Today Terri Gross, “Fresh Air” host, conducted a 36-minute interview with J.D. Vance, author of the best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

Though Vance is no fan of Donald Trump and will never vote for him, having been born and raised in rural Ohio and Kentucky and still very much involved with his white friends and family there, Vance has an interesting take on the source of Trump’s support.

One story in particular is revealing. Concerning his grandmother, he reported:

She loved Tiger Woods. And the reason she liked Tiger Woods is because she saw him as an outsider that was shaking up a rich man’s game. And there was this really interesting moment where after he won – and the Masters always has this ceremonial winner’s dinner to celebrate the victor. One of the golfers said something to the effect of, what are we going to have at the winner’s dinner – fried chicken and watermelon, which, of course, was this extraordinarily nasty racist comment.

But it struck me at that moment, one, that that fried chicken and watermelon was almost the cultural food of my people, and my grandma just got so viscerally angry. And she said, those a-holes, they’re never going to let people like us be part of their crowd. And the sense that she had was they both looked down on the black people who were outsiders and the poor, white people who are outsiders. And she really saw the similarities. And that was the first real exposure that she felt some sort of kinship to people who looked very different from her but ultimately were similar in a lot of ways.

That story reminds me of how when I’d visit my father in Texas, the only political conversation we could have was about our shared anger at “the Rockefellers” and other “Yankee” elitists.

As Vance wrote, “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty’s the family tradition.”

In the interview, Vance said:

They’ve grown up with a certain resentment at rich people. But it also means that, for them, the upward mobility that a lot of folks experienced right after World War II was their first real taste of economic optimism, and I think that’s something that really gave them a lot of hope. And ultimately, as I write later in the book, that hope didn’t really materialize.

In describing an encounter with the courts, Vance said:

The honest truth is that I didn’t care at all about lying because I remember sitting in that courtroom and feeling in some ways that I was on the wrong side of an invisible line because the lawyers and the judge – they all talked a certain way. They all wore certain clothes. And I felt like they were outsiders.

They were the people that I was taught, in some way, to mistrust and to fear. They were rich people – whether they were actually rich – they seemed rich to me. And I noticed that in this little courtroom, all of the people who were subjected to the court system were like me. They were white people. They didn’t wear that nice of clothes.

They were obviously very poor, both in the way that they talked and the way that they conducted themselves. And when I was asked to lie to that judge, frankly, I didn’t feel bad at all because I knew that it was something that was necessary to protect my family and to protect myself.

And it’s really interesting, looking back, that I didn’t, you know – I’m a member of the bar now – that I didn’t feel at all guilty about lying to a judge. And a big part of it is just because I felt like – look, my people are here. And they’re being subjected to this system. These people are over there. And they’re administering this system. And it’s fine to tell a little white lie to them. And that’s, of course, a little ironic because I was there, theoretically, because of my own protection.

But it was pretty clear to me, both in my exposure to the courthouse and my exposure to the child welfare bureaucracy, that the folks who were involved in our lives were outsiders. And what was most important was to push them out as quickly as possible.

As Gross led the interview toward a discussion of the Presidential election, Vance said, “I saw a statistic a few weeks ago that in the Ohio county where I grew up, Butler County, deaths from drug overdoses actually outnumber deaths from natural causes…. And it’s just an extraordinarily terrible thing that’s happened to these communities.”

Vance argues that white poor people and working-class whites share a belief that the country is headed in the wrong direction, which breeds frustration at political elites. So Trump:

is in some ways a pain reliever. He’s someone who makes people feel a little bit better about their problems [because he] is recognizing some legitimate problems….

They don’t think that this guy is going to solve all their problems. They just think he’s at least trying and he’s saying things, primarily to the elites, that they wish they could say themselves. So it’s really interesting. There’s a recognition that Trump isn’t going to solve a lot of these problems, but he’s, at the end of the day, the only person really trying to tap into this frustration….

I certainly understand why a lot of folks are surprised [that an ostentatious billionaire can relate to those people]. I think a big part of it is just the way that Donald Trump conducts himself. A lot of people feel that you can’t trust anything Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama say, not because they necessarily lied a lot but because they sound so filtered and they sound so rehearsed. Donald Trump, if nothing else, is relatable to the average working-class American because he speaks off the cuff. He’s clearly unfiltered and unrehearsed.

And there is something relatable about that, even if, you know, half of the things that he says don’t make any sense or a quarter of the things that he says are offensive. There’s something to be said about relatability. And it’s not, you know – there’s been a lot written about how elite political conversation is not emotionally relatable to big chunks of the country. I think that in a lot of ways, Trump is just the first person to tap into that sense of disconnect in the way that he conducts himself with politics….

So I think that there are obviously a lot of things that are relatable about Hillary and Bill Clinton. But fundamentally, they’ve surrounded themselves by very elite people who went to very elite universities. And because of that, both in the way they conduct themselves and the things they seem to care about – they just seem very different from the people that I grew up around. And that makes it very hard for me to feel that Clinton – Hillary or Bill Clinton are very relatable.

That interview and yesterday’s with the author of White Trash strike me as incredibly important. If we are to build a powerful popular movement, our chances will be enhanced if we learn to set aside our harsh judgments.  Trump supporters are neither “ignorant” nor “indoctrinated.” In fact, we share with them a conviction that “the system is rigged” and an impatience with the incredibly slow pace of incremental progress envisioned by Obama, Clinton, and the Democrats.

Surely we can aim higher than that. If we do, we could find many more allies in rural America.