Its a Great American play that could only have been written here at that particular time when things were popping all over the place. And it covers a wide range of topics, but it does so with the human characters. Ive never, i havent done a style like this since i was in college doing a restoration piece. Its different from anything ive ever done and im so glad i was asked on board because its a challenge, its a challenge night nightly. We concluded with Alexandra Lebenthal and dr. Michael kaplitt for a new treatment for tremor. I was many able to tell people like this how often in ones life does somebody have the ability to change other peoples lives. Im so grateful and honored to have that opportunity. Rose hillbilly elegy, the front page and a new medical treatment when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by the following and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose j. D. Vance was here raised in the appalachian town of jackson, kentucky. After high school he joined the marine, graduated from yale law school. He went on to success in the Financial Community. His new book tells the story of his remarkable trajectory. It offers an examination of White Working Class america. Its called hillbilly elegy, a memoir of a family and culture in crises. David brooks calls it essential reading for this moment in history. Im pleased to have j. D. Vance at this table for the first time. Welcome. Thank you. Rose you should have been here earlier so thank god weve got you here. Tell me what drove you to write this. So i started writing it as a third year student in law school and why there was no more people like me at yale law school. I was the only working white class person i knew or at least was open about it and it seemed to me not just that i was relatively low income relative to my peers but that i had this sort of cultural outsider attitude that was very very unique. That i was not just lower income but i actually felt like a cultural outsider. That was is first time i ever felt like that in my life so i started to wonder what was it that made me different. And i decided to start writing to answer this question of why there werent more kids like me, more kids who lived a charmed life. Rose did you feel like you were living in a world where people looked down at you or something because you were qualified to be where you were at every stage. Absolutely. I never felt people were looking down at me at yale law school. I felt there was a general sense of disdain from the community i came from. Some folks would call it redneck but i never felt it was personally directed at me. Rose so you decided to write the book. You said you started to think about where you came from its called a memoir of a family and culture in crises. What cultures in crises. Well i think the culture is White Working Class americans, specifically White Working Class americans with connections to appalachian. What i started to research and realize is a lot of problems that existed in my families existed in the Broader Community at large in a very disproportionate way. Rose what were those problems. Increasing rates of family break down and support. Opioid addiction. Pessimism and sinnism about the future that is very real a learned helplessness about peoples future prospect. Rose did you have a feeling of being a victim. Its partially a failure of being a victim. Its not an individual failure i think it comes down to the communities and neighborhoods we were raised in and the attitudes we acquired. Rose you acquired them from the neighborhood. What is it you acquired from the neighborhood. I think one of the things you acquire is a sense that your choices dont necessarily matter. And so whats happened obviously is that the industrial economys been very tough on these areas. So i dont think we should allay that. But in combination with that really tough economic circumstances, people start to give up and start to think no matter what they do, they get ahead and i think thats pretty destructive attitude. Rose this is what david brooks wrote on june 28. Anyone who spends time in working class of america and one presumes brittens notice contagious of drugs and suicide, pessimistal and resentment part arises from deindustrialization. Good jobs are hard to find but hardship is not exactly new to these places. Like in coal valley made it hardship to say i may not have made a lot of money but people can count on me im a good person, loyal, tough and part of a could good community. We know what that working class honor code was but if you want a refresher read j. D. Vances new book. History. Thats the point i want to come to, this moment in history. Do you think in this book, we understand some of the feelings that are driving this president ial election . Yes. I think thats definitely true. I mean one of the thing thats really driving attraction to donald trump is not any special quality of donald trump himself, but of the fact that folks feel very resentful at the media establishment, the political establishment, the financial establishment and so forth. One of the things i really started to recognize as a teen ager is that folks are very cynical, pessimistic and sort of alienated from the Broader Community thats one of the things i wrote about. I didnt quite think it would be taken but im not surprised. Rose you felt alienated because what. Its a combination of the fact that their communities themselves arent going especially well. We talk about the addiction crises, family break down andal all of these indicators that dont look very good breafdz frustration and yourself and perceive that people dont care about your problems. You feel youre not dugas specially well and the elite do not care, not that they dont care but they condescend, they look down at people like you because of the way you live your life. Rose why. I think it actually did affect me in a lot of ways; based on my grades and drugs i would not have had a success 2368 life. Part of the story is the exploration for what changed in that life. Rose what changed. The first thing is i started to spend a lot more time, in fact i started to live full time with my grandma and my grand mauve was a very classic hard working self reliable woman who recognized life was unfair but need sure i didnt think the deck was stacked against me even if i recognize some structural inequalities. Rose how did she do that. One, she preached a very tough message, right. So i remember when i was a kid, she bought me a really nice graphing calculator for one of my advanced math classes. But she said if im going to work hard and buy this for you, that meant i had to work hard and study at school. She preached a very tough message. She made sure i took my studies seriously and knew the culture around me had a sort of message that maybe my choices didnt matter and she fought against that. Rose you went from high school to the marines. Thats right. I joined the marine right out of high school and this is right after we invaded iraq. Rose did you do that out of patriotism or other reasons. I was very patriotic like other kids in high neighborhood but it was recognition i wasnt ready for life after high school. I remember puzzling through the financial aids form after i had gotten into ohio state where i eventually went. I didnt know what to do and i was sort of scared by it and i thought the marine corps gave me four years to shape up. Rose did it. It definitely did. The great thing about the marine corps is that they really force you to shape up. I like to describe it as a four year Character Education because they teach you not just you know how to iron a uniform but they ach you about financial management, they teach you how to make your bed, they teach you a lot of the skill sets you need to be a successful adult. Rose part of the conventional wisdom about that, in terms of commentary that leads pele to be so excited about your book is youre giving them a key to understanding. And everybody wants it because it is a dramatic political component in the president ial election of 2016. And theyre saying to people, where is the dialogue between politicians, where is the dialogue between the establishment and the people were talking about. Because, because everybody gets, when theres a comment like Hillary Clinton made about desperates, that offends people. Sure. Rose when donald trump says something it seems to have contempt for people, it offends them. I wonder how much dialogue is there really taking place in trying to in a sense listen and communicate. And not just use for political needs. Yeah. So i think there is precious little dialogue between these two big cultural segments of america. Sort of Middle America fly over country whatever you want to call it. Donald trump has become their sort of representative and theyre very proud. Rose and the trouble in pennsylvania in 2008. Sure for saying folks cling to their guns and religion which i think was a wellintentioned comments. He mentioned folks were struggling economically and that was his explanation but layered with a certain amount of called sention. Awe sults dont cling to things you might have said it a much different way and i dont think the comment would have had nearly the effect it did if he had said it in a much more compassionate way. Rose how do we change this. Thats a really tough question. I continue to think one of the big problems, one of the big sources of this Cultural Divide is fact people arent spending much time together. When my wife of indian descent was born in san diego i was horrified my family were elitists. The truth is they love each other and thats a small example. When people spend time with each other, theres contact theory when people from different groups spend time with each other they empathize with each other at a much greater extent. Its the consequence we have too much geographic segregation between the elites and the rest of the country. At the end of the day if youre a policy maker in washington d. C. , you know very little about the people in middle town ohio not because youre a bad person but because you dont spend much time with them. Rose one thing people resonates is donald trump says hes the leader of is opposition to quote, globalization. An opposition to trade. How they see that as sort of friends of the establishment, whichever strained them by taking the manufacturing out of their small town and sending it overseas and theyre left there with the same life they had, with no of course and trying to figure out a way to live a good life. Right. Yes, thats absolutely right. And work isnt just about a wage, right. Its not just about of course, its about building something thats belonging to a community of workers. Grandpa, to the pay he died en made with steel from thead steel mill he worked at. We built that car. That pride started to disappear because the cars started to disappear. Rose do the people you write about feel like they are victims. I think in a lot of way they feel like theyre victims, victimized by the political class, they see the jobs going overseas and they want to blame somebody right. And often times the only person it makes sense to point their finger at is the local representative or congressman or attracted to donald trump is whether you are pessimistic or optimistic about the future. Thats right. Rose if youre pessimistic about the future youll vote for donald trump. Thats right. One of the biggest drivers of trumps support is expressing cynicism about the future. Rose his voice is to every time he makes a campaign stop. Absolutely. Rose cynicism is appropriate. Absolutely. Rose for those people dont care. You think about the slogan make America Great again. The implication is america isnt great right now and if youre very unhappy about your life thats going to resonate. Rose do you think this is a large number of people . Do you think this is enough people to elect donald trump . No, i dont think its a large enough people to elect donald trump. Obviously the democrats for the country has changed a lot and the working Class Community is a big part of the electorate and will not let donald trump alone. My fear is i dont think donald trump is not the right candidate for this group of voters. Rose who would have been. Well, i dont know that there was a single candidate who really appealed to these voters in a way that one inspired them, and two, actually had a set of policies that would have been good for them either on the democratic or the republican side. Part of the problem with this election is in fact i think the problems that are unique to some of these working class communities dont get a lot of attention and maybe hopefully the book will raise Peoples Awareness a little bit. Rose they feel strongly about patriotism, they feel strongly about national service. And they feel strongly about the american military. Sure. Rose because they have been the backbone of those people lieu have gone to war. When you think of the demographics of the u. S. Military more likely to be republicans, likely working middle class not destitute or wealth. That is Donald Trumps core group of supports right there. Rose politicians have speculated about this. To unite the poor with a broad brush with the latino poor because of race and culture differences and other things. Because thats a powerful coalition. You saw with Bernie Sanders certainly reaching out to those people who thought they wanted something different. Sure. Rose and had a special appeal to melennials. Right. You know, i mean i dont know if the problem is so much that its actually really hard to unite these different groups into a coalition of voters. I think its probably, i think its a Winning Coalition and its possible i just dont think many people have actually tried. If you think of the Republican Party rhetoric, it is almost designed to turn off black voters. Rose in fact, thats what happened in the south. Exactly. Rose the politicians used, in a sense used race to prevent. Yes. And its unfortunate that we dont have the counter factuals right. I wish we had tried to do something differently and we might be sitting right here saying isnt it great we have a fantastic American Political Party appealing to the concerns of both white and black poor. Unfortunately we dont. We have a party thats primarily White Working Class and very little else these days and we have a party that is the black poor and the latino poor and sort of the cosmopolitan middle and upper classes of all races. Rose and pervaded wisdom is their bitter. If you look at the polls thats probably true. Rose what impact do you think this elections having on this country other than a sense of disdain for the tenor of it. I think that this election is really having a negative effect especially on the White Working Class. Because i think a lot of these grievances are legitimate but what its doing is giving people an excuse to point the finger a someone else. Point the finger at mexican immigrants or chinese trade or the democratic elites or whatever else. Sometimes these villains are legitimate. I think its totally fair to say the policy elites of the Democratic Party havent been totally concerned about the White Working Class but at the same time fundamentally whats going on and what donald trump has done is change the focus of the White Working Class from a sort of engaged and constructive politics to a politics of pointing the finger. Rose someone on this program jeff green field said Hillary Clinton, he worked with bobby kennedy, john lindsay and others said that what Hillary Clinton should do now is she should go to these working class communities and perhaps she is. But go to them and say i may not get your vote but i wont you to know im listening and i want you to know that if i win and even dont get your vote im coming back. To give them some sense to be able to believe that somebody heading for washington if she is indeed heading for washington is taking enough time to try to hear what the problems are. Sure. I think it would be an extraordinarily constructive addition to our politics because at the end of the day if people only focus on those who they think are going to vote for them well have an increasing polarized electorate. I think there could be a National Constituency in the White Working Class. They voted for bill clinton in overwhelming numbers. So its not to me, its not so much an ideological opposition to either the democratic or the republican elite. Its a sense that people just dont care about those like you. Rose exactly right, they dont care. Exactly. And that feeling unfortunately if you think about the political dialogue that were already starting to have, both on the left and the right, theres a movement to sort of gloat over the fact that the elites were right about donald trump, right. Im a never trump guy, i never liked him but i noticed this willingness from people who think a lot like i do that look we told you so. To all these White Working Class voters we told you so, we told you that trouble was going to be a terrible candidate. We told you were an idiot if you voted for him. The problem is if you take that attitude as sort of gloating over trumps defeat then youre playing into the very thing that gave rise to trump in the first place which is a feeling that the elites think they are smarter than you and just think youre a bunch of idiots. Rose whatmpact has writing this book had on you other than the fact that it made you think deeply about where you came from and what impact and understanding of your own community might make. Yeah. Well for the first time it exposed me to the wild world of internet trolls who criticize everything that you do. Absolutely. Its very interesting. The internet is a deny den of vipers. It sort of forced