0.98

00:56:23.000 But, you know, We don't want to live in a society where being not professionally educated and not worrying about every word that comes out of your mouth is effectively a barrier to economic and social advancement. 0.99

00:56:35.000 That's kind of the society that we live in.

00:56:37.000 And I do think that a lot of working class voters, not just white voters, because of course a lot of Latinos and And even black working class voters migrated to Republicans in the last election.

00:56:47.000 I think that they sort of, there's something they recognize, that this way of talking, if it becomes a barrier to achievement, is just going to be really bad for them.

00:56:55.000 And they're right.

00:56:57.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

00:56:59.000 First, let's talk about the fact that America is always under constant threat.

00:57:03.000 This nation has been confronted with unprecedented perils.

00:57:05.000 Edmund Burke said it.

00:57:06.000 All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.

00:57:09.000 Well, if you want to preserve America, while we still can, it's time to join AMAC.

00:57:12.000 That's the Association of Mature American Citizens.

00:57:14.000 It's the fastest growing conservative group in the country.

00:57:17.000 Joining AMAC will give you access to money-saving benefits, cutting-edge news, and a great bi-monthly magazine.

00:57:22.000 More importantly, AMAC fights for you.

00:57:24.000 There's a socialist storm a-brewin'.

00:57:26.000 And if you care about our future the way I do, you need to join AMAC today.

00:57:29.000 Over 2 million conservatives like you, like me, have already joined AMAC.

00:57:33.000 Stand with us by joining right now.

00:57:34.000 Just go to amac.us slash Shapiro.

00:57:37.000 That's A-M-A-C dot U-S slash Shapiro.

00:57:40.000 The benefits of AMAC membership are great.

00:57:41.000 The cause is even more important.

00:57:43.000 Join today at amac.us slash Shapiro.

00:57:46.000 The country is always under threat.

00:57:48.000 You can fight back by joining AMAC.

00:57:49.000 A-M-A-C dot U-S slash Shapiro.

00:57:51.000 Again, that's A-M-A-C dot U-S slash Shapiro.

00:57:55.000 I think that the backlash that started to materialize with Trump is certainly not going to end with Trump.

00:58:00.000 I mean, when you see how corporate America has militarized, I mean, really militarized on behalf of a sort of woke agenda, the NASDAQ announced this week that they were going to be only listing companies that increased diversity on their boards.

00:58:13.000 I mean, the takeover of corporate America, the establishment media, the social media companies that will now quash free speech, the mainstream stuff.

00:58:23.000 Great example this week was something that I think is a complete disconnect for most Americans, the Hollywood star Ellen Page. 0.98

00:58:29.000 Announced that she was trans and will not be known as Elliot Page.

00:58:32.000 And every single headline was Elliot Page, Juno star, announces he is transgender.

00:58:37.000 If you had no previous knowledge of what was going on, you have no idea what that headline means.

00:58:42.000 Elliot Page emerged today, right?

00:58:43.000 I mean, like you literally have no, you've never heard of Elliot Page before.

00:58:46.000 The Juno star was Ellen Page and was a woman.

00:58:48.000 What in the world are you talking about?

00:58:49.000 But if you went on Twitter and you said Ellen Page is a woman, you would be hit across the, across the face with this, with this Bizarre notion that you were a bad person for acknowledging a fact that happens to be biologically true.

00:59:01.000 And also, even according to Elliot Page, was true as of seven minutes ago.

00:59:06.000 But it's not just that we have to violate the laws of biology.

00:59:08.000 We also have to violate the laws of physics and retcon this so that actually the star of Juno was a transgender man named Elliot Page.

00:59:15.000 I mean, all of this, I think, creates a disconnect in the minds of Americans with real consequences.

00:59:20.000 Because the elite, the elitists in the society do have consequences ready for people who refuse to abide by these dictates.

00:59:27.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:59:28.000 And the consequences are very real.

00:59:29.000 And this is, by the way, one of the pitches I make to more libertarian-minded conservatives like yourself, Ben, for why we need to be a little bit wary about the alliance that existed between the right and commercial actors in our society, is that for a long time, basically, the dynamic in American politics was the left owned the culture, The right owned the money and the commercial and corporate power, and they battled over political power.

00:59:57.000 And one of the things that's happened is that the right has now lost one of those two spheres, right?

01:00:02.000 We can still win elections, but both the culture and the corporate leadership is now firmly behind the left.

01:00:12.000 I saw this statistic recently.

01:00:15.000 That in the 19, I think in 1990, the Fortune 10 companies were all led by Republicans.

01:00:21.000 I think their CEOs were all Republicans, or maybe 9 out of 10.

01:00:26.000 And in 2020, the Fortune 10 CEOs are all Democrats.

01:00:29.000 And so I do think that one of the important realizations that has to happen for conservatives is like, we don't own the market anymore.

01:00:36.000 We don't own the actors in the market anymore.

01:00:38.000 They have sort of gone over to the other side, and our politics has to adjust to that fact.

01:00:42.000 But that's really the consequence.

01:00:44.000 You asked about consequences.

01:00:45.000 Those are the consequences that matter, right?

01:00:48.000 Yeah, you might get beat up on social media, especially if you're more of a public figure for saying you voted for Trump or saying you voted for whatever Republican candidate of the day is.

01:00:58.000 But the thing that really bothers me when I talk to friends who, you know, maybe they voted for Trump and didn't tell people or they try not to be open about it.

01:01:07.000 What they were worried about was not criticism from their peers and their neighbors.

01:01:10.000 It was what they were worried about is they might get fired.

01:01:13.000 Yep.

01:01:13.000 And we are now in that environment where People on the right really have to worry about what they're saying, especially if they're working for the most elite companies in the country.

01:01:24.000 You have to worry about this less if you work at a small manufacturer in southern Ohio than you do if you work at Google.

01:01:29.000 Of course, if you work at Google, you've really got to worry about what you say or you might lose your job.

01:01:34.000 And, you know, that that strikes me as a pretty unhealthy.

01:01:38.000 Absolutely.

01:01:39.000 And even if you're working at a small company in southeastern Ohio, if you go on Twitter or Facebook and you say something, there's a high likelihood that somebody is going to pick that up and then call your boss.

01:01:47.000 That's right.

01:01:48.000 boss will be inundated or that Yelp will suddenly review you as a racist business and your boss is going to be forced to fire you. I mean, the sort of censorship regime from the top is really pervasive. And I think the people on the left are underestimating what the backlash is going to be. Now, the question I think between the two of us is actually not really about that. I think it's really about what's the method of fighting it. I tend to think that that has to be fought more on a cultural level as opposed to what can even be done in the political sphere.

01:02:13.000 I'm not sure what can be done in the political sphere to reverse that.

01:02:17.000 I think that, in the end, what may have to happen is that, unfortunately, we may break into a country that basically has a Republican credit card company, a Democratic credit card company, and a Republican bank, and a Democratic bank.

01:02:27.000 I worry about that, especially, you know, as you know, I spend most of my day investing in technology companies.

01:02:33.000 You know, certainly you talk to companies that have more of a right-of-center bent, and sometimes they'll say they're maybe a little bit worried that, for example, Amazon Web Services, which is sort of a critical infrastructure component, whether they're going to be able to continue to host their website if this thing gets any worse.

01:02:46.000 I mean, I agree with you that we certainly have to exercise cultural power, but I also think that there are some basic policy assumptions in the American regime that corporations are going to be fundamentally neutral.

01:02:59.000 Maybe the CEO is going to say what the CEO is going to say.

01:03:01.000 Maybe there will be some political donations.

01:03:03.000 But I think there is an assumption of neutrality.

01:03:06.000 Why do we offer all of these protections to our companies if they're not going to assume some posture of neutrality?

01:03:15.000 And so I do think that if we continue to go down this path, We're either going to have, like you said, a left-wing economy and a right-wing economy, or we're going to have to start actually telling our corporations, like, look, if you want the benefit of American limited liability, you have to show some neutrality, right?

01:03:31.000 If you want to continue to access capital markets, you can't just fire Republicans for saying things that Republicans believe in.

01:03:37.000 And so I'm willing to use not just the cultural power, but eventually the legal and political power if we have to use it.

01:03:44.000 I mean, it may eventually come to that, especially if what you're talking about that my great fear of doing that, of course, is that any sword that is wielded by the government can be wielded by either side.

01:03:52.000 You're already seeing it wielded against religious people, particularly.

01:03:55.000 So if you maintain neutrality in business and then you have a religious business owner who wants to actually, you know, act religiously in their business, the government's already coming after those folks.

01:04:02.000 Maybe the eventuality has already come.

01:04:04.000 And the left's already using the power, and there is no neutral principle to be upheld at this point.

01:04:08.000 And now it's just this sort of Hobbesian war of all against all, in which either we establish a strict neutral principle for every company in America, including religious people and including people who are on the far left, because the left is simply not going to leave it alone.

01:04:21.000 That's definitely a possibility.

01:04:23.000 Yeah, there is a scary way sometimes in which the slippery slopes, we seem to be already on them or even at the bottom.

01:04:29.000 If that's true, then, you know, I think our, like I mentioned with Tucker earlier, I think our policy aperture has to widen a little bit.

01:04:37.000 So let's talk about the movie.

01:04:39.000 So obviously we're talking today because the movie finally has come out in 2020.

01:04:43.000 The production process and the length of it obviously did not benefit the critics.

01:04:47.000 Because if this movie had come out in 2016, immediately upon the success of the book, it would have been 99% on Rotten Tomatoes.

01:04:53.000 Right now it currently ranks about 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.

01:04:56.000 And I'm sure after they've now announced that Rotten Tomatoes, they're going to be having a top critics feature as well.

01:05:02.000 So presumably among the top critics, it is at currently negative 37%.

01:05:06.000 But the public approval of the film maintains the kind of fan rating of the film is up in the 80s.

01:05:12.000 There's this huge 60 point gap between what the critics think and what the public thinks in terms of approving the film.

01:05:18.000 So as somebody who has seen the film, the film is quite good, I can say this is really apolitical.

01:05:24.000 All of the politics that we have discussed, this entire episode do not come up virtually at all in the film.

01:05:31.000 When I say virtually, I mean, I don't even think virtually, like at all in the film.

01:05:33.000 It's an extraordinarily apolitical film.

01:05:36.000 It is very personalized.

01:05:37.000 Ron Howard, I think, actually stripped as much politics as could be stripped out of the story, out of the story, and tried to focus in specifically on the family story.

01:05:47.000 And yet people decided to read the politics in there.

01:05:49.000 Anyway, what do you make of the critical response?

01:05:51.000 Well, it definitely shows a real disconnect, and I worry about that because, you know, you don't want to have a media that's so separate from the rest of the country, right?

01:06:00.000 We actually want to share a country together.

01:06:02.000 Charles Murray has written about this very, very effectively, that if you have a group of people who set the tone of the conversation, who are so disconnected from the people who are actually viewing films, viewing TV shows, Then it's just another wedge that sort of exists between the broad population of the country and everybody else.

01:06:18.000 That's just not a good thing.

01:06:20.000 I do think it's political.

01:06:21.000 I think, you know, I like the movie.

01:06:23.000 I'm happy with what Ron did.

01:06:24.000 Obviously our politics aren't the same, but I think he just wanted to make an empathetic family drama about problems, you know, addiction, family chaos, trauma, that are unfortunately all too common in the country, especially in the part of the country that I call home.

01:06:37.000 So I think you did a good job with it, and I hope people will give it a chance.

01:06:43.000 The politics of it are just bizarre.

01:06:45.000 I mentioned somebody called it a libertarian fantasy or something, not the book, the movie.

01:06:50.000 To me, there are two even...

01:06:53.000 plausibly political things in the entire movie.

01:06:56.000 So one of them is that the book sort of highlights that Mamaw, when she was raising me, didn't have a lot of money, and this is true to the actual real life characters, was actually struggling to pay for some of her health care, right?

01:07:08.000 Now you could take a number of different policy outcomes from that, but certainly that's not like a libertarian fantasy to sort of talk about the fact that people have trouble paying for their health care, you know?

01:07:18.000 I think you could sort of, again, go in different directions with that, but that's not, I think, a fair characterization to call it libertarian fantasy.

01:07:25.000 And then the other thing is that she does emphasize a couple of times with me personally and other characters in the movie, my mamaw emphasizes, look, this is not easy, but you've got to do the right thing anyway.

01:07:35.000 You've got to try to make the right decisions, even if our lives haven't been totally easy.

01:07:39.000 And again, I think that that message of empowerment, I understand now that people believe that's political, but I think it's depressing because I know a lot of people who come from very rough circumstances who are Democrats, and they think a message of empowerment is actually valuable.

01:07:55.000 So it's unfortunate that the left-wing critics haven't agreed.

01:07:58.000 So in just a second, I want to ask J.D.

01:08:00.000 Vance a few final questions, starting with places where the movie is different from his life.

01:08:06.000 J.D.

01:08:06.000 Vance's answers.

01:08:07.000 You have to be a Daily Wire member.

01:08:08.000 Head on over to dailywire.com.

01:08:09.000 Click join.

01:08:09.000 You can hear the rest of our conversation over there.

01:08:13.000 Well, J.D.

01:08:14.000 Vance, really appreciate your time.

01:08:15.000 Everybody should go check out J.D.' 's best-selling book first, Hillbilly Elegy, and then watch the brand new film adaptation on Netflix.

01:08:20.000 J.D., really appreciate the time.

01:08:21.000 Thanks, man.

01:08:21.000 Good to talk with you.

01:08:22.000 This is a special.

01:08:33.000 This episode of the Sunday special was our last for.

01:08:35.000 We will have new episodes coming out in 2021, but we are trying a new format.

01:08:39.000 Episodes aren't going to be released on a schedule.

01:08:41.000 Instead, we're going to record them as we find the right guests and the right topics to discuss.

01:08:45.000 The best of the best.

01:08:46.000 We've had such an amazing lineup of guests through the past few seasons, and we are excited to level up our approach with timely and relevant interviews that continue to push Daily Wire into the mainstream conversation.

01:08:56.000 Have a wonderful Christmas, and we'll see you next year.

01:08:58.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Glover.

01:09:02.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:09:04.000 Our technical director is Austin Stevens.

01:09:06.000 And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.

01:09:08.000 Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.

01:09:10.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:09:12.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:09:14.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

01:09:16.000 Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.

01:09:18.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:09:20.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 06, 2020

J.D. Vance | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 109

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