Until very recently, J.D. Vance was the toast of the town, at least among centrist liberals and centrist conservatives. In 2016, his book Hillbilly Elegy was hailed both as an eye-opening portrait of the white working class and as an explanation for Donald Trump’s rise. Vance’s politics were those of a Never Trump conservative who could offer a deeper understanding into the new right wing populism. In doing so, he seemed to be offering a path forward that would allow Trumpism to be rejected.
But now Vance has undergone a seeming transformation. Running for the Republican senatorial nomination in Ohio, he’s cast himself as pure Trumpist.
Writing in The Bulwark, Mona Charen expressed the displease felt by Never Trump conservatives and shared by many centrist liberals:
Vance is an extremely bright and insightful man who could have been a fresh voice for a fundamentally conservative view of the world.
But a funny thing happened after the introduction of J.D. Vance, anti-Trump voice of the working class. He began to drift into the Trump camp. I don’t know why or how, but Vance became not a voice for the voiceless but an echo of the loudmouth. Scroll through his Twitter feed and you will find retweets of Tucker Carlson, alarmist alerts about immigration, links to Vance’s appearances on the podcasts of Seb Gorka, Dinesh D’Souza, and the like, and even retweets of Mike Cernovich. On February 16, he tweeted “I still can’t believe the 45th president of the United States has no access to social media, and the left—alleged opponents of corporate power—is just totally fine with it.”
Has Vance really gone through a radical transformation? Or were the seeds of his current radicalism already there in the start?
Sarah Jones of New York magazine has long been a Vance skeptic, writing in The New Republic a rare critical review of Hillbilly Elegy. Her more recent writings on Vance have been no less scathing. I’ve long appreciated Sarah’s insights into Vance and politics in general, so I took the opportunity to ask what she thinks about the evolution of his career. In our discussion Sarah & I touch on this interesting Washington Post profile of Vance by Simon van Zuylen-Wood.
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