J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J.D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.
Both versions suggest the protagonist of a 19th-century novel—Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Lucien in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. A novelist who set out to narrate the decline of the American empire in the 21st century might invent a protagonist like J. D. Vance. He turns up in all the key places, embodying every important theme. He’s the product of an insular subculture (the Scots-Irish of Appalachian Kentucky) and grows up amid the ills (poverty, addiction, family collapse) of a dying Ohio steel town ravaged by deindustrialization. He escapes into the Marine Corps in time for the Iraq War, and then into the dubious embrace of the cognitive meritocracy (Yale Law School, West Coast venture capital, East Coast media). At a turning point in his life and the country’s—in 2016, with the surprise success of Hillbilly Elegy and then the surprise victory of Trump—Vance becomes a celebrity, the anointed spokesman for the 40 percent of the country that comprises the white working class, which has sudden political power and cultural interest. He’s tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined.
With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he’d found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe.
At every step the reader wonders: Is our hero motivated by conviction, or is he the creature of a corrupt society? Does he deserve our admiration, our sympathy, or our contempt?
Still only 40, Vance is likelier than anyone to be the next president. (The biggest obstacle, for several reasons, is Trump himself.) His rise has been so dramatic and self-dramatized that he calls to mind those emblematic figures from history who seem both out of a storybook and all too human, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Huey Long. In the end, the question of Vance’s character—whether his about-face was “authentic”—is probably unanswerable. Few people are capable of conscious, persistent self-betrayal. A change that begins in opportunism can become more passionate than a lifelong belief, especially when it’s rewarded. Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face.
What’s more important than Vance’s motive is the meaning of the story in which he’s the protagonist. More than any other public figure of this century, including Barack Obama (to whom his career bears some similarities), and even Trump, Vance illuminates the larger subject of contemporary America’s character. In another age, his rise might have been taken as proof that the American dream was alive and mostly well. But our age has no simply inspiring and unifying tales, and each chapter of Vance’s success is part of a national failure: the abandonment of American workers under global neoliberalism; the cultural collapse of the working class; the unwinnable forever war; a dominant elite that combines ruthless competition with a rigid orthodoxy of identity; a reaction of populist authoritarianism. What seems like Vance’s tragic wrong turn, the loss of real promise, was probably inevitable—it’s hard to imagine a more hopeful plot. After all, the novel is about a society in which something has gone deeply wrong, all the isms have run dry, and neither the elites nor the people can escape blame.
The power of Vance’s story depends on the image of a hick struggling to survive and escape, then navigating the temptations and bruises of ascent. At the start of his memoir he describes himself as an ordinary person of no real accomplishment who avoided becoming a grim statistic only by the grace of his family’s love. This self-portrait shows the early appearance of Vance the politician, and it’s belied by the testimony of people who knew him. Friends from the Marine Corps and Yale described to me an avid reader, confident and well-spoken, socially adept, almost universally liked—an extraordinary young man clearly headed for big things. (Vance himself declined to be interviewed for this article.)
As an enlisted Marine, Vance worked in public affairs, which meant that he saw no combat in Iraq during some of the most violent years of the war. Instead, he acquired a sense of discipline and purpose in a fairly cloistered milieu. He was already interested in political philosophy, and on the sprawling Al-Asad air base, in Anbar province, Vance and a close friend discussed Jefferson and Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Christopher Hitchens and the “new atheists,” even Locke and Hobbes. He was also a conservative who revered John McCain and was, the close friend joked, the only one on the base who wasn’t disappointed when a mystery visitor turned out to be Dick Cheney rather than Jessica Simpson. But Vance began to have doubts about the war before he ever set foot in Iraq. In a chow hall in Kuwait, officers on their way home to the States described the pointless frustration of clearing Iraqi cities that immediately fell again to insurgents. The ghost of Vietnam had not been vanquished by the global War on Terror.
“I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” Vance wrote years later. “I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.” Whether that ideology was called neoconservatism or liberal interventionism, its failure in Iraq led in a straight line to a new ideology that was also old: “America First.” On foreign policy Vance has been pretty consistent for two decades. When, while running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, he remarked, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” you could hear the working-class Iraq vet taking a shot at elites who send others to bleed for abstractions and are indifferent to the human collapse of Middletown, Ohio.
“America First” wasn’t the only available response to disillusionment with Iraq. Other veterans who’d entered politics—Dan Crenshaw, Jason Crow, Tammy Duckworth, Seth Moulton—continued to be concerned about human suffering and the fate of democracy abroad. Nor have they abandoned liberal democracy for blood-and-soil nationalism. Vance is a politician with an unusual interest in ideas and a combative nature fed by an old wound. The combination makes him capable of going a long way down an ideological road without paying attention to the casualties around him.
Raised loosely evangelical, Vance became a libertarian atheist in his 20s—the stance of many smart, self-taught young men of the aughts in search of totalizing positions that could win mostly online arguments. “I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic,” he wrote years later. “There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually.” Both Rand and Hitchens took him away from the community of his upbringing—from a poor white culture of non-churchgoing Christians whose identification with the Republican Party had nothing to do with tax cuts. Libertarianism and atheism were respectable worldviews of the new culture that Vance badly wanted to enter.
“I became interested in secularism just as my attention turned to my separation from the Marines and my impending transition to college. I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil,” he would write in 2020, after his conversion to Catholicism. “Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to join the elites, but it sure made things easier.” This ability to socialize himself into new beliefs set a pattern for his career.
Vance took just two years to graduate from Ohio State, and in 2010 he was accepted by Yale Law School. Entering the Ivy League put him through what the sociologist J. M. Cuddihy called “the ordeal of civility”—repression of one’s class or ethnic background in the effort to assimilate to the ways of a dominant culture. As Vance later wrote, he had to get used to the taste of sparkling water, to learn that white wine comes in more than one variety. In an earlier time, the dominant group would have been the WASPs. In the early 21st century, it was a liberal multiethnic meritocracy for which a Yale law degree opened the way to power.
In this world, there was nothing odd about a descendant of several centuries of native-born white Christian Americans taking as his “Yale spirit guide” the daughter of Hindu immigrants from India. The route to New Haven is in some ways shorter from Andhra Pradesh than from the hills of eastern Kentucky. What counts is class, and class is largely a matter of education and credentials. Usha Chilukuri had all the right qualities to civilize Vance: raised in a stable, high-achieving family of California academics; Phi Beta Kappa at Yale College; master’s degree from Cambridge University; even-tempered, politically opaque, hyper-organized, mapping out her work and life with Vance on Post-it notes, whiteboards, and spreadsheets. When Vance’s friend from the Marines visited New Haven, Usha told them both that they’d done a good job of “course correcting” their lives. In Vance’s memoir she’s a kind of life coach, counseling him to unlearn hillbilly codes and habits—helping him talk through difficult subjects without losing his temper or withdrawing, expressing pride when he resists going after another driver who flips him off in traffic.
Hillbilly Elegy—both book and film—makes much of a scene in which Vance is so baffled by the complicated tableware at a Yale dinner with recruiters from a white-shoe law firm that he has to leave the room and call Usha for guidance. “Go from outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes,” she tells him. “Oh, and use the fat spoon for soup.” The picture of a raw youth going from outside to inside with the help of his super-striver girlfriend is a little misleading. “I never got the sense that he was worse off because he hadn’t gone to Yale or Harvard, just because he was so well-spoken,” a law-school friend of Vance’s and Chilukuri’s told me. “He was intriguing to Usha, and to the rest of us too.” Being a chubby-faced working-class Marine from the Midwest might have brought cultural disadvantages, but it also conferred the buoyant charisma of a young man who made it out. Regardless of place settings, Vance quickly mastered the essential Ivy League art of networking. Classmates picked him out early on as a political leader.
Everyone who met Vance in those years seems to have been impressed. He didn’t have to put on Ivy League airs, or wave a hillbilly flag, or win sympathy by reciting the saddest chapters of his childhood. He kept stories of his abusive mother and her checked-out partners almost entirely to himself—a close friend was surprised by the dark details of his memoir—but he didn’t cut himself off from his past. He watched Ohio State football every Saturday with another Buckeye at Yale, and he remained close to his sister, Lindsay, and to friends from his hometown and the Marine Corps.
In the early 2010s, when he began to publish short articles on David Frum’s website FrumForum and in National Review, they were mainly concerned with the lack of social mobility in the working class. His voice was perfectly tuned to a moderate conservatism, strengthened by his authentic origin in heartland hardship—skeptical of government programs for the poor, but with a sense of responsibility to the place he came from. I’m making it, he said, and so can they if they get the right support. In an early essay, from 2010, he defended institutions like Yale Law School against a rising right-wing populism that saw a country “ruled by perniciously alien elites.” This burn-it-down politics was a luxury that poor people couldn’t afford. His “political hero,” according to Hillbilly Elegy, was Mitch Daniels, the centrist Republican governor of Indiana. His choice for president in 2012 was Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and ambassador to China, who made Mitt Romney seem a bit extreme.
Vance planned to write a policy book about the problems of the white working class. But when he came under the wing of the professor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, who fostered his relationship with Usha and recommended him for coveted jobs, she urged him to write the story of his life.
At the end of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes a recurring nightmare, going back to childhood, in which he’s pursued by a terrifying antagonist, a “monster”—in at least one dream his unstable mother. While he was at Yale she became addicted to heroin, and he later had to drive to Ohio to keep her from ending up homeless. The nightmare returned just after he graduated—but this time the creature being chased is his dog, Casper, and the enraged pursuer is Vance. At the last moment he stops himself from hurting his beloved pet, saved by his own capacity for self-reflection. The dreamer wakes to a bedroom filled with all the signs of his happy new life. But the past is still alive, and the nightmare leaves a haunting insight: “I was the monster.”
Reading the book today is like the reversal of roles in Vance’s dream. The earnest, sensitive narrator of Hillbilly Elegy sounds nothing like the powerful politician who sneers at “childless cat ladies,” peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X. Vice President Vance is the pursuer. So it’s a little disorienting to return to Hillbilly Elegy and spend a few hours in the presence of a narrator who can say: “I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people portrayed. For there are no villains in this story.”
As a writer, Vance passes the most important test in a work of this kind: He’s honest enough to show himself in an unfavorable light—hotheaded, cowardly, often just sad. He’s wary of any simple lessons or wholly satisfying emotions. He loves his family and community, but he is unsparing about their self-destructive tendencies. He rejects the politics of tribal grievance and ostentatious piety that now defines the populist right. If the book has a message, it’s the need to take responsibility for your own life while understanding the obstacles and traps that blight the lives of others—to acknowledge the complex causes of failure without giving in to rage, self-pity, or despair. “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government,” Vance warned, “and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
It’s not a message to impress the MAGA mind. The author’s nuanced analysis and policy ideas might well make Vice President Vance retch. In countless interviews and talks related to his New York Times No. 1 best seller, Vance spoke movingly about his childhood, criticized the low standards that both right and left impose on his people, and offered no easy answers for their desperate lives, only a kind of moral appeal to self-betterment and community that sounded like the centrist commentary of David Brooks. In his open-collar shirt and blazer, with smooth cheeks and boyish blue eyes, a fluent delivery and respectful responses, Vance appeared to be living proof that the meritocracy could take a self-described hillbilly and make him one of its own, creating an appealing celebrity with an important message for comfortable audiences about those left behind.
So Hillbilly Elegy is a problem for right-wing populists—and also for Trump opponents who now loathe Vance, because it takes an effort not to sympathize with the book’s young hero and admire the eloquence of its author. By 2020, when Ron Howard’s movie was released, at the end of Trump’s first term, critics who might have turned to the book for insight had soured on the white working class, and they excoriated the film. (Tellingly, it was far more popular with the general public.) By then it was no longer possible to have an honest response to a book or movie across political battle lines. Hillbilly Elegy, published four months before the 2016 election, came out at the last possible moment to shape a national conversation. It belongs to an era that no longer exists.
Other than learning how elites get ahead, Vance made little use of his law degree. He spent a year clerking for a Kentucky judge, and less than a year at a corporate firm in D.C. Even at Yale he knew that practicing law didn’t interest him. What he later called “the most significant moment” of his law-school years was a talk in 2011 by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. I spent time with Thiel for a magazine profile that year, so I’m familiar with the pessimism of his thinking: America is going through a period of prolonged stagnation; supposedly revolutionary digital technologies like the iPhone and social media have turned out to be trivial, while chronic problems in the physical world—transportation, energy, bioscience—haven’t improved; and this lack of dynamism drives elites like the ones in Thiel’s audience to compete furiously for a dwindling number of prestigious but ultimately meaningless jobs.
This analysis of a soulless meritocracy in a decadent society held more than intellectual interest for Vance. Thiel was describing what Vance had already begun to feel about his new life among the credentialed: “I had prioritized striving over character,” Vance later wrote. “I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.” The talk gave an abstract framework for the psychological conflicts besetting a refugee from decline: burning ambition, and the char of guilt it leaves; longing for elite acceptance and resentment of elite disdain (the professor who scoffed at state-school education, the classmate who assumed that Marines must be brutes); what Vance called the “reverse snobbery” that a poor boy from flyover country feels toward the Yale snobs who know about butter knives while he alone confronts a belligerent drunk at the next table in a New Haven bar. In an interview with Rod Dreher of The American Conservative upon the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance said, “It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.” He added, “But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.”
Elite anti-elitism—contempt from a position of strength, the ability to say “Thanks but fuck you”—offered a way out of the conflicts. This was the first of many gifts from Thiel, and Vance would go on to indulge it every bit as destructively as his new mentor could wish. But not yet. He was still hard at work earning his credentials and preparing to enjoy their fruits.
The author of Hillbilly Elegy could only have a complex view of Donald Trump: an intuitive grasp of his appeal for people in Middletown, and horror at his effect on them. In an essay for this magazine published just a few weeks after the memoir, in the summer of 2016, Vance called Trump “cultural heroin”—the most apt metaphor possible. Trump was an overwhelmingly tempting drug that brought relief from pain but inevitably led to self-destruction, enabling all the ills—resentment, bigotry, coarseness, delusional hope—of a white working class in rapid decay. Shortly before the election, Vance warned that a refusal by Trump to accept its results would further alienate his supporters from politics, saying he hoped Trump “acts magnanimous.” Late on Election Night, when Trump’s shocking victory appeared imminent, ABC News, suddenly in need of an authority on Trump voters, pulled Vance from Yahoo News into its main studio as a native informant. “What are they looking for from Donald Trump?” George Stephanopoulos asked. “What do they want tangibly?” Vance replied that they wanted a change in direction, and that if Trump failed to bring one, there would be “a period of reckoning.” Then he added with a slight smile: “I do think that folks feel very vindicated now, right? They believed in their man. They felt like the media didn’t believe in their man.”
What did Vance believe in?
Trump’s win brought the author of Hillbilly Elegy to new prominence as a national voice. It also placed a roadblock directly in the path of his ambitions. He had identified himself as a Never Trump conservative, privately wondered if Trump was “America’s Hitler,” and voted for neither major-party candidate. Suddenly the establishment that had embraced him and elevated him beyond his dreams could no longer offer means of ascent. Just about everyone who knew Vance assumed he intended to enter politics, but the Daniels-Huntsman-Romney species of Republican was halfway to extinction.
In January 2017, a week after Trump’s inauguration, a group of about a dozen conservatives—adherents of “reform conservatism,” a modernizing, more inclusive strain that took seriously issues such as inequality and the environment—gathered with Vance at the Washington offices of the Hoover Institution to advise him on his political future. These were policy intellectuals who had encouraged and validated young Vance. They discussed what their agenda should be now that a Republican few, if any, of them had supported was president. Were there positive aspects to be gleaned from Trump’s populism on issues like immigration? How far should Vance go to accommodate himself to the cultural-heroin president? One thing was certain: The people in the room were already losing their value to Vance.
A week later, on February 3, he spoke about Hillbilly Elegy and Trump at David Axelrod’s Institute of Politics, in Chicago. He gave one of his most thoughtful performances, trying to tie the unraveling threads of the country back together, urging his audience to see the common ground between working-class Black and white Americans, arguing that both the cultural left and the racist alt‑right represented a small number of mostly coastal elites. But he also made a startling claim about Trump that he would return to in the coming months and years: “If you go to one of his rallies, it’s maybe 5 percent him being really outrageous and offensive, and 95 percent him talking about ‘Here are all the things that are wrong in your community, here’s why they’re wrong, and I’m going to bring back jobs.’ That was the core thesis of Trump’s entire argument.”
Never mind the tone, Vance was saying, it’s trivial—pay attention to the content. But his percentages weren’t remotely accurate, and he was ignoring the inextricable bond between inflammatory language and extreme policies that held Trump’s speeches together and thrilled his crowds: What’s wrong in your community is them. Vance, too intelligent not to sense the hollow core of his claim, was taking a step toward Trump.
He also informed his audience that he was moving back to Ohio.
According to a classmate, while still in law school Vance had gotten in touch with Thiel, who extended an open invitation to come see him in Silicon Valley. After graduation, marriage to Usha, and short stints in the legal profession, he moved to San Francisco and, in 2016, started working at Thiel’s venture-capital firm Mithril. But technology investing seemed to hold little more interest for him than corporate law. What excited him was politics and ideas. Thiel was preparing to endorse Trump and was mounting a radical attack on America’s sclerotic and corrupt institutions—universities, media, corporations, the regulatory state. His rhetoric became extreme, but his goals remained vague. Trump was an experiment: Thiel wanted to blow things up and see what happened, and if it all went wrong he could move to New Zealand, where he’d invested millions of dollars and acquired citizenship. The alliance between Thiel (monopoly advocate, cognitive elitist, believer in supermen, admirer of the antidemocratic thinkers Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss) and Vance (son of the common people, who get screwed when things go wrong and have no way out) shows that reactionary populism is capacious enough to appeal to every resentment of the liberal status quo.
With prolonged exposure to the master class—the junkets in Aspen and Sun Valley—Vance collected disillusioning stories that would later help justify his political transformation: the tech CEO whose answer for the loss of purpose among displaced workers was “digital, fully immersive gaming”; the hotel mogul who complained that Trump’s anti-immigrant policy made it harder for him to find low-wage workers. One feels that these clueless capitalists, like the condescending Yalies of half a decade earlier, played a genuine role in Vance’s turn away from the establishment, but that he enlisted them disproportionately. Incidents like these provided a kind of indulgence that allowed him to feel that he wasn’t with the elites after all, wasn’t betraying his own people while explaining their pathologies over dinner to the superrich—a role that was becoming more and more distasteful—and under the table he and Usha could quietly signal to each other: We have to get the hell out of here. These people are crazy.
The Vances moved first to Columbus in 2017, then bought a mansion in Cincinnati the following year and filled it with children while they both pursued the extremely busy careers of the meritocracy. Vance explained his return to Ohio as a desire to give back to his troubled home region and help reverse its brain drain; his political ambitions went unmentioned. He announced the creation of a nonprofit to combat the opioid epidemic, but the group, Our Ohio Renewal, raised almost no money and folded before it had achieved much more than placing a couple of op-eds. He put more effort into funding regional start-ups with venture capital, but one of his biggest bets, an indoor-agriculture company in Appalachia, went bankrupt. With seed money from Thiel, in 2019 Vance co-founded his own firm, Narya Capital, and invested in the right-wing video-sharing platform Rumble and a prayer app called Hallow. Like Thiel’s Mithril Capital and big-data company, Palantir, the name Narya comes from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—a novel that obsesses a certain type of brainy conservative, particularly younger religious ones, with its hierarchical social order and apocalyptic battle between good and evil. As Vance turned away from classical liberalism, Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers gave way to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. That same year, he became a Roman Catholic.
Around Easter 2020 Vance published an essay about his conversion in the Catholic journal The Lamp. It describes a largely intellectual experience, informed by reading Saint Augustine and the literary critic René Girard, driven by disenchantment with the scramble for credentials and consumer goods, and slowed by his reluctance to embrace a form of Christianity that would have been alien to Mamaw, his late grandmother. He finally made up his mind when he “began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims.” Vance hoped that Catholicism would help him to care less about professional prestige, “let go of grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me.” However he is doing in private, it’s hard to see the hand of Catholic humility at work in his public life. His conversion anticipated a sharp turn in how he went about pursuing power, and it coincided with a wave of high-profile conservatives turning to religion. The essay was titled “How I Joined the Resistance.”
Vance didn’t give up his former beliefs all at once. It took him four years, from 2017 until 2021, to abandon one politics for another—to go from Never Trump to Only Trump. Compared with the overnight conversion experiences of innumerable Republicans, this pace seems admirably slow, and it probably reflects Vance’s seriousness about political ideas. He took time to make them intellectually coherent; then the moral descent was swift and total.
A close friend of Vance’s, another Ohioan, gave the most generous explanation of his political conversion. “His views have always been kind of rooted toward doing good for the working-class segment of America,” the friend told me. Progressives embraced an identity politics that placed Vance’s people somewhere near the bottom, and standard conservative policies hadn’t worked for them, especially on trade. In Ohio, Vance found that his people had become big Trump supporters. By 2018, the friend told me, Vance believed that Trump “was committed at least to doing the things he said and fixing the problems that J.D. also identified as problems”—the loss of jobs and decline of communities. In 2017 Vance had said that manufacturing jobs had been lost mainly to automation, and that protectionism wouldn’t bring them back. Before long he was blaming globalization, China, and the Republican donor class. “At that point J.D. realized he was very aligned with Trump on the issues,” the friend said.
In 2018, Vance told an acquaintance that he was thinking of voting for Trump in 2020. Onstage with Amy Chua that same year at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he said that people he knew in Ohio were angrier at Wall Street and Silicon Valley types than at ethnic- or religious-minority groups, and that Trump’s speeches, though “tinged with criticisms of Mexican immigrants or Muslims,” directed 85 percent of their vitriol at “coastal elites.” Another doubtful calculation—but it allowed Vance to align Trump’s more acceptable hostilities with those of his people and, by implication, his own. He wasn’t going to insult Mexicans and Muslims in front of an Aspen crowd, but the crowd itself was more than fair game.
The next year, at a pair of conservative conferences, Vance argued that libertarianism didn’t have the answer for what ails American parents and children, workers and communities. He championed a “pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American-nation conservatism,” and he said: “In my own life, I’ve felt the demons that come from a traumatic childhood melt away in the laughter and the love of my own son.” The policy implications weren’t entirely clear. He was against abortion, Facebook apps designed to addict children, pointless wars that got his Marine buddies killed, and CEOs who didn’t care about American workers and families; he was for mothers and kids. He ended one speech by saying, “Donald Trump has really opened up the debate on a lot of these issues, from foreign policy to health care to trade to immigration.”
By 2020 Vance had publicly turned away from the residue of Reaganism toward what came to be called “the new right,” “national conservatism,” or simply “populism.” In a sense, he was following the well-trod path of his generation of conservatives. The Republican establishment had failed, the reformers hadn’t amounted to much, the Never Trumpers had lost—here was the obvious alternative.
But what had Trump actually done for people in the postindustrial heartland? The fentanyl crisis raged on, manufacturing job growth remained anemic, and the president’s main achievement—a tax cut—benefited corporations and billionaires far more than the working class. Vance knew all of this, and in early 2020 he wrote to one correspondent: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” But the political winds had turned, and now he massaged his public remarks about Trump into vague approval while keeping his criticism private. Vance was getting ready to enter politics.
The generous account of Vance’s political conversion contains some truth. It still fails to explain what followed.
A change in his view of tariffs didn’t require Vance to go to Mar-a-Lago with Peter Thiel in early 2021 to seek the disgraced ex-president’s forgiveness, then start and never stop repeating the very lie about a stolen election that he had warned against in 2016. In moving away from the Enlightenment and globalist neoliberalism, he could have stopped at the reactionary writer Christopher Caldwell or the post-liberal scholar Patrick Deneen. He didn’t need to spend 90 minutes schmoozing with an alt-right podcaster and rape apologist who goes by Jack Murphy (his real name is John Goldman), insisting ominously: “We are in a late-republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Vance could have run for the Senate as a populist without maligning half his compatriots—liberals, immigrants, women without children—as hostile to America. He could have become a father without devoting a speech to mocking the “childless left.” The Catholic Church didn’t command him to stop caring about human beings in other countries, or to value Israel more than Ukraine because most Americans are Christian and Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not Kyiv. He could have turned away from his Ivy League credentials after they stopped being useful without declaring war on higher education and calling professors “the enemy.” He could have put aside his law degree and still held on to what it taught him about judicial independence and due process.
After 2020 the prevailing politics on the right was apocalyptic, vituperative, and very online. Vance, ever skilled at adaptation, went with it all the way. If, as his patron Thiel argued, the country was under the control of a totalitarian, brain-dead left, almost any form of resistance was justified. When Vance argued that “the culture war is class warfare,” he was giving himself license to stigmatize large groups of Americans and flout the rule of law as long as he did it in the name of an abstraction called the working class.
But Vance never got away from elites. He simply exchanged one set of benefactors for another—traded Yale professors and TED audiences and progressive Silicon Valley CEOs for the money and influence that came with Peter Thiel, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. One elite elevated him to justify their contempt for the working class; the other championed him in order to burn down the first. Vance is interesting not only because he changed camps and was talented enough to thrive in both, but because the camps themselves, out of the lesser sin of decadence or the greater sin of nihilism, have so little to offer the country.
Vance transformed himself into the fullest incarnation of the Trump reaction—fuller than Trump himself, because Vance is more intelligent and disciplined, less likely to wander and stop making sense. He willed this change on himself because he had a lot to atone for and he was in a hurry. It won him Trump’s blessing in 2022 in a U.S. Senate race that Vance was losing, which gave him the Republican nomination and the election, leading to his choice as vice president in 2024, which could make him Trump’s 44-year-old successor in 2028.
Vance’s political transformation is so complete that it’s also physical. In the film adaptation of the Vance novel, imagine a scene in which the protagonist’s features in 2016 dissolve into a very different face circa 2025. The round cheeks and pudgy chin are now hidden by the growth of a Trump Jr. beard. The blue eyes, no longer boyish, are flatter, and they smile less. And the voice, which used to have an almost apologetic tone, as if he wasn’t sure of his right to hold the stage, now carries a constant edge, a kind of taunt. He’s more handsome but less appealing, and the loss of appeal comes from the fact that, like the movement that now runs the country, he’s animated by what he hates.
Like Trump, Vance shows no interest in governing on behalf of anyone outside MAGA. But the various phases of his life story make him—and him alone—the embodiment of all the movement’s parts. In a speech in March at a business conference, he called himself a “proud member of both tribes” of the ruling coalition—meaning of the populists like Steve Bannon, and of the techno-futurists like Elon Musk. He discounted the likelihood that they’ll fall out, and he insisted that innovations such as artificial intelligence will benefit ordinary Americans, because—despite the evidence of the past half century—“it’s technology that increases the value of labor.” MAGA can’t breathe without an enemy, and workers and innovators have “the same enemy”: the government. But MAGA is now the government, and the contradictions between its populists and its oligarchs are obvious.
Vance’s transformation has another advantage besides the obvious one for his political prospects. When he grins slyly and says, “I’m gonna get in trouble for this” before launching an attack on some despised group, you can feel him shucking off constraints that he’s had to impose on himself since that recruitment dinner at Yale—or even earlier, since he was a boy in Middletown surviving the violence of adults. This more aggressive Vance has drawn closer to that hillbilly culture he long ago escaped. The vice president of the United States doesn’t let a challenge to his honor pass. He’s quick to anger, ready with a jibe, picks fights on social media, and brandishes insults such as “moralistic garbage” and “smug, self-assured bullshit.” He divides the world into kinfolk and enemies, with steadfast loyalty for those in the first category and suspicion or hostility for the great majority consigned to the second. He justifies every cruel policy, blatant falsehood, and constitutional breach by aligning himself with the unfairly treated people he grew up with, whether or not his administration is doing them any actual good. His idea of American identity has gone hard and narrow—not the encompassing creed of the founding documents, but the Appalachian dirt of the graveyard where his ancestors lie buried.
To succeed in the world of elites, Vance had to let himself be civilized, at a psychological cost. When that world no longer offered what he wanted, he found a new world of different elites. They lifted him to unimagined heights of power, and at the same time they brought him full circle, to a return of the repressed.
This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “The Talented Mr. Vance.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
*Lead–Image Sources: Stephen Maturen / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call / Getty.
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