J. D. Vance

Church attendance rates among white Americans without a college education have dropped pretty significantly. People with college degrees are more likely to go to church than people without college degrees among the white working class.

It's not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don't recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.

There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

The increasing segregation we have in our country geographically and culturally has led to these pretty monolithic views of different classes of people, and because of that, we've lost a certain amount of cultural cohesion.

The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world's finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting.

For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices - and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group.

I have been waiting for someone to come along and tap into that very real frustration that exists in a very large segment of the working-class Republican base. And no one had done it until Donald Trump. I very clearly saw a void, and I knew somebody would fill it. And the moment I knew he had filled it, I knew he would win the nomination.

Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world's money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.

Policies that promote better wages and better jobs would be super-helpful, and I'm a big fan of programs that encourage people to go where jobs are.

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn't know how the world of the American elite works.

The subsidy for employer-sponsored coverage has tethered health care to employment in a way that virtually no economist endorses.

I think running a small nonprofit to work on the opioid crisis and bring interesting new businesses to the so-called Rust Belt - all of these things are valuable, if not more valuable, than running for office.