With hillbilly elgie, a beautifully written book, a fantastic work and trying not to hate him for that quality on his first ever book. Hes also he just wrote yesterday, going back to ohio, columbus, ohio, where unfortunately hell be doomed to watch second tier football for the rest of his life. And then, look im sorry from the southeastern conference. I get to say that. And to my immediate right, Kevin Williamson, almost redefined the term right piece, right time, writing about working class communities to so much twitter acclaim in the election season. And from texas, livingston, texas. I live in the world famous mule capital of the world, columbia of tennessee, home of the annual mule day festival, which is as i like to call it, redneck woodstock. And so were here to talk about conservatism and the class divide. One of the hottest topics of the last year. When all of a sudden a big chunk of america looked up at the success of dnonald trump, looke at november 8th and the Morning Hours of november 9th and said who are these people that voted for donald trump in so many numbers . And then also looked at some really disturbing numbers about Public Health in the United States, about the rise of opioid addiction, the recognize of alcohol deaths, the rise of suicides and said what on earth is going on . Thats what were going to start with and i guess well start with j. D. And sort of for those who have dont want to summarize a book entirely, but those who have not read it, those who have not followed it closely, where are we right now . Well, thank you, david. Thank you, kevin, for sharing the stage with me. And i guess hello, we bring tidings from real america. So where we are right now. I always frame this as and i hope the book framed this question as primarily one of the interaction of economics and culture because i think that its impossible to completely disentangle one from another and they obviously influence one another in important ways. But fundamentally whats happened is two things. One, weve had an economy that you see on a ton of News Headlines that is unable to provide very good working class jobs for large segment of the country. On the other hand you have a cultural disintegration happening at the same time. You talk about the opioid addiction stuff and rising suicide rates and rising rates of alcoholism and disintegration of the family and rising incarceration rates among the White Working Class which is one of the few demographics to move in that direction while every other demographic is moving in the right direction. You have a group of people who feel, and in some cases rightfully feel, that country left them behind and that their societies are broadly declining and things just arent working. You go outside. You see that all of the local businesses on main street from closed. You read the local newspaper. You see another neighbor died of an opioid overdose and so on and so on. My sense is that bred a very unique sense of frustration. It was possible to misinterpret will donald trump won the republican nomination but my sense is that now its in everybodys faces. Whether you are conservative or l liber liberal you recognize that there is this large group of people. It is struggling and they are reflecting those frustrations in the way they vote and approach politics. Thats my sense of whats going on pretty broadly and my book is just a very personal story of what that decline and what that struggle looks like. Kevin, youve got out and written from what you coin the big blight ghetto. The appalachia and the sou southksh. Home, as i call it. Exactly. That are fundamentally different from the stories we hear about today or over the last couple of day chess is there is this golden age with these thriving factory answers amazing jobs and the factory was shuttered and despair set in. Age with these t answers amazing jobs and the factory was shuttered and despair set in. Thats not the story of the big white ghetto. Maybe could you talk a little bit. It was a place called alvy county kentucky. They hate to see reporters coming. They are used to us because every time the census comes out it comes out as the poorest census designated place in the United States. So they are used to journalists coming in for a couple days and writing how much it sucks there. And the police chief there is funny. He is from new york city. He is Staten Island guy who married a local lady. He is the first guy you meet. A oh, yeah, i met david brooks. All the Homeless People are that way and the golf course is that way. He makes fun of the whole enterprise. But what is interesting about this particular place and what is true broadly of a lot of greater appalachia and even into west texas where im from that the poor parts of the southwest, nothing happened. There wasnt some great industry there that went away. There wasnt some factory that closed down. There wasnt some anything like that. Now if you go further east, there was some coal mining but its always been poor. It stagnated while the rest of the country changes and becomes more and more dra mat nick contrast ease the rest of the country gets wealthier and it stays where its always been. My view about the political end of this is maybe different from those people. I read a lot about economics but i dont think its an economic question. I think that what happen said we are really paying the wages of these socalled sexual revolution that most men in the world and average people in the world are more or less average. Thats how things work. A little bit above average or a little bit we low average. Most people, even in wealthy countries like the United States, have not taken a great deal of meaning in their life or status or sense of themselves from their jobs. They talk about careers and such and most people dont have careers. They have jobs. They have a thing they have to do. Where your sense of self really came from is being a husband, being a father, being a provider, those sorts of things. We have essentially taken the option of having stable normal traditional families off of the table. For a lot of the country they simply dont exist any more. The divorce rate has levelled off a little bit. But thats largely being driven by the fact that people arent getting married to start with. So hooray. Fewer divorces. So what we have is a very large group of people. I think about this in terms of men because there are sexual differences there, who traditionally would have derived a sense of self, relative place in the world and place in community from their position as men in their families. As husbands and fathers. And that being gone, whats left . Some job, if its not something thats going to give you that sense of value, that sense of worth, people talk about the late 1950s, early 1960s as golden age and in a sense theres something to that. It was an unusual time because we are an unusual industrial position because of the war. But you can have a 1957 standard of living today really easy on a minimum wage job. People forget how poor 1957 was in real terms for ordinary people. You can have a 1957 car, house, health care. Nobody really wants that. It is not about material standard of living. It is about peoples relative sense of status in society. And thats one of the reasons why i think trump was an effective candidate because, i mean, he is a cartoon. He is a cartoon but a billionaire real estate tycoon from new york. Sort of swaggering persona and that sort of thing and he speaks to a lot of those i think specifically male anxieties about status and place in society and all that. Now the idea of looking that and saying, yes, thats what i aspire to i personally find horrifying and it makes me want to immigrate to switzerland. But you can understand in a broader social sense why a candidate like that would be appealing and has sense confidence, sense of not compromising or not apologizing for who he is, even though he probably ought to apologize for who he is a lot of the time, you can certainly see the appeal of that and towards the background of that and the sociology. Lets talk about something that came up yesterday in a pretty direct way. The subject is moving. So yesterday there was an Economics Panel and a pretty pointed exchange essentially saying that if youre looking at struggling communities and youre asking people to move, not only is that unrealistic, in a lot of ways it might be harmful is the argument. You are asking for people to leave family. To leave a community to whither thats been there for a long time. A couple of things came it mind. I know both of you have your own perspectives on that issue and one immediately is i thought oh, this is Kevin Williams right here. And were going to have kevin here. And so i thought it would be your piece about moving and about moving from depressed economic areas to places where there are jobs might be one of the most slandered and misunderstood piece of writing that i have witnessed in a long time. Breitbart. According to twitter. Yeah, and to breitbart. I assume you saw what happened yesterday. Mmhm. Love to get your reaction. Well, two things about that. I will make it relatively brief. The pilgrims landed in massachusetts in november. If youve ever been to massachusetts in november, its cold. And you know, not like landing in malibu. Very different sort of place. So moving is in our dna. There a there is a reason there are more people from ireland in the United States. They came here for opportunity. There werent a lot of berkians on the mayflower. Eventually you have to get up and mooj. While we should be sympathetic in our assessment of what is going on there, you are in a place with no job and no Economic Opportunity and no sense there will be some in the future. Can you stay there and be miserable. Can you be maintained on some sort of public dependency for the rest of your life or indefinitely. Theres no fourth option there. So you can, in a berkian sense, take sense of what is being lost. And there are certain ways of life and certain communities that arent going to make it and we know this. And some of them, what got people mad, is i said a lot of people dont deserve to. There are people who raise their children really badly and fill them and their neighbors and community with despair and dysfunction and addiction and violence and all sorts of things. I say this from firsthand experience. This is how i grew up. I know that world a lot better than i would like to. If it goes way because people move to california or houston or some place else or better jobs or opportunities and better life and better schools, okay. Im all right with that tradeoff. And at the end of the day, theres not really another option. I dont think anybody, any self respecting person and kbagain i think there is a self respecting difference i dont think a selfrespecting man wants to maintain indefinitely. I do. I would like to a very wealthy lady out there somewhere no, no, no. Lynette will have to work harder. But i dont think anybody really wants that. I dont think this is just true of what we are talking about with appalachia and the White Working Class. I lived in south bronx for a long time. I didnt meet a lot of people up there who wanted to be maintained independency forever either. We want to be in charge of our lives and have an element of control and while there may be a need for assistance and help of various kind which im a strong believer in, ultimately we have to structure that help in way that helps people to become ultimately self sufficient. Policy wise, one of the things ive argued for is take Unemployment Benefits and restructuring them in a way that helps people meet the expenses of moving if they get a job somewhere. If you have 18 weeks of unemployment left, give that to someone who will take a job in pennsylvania in the oil fields or something. And you know, start a new life. There will be something lost but also something gained. Jd, youre moving from silicon valley, right . Yep. To ohio. That fits in with what you were sharing with us before on this topic of moving. Right. I have conflicted views about moving. Obviously the story of my grandparents life is they went from Eastern Kentucky coal country to the land of ohio, thanks to the Industrial Revolution happening, a lot of factory jobs. Thats how, even though the story of the book is in a lot of ways one of downward mobility, we started in a descent spot because my grandfather worked a factory job for 30 or 35 years. And thats why i was able to have any of the things id growing up. I recognize the importance of moving but i do think there are so first, we have too Little Movement in the country. I think most economists recognize this. We have the lowest rates of geographic mobility since the post war period and we have these massive regional disparities. We have places like denver, colorado that has 2 or 3 unemployment. Then places like most counties of West Virginia that have 20, 30 unemployment. That doesnt fully capture the scale of the underemployment, people who completely dropped out of the labor force and so forth. Theres a good argument to be made that it would be bet are for people to pick up from where they are are and move. But i also think we have to recognize the importance of place in a lot of peoples lives. A lot of peoples sense of identities, right . There is a regional part of this, right . We talk about those moving from england it massachusetts. But when they are moving for opportunity arent moving from the uk to massachusetts even though i dont think it was call the uk back then. But moving from lets say, West Virginia to ohio. Or from kentucky to atlanta. They still have a broad regional sense of place. Still connected to grand parents and aunts and uncles and so forth. We have such concentrated areas of Economic Development and improve amount that that choice even that interregional choice or sorry intraregional mobility choice is becoming impossible. It is hard, lets say, to move from eastern tennessee to lets say West Virginia because there arent a lot of jobs any place in between. I do think we have to be mindful of the fact, maybe not as a matter of policy but just those of us who, and i wrote this yesterday in the times, those of us who have been lucky enough to have certain opportunities that we shouldnt wholly abandon the communities we came from p. We should be mindful that we do owe something in a berkian sense to the places that raised us and created us. I encourage people to be mindful of that though i dont think we need to have a massive Infrastructure Project that will create a 30 million jobs in appalachia, for example. But the last point ill make there is that i worry about this aless from the opposite side. We talk about lower income americans. Americans who cant find jobs and whether they should be moving to areas of greater opportunity. But i also really worry about the fact that the trend in modern american elites is to go to five or six cities. Right . If you go and get a fancy education you end up in new york, d. C. , seattle, San Francisco or l. A. Maybe chicago. Right . And this is a pretty significant problem culturally because it ends up taking a lot of talent, a lot of people who get sucked away from the communities that care about them. Redistributed to the coastal cities. Culturally kond send and look down ton ton the people they co from. Conservatives above all should be mindful of the fact that if you live in a place like West Virginia its not just a question of whether you should pick up and move to a pliace tht has opportunity, but when you send your kids away from college, they start to dislike you. Maybe dislike the community they came from. I dont think thats very thats a very effective way it run a successful political discourse in the country. One of the things that gave me whiplash in this 2016 cycle was my entire life growing up as conservative, looking at the deepseeded problems youve seen in inner city, the conservative argument was we need to repair the family. We need to repair the civic institutions in these cities. We need to support the church and people of faith and faithbased institutions as they are reaching out. That government coming in and purporting to solve what ails inner city chicago or worst parts of the bronx is just the wrong answer. You know what we also need a whole lot of is individual responsibility. No one makes you have children out of wedlock. No one makes you delay indefinitely or not be unmarried or be unfaithful to your life. No one makes you take drugs. We need people to step up in their lives. Thats a conservative argument for a long time. Then one of the interesting things in 2016 as we look at a White Working Class community that as Charles Murray very ably laid out in coming aprt was attending church dramatically less. That was taking drugs more. That was breaking up their own families or cohabiting or you name the social condition that was mirroring in many ways this condition in the inner cities. And some of us conservatives were saying, you know, wow, people need to take some personal responsibility here. They need to get married and stay married. They need to come back it church. That this is a cultural problem. Faithbased problems. More than a government problem. And the response to that was an overwhelming thunderous, youre an elitist. Youre a beltway elitist. Youre condescending. Heres my simple question. Are republicans hypocrites . Lets hope so. Youre not into good foreign politics if youre a hypocrite. Something i run into a lot in my writing, and i dont say this to give nasty racial feelings to people, because i dont think thats exactly what it is. But what conservatives used it say about blacks and latinos and we now say about white and whites are upset about this. What you say about inner city is also applied to places like where im from and where jd is from. And the people who live there dont like that much. And who blames them . We should remember that also the black people and brown people didnt like it either and they dont vote for republicans for a lot of reasons. So i dont think that people will ever welcome that sort of criticism themselves. And of course it is easier to make cri