32 - JD Vance - American Dreams and Nightmares: Difference between revisions

It is said that there is not one American dream but many, and few have lived more than [https://twitter.com/JDVance1 JD Vance]. Growing up in Appalachia on the border between poverty and the lower working class, JD knew economic fear first hand as well as the cultural devastation of the region's post-coal era. Working his way up, he joined the elite US Marine Corps and entered Yale University to attend the country's most exclusive law school. Not content to stop there, he found his way to Venture Capital in San Francisco while marrying into a multicultural relationship with a wife of Indian descent, herself supercharged with a dynamism informed by the classic immigrant experience.   

Eric and JD sit down to discuss the history of coal and politics, the evolving American Left in the era after the demise of organized labor. Through it they discuss the difficulty of finding out footing in the collision and disappointment of so many American dreams which all too frequently remain tantalizingly out of reach for the majority of those who dare to dream them.

So, I love picking up the thread of the American Dream because I'm a total believer in the American dream, and I more or less want to just fight anyone who wants to get in its way.

I think it has to do with the idea that the generations—first of all, let me say something controversial: I think that the baby boom takes a lot of heat for the Silent Generation. A lot of these problems began with the generation before the baby boomers. They tried to figure out how to save the world from stagnation and low growth. And when they couldn't do it, they started realizing, okay, well, these fake growth stimulus techniques are sufficient to grow certain slices of the pie at the expense of others, if not the entire pie. And the baby boomers just sort of signed on to that and made everything completely insane. The weird thing about the universes is that there was a cultural thing—all of these people go back and forth between different universes with different levels of endowments, right? So here's the weird thing. Choose any one of the great research universities. Without knowing it, which one you chose, it is almost certainly headed by a baby boomer, whereas in the 1970s and early 80s it would have probably a 50% chance of being headed by a Gen-Xer or a Millennial. So they changed the retirement age and you couldn't discriminate on the basis of age. So now almost all of these institutions are headed by baby boomers. Without knowing anything further, I can also say that almost all of them have had the number of administrators on payroll skyrocket above the number of new enrollments. Their tuitions have climbed above medical inflation, the number of old professors getting grants has climbed relative to the number of new professors getting grants. In other words, there's one superarching, overarching story, which is a story of intergenerational warfare. And the funniest part about it was that if you were part of the generation that had declared intergenerational warfare on the Gen-Xers and Millennials, and then now the Gen Z crowd, if anyone mentioned what you were doing, you would accuse them of intergenerational warfare. So my claim is, is that Harvard could afford to buck this trend. They could lead! You know, oddly, I think Ohio State, where you were, decided to lead against the protesters who showed up in the office, you know, and said something to the effect of, we understand that you feel very strongly about your views, and we're going to give you the right to go to jail for them. And you'll notice that there's no administrators, there's no office staff here because they've all gone home, because this is no longer a safe space for them. And by reading them the riot act, Ohio led the way, and Chicago led the way, saying, this is not a safe space. This is an educational institution. There are a tiny number of schools that are bucking this trend. Harvard could have been one of them, but Harvard doesn't believe enough in itself. And this is the thing that really makes me angry, which is there is a pride in believing in the United States. you know what I love about your story is how many American dreams have you lived, sir? There's one about the Marine Corps—