Who Does J.D. Vance Think He’s Fooling?

I am a fan of “Hillbilly Elegy”—even the movie!—but I can no longer admire the plutocratic fraud that its author has become.

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There’s an arresting scene in J.D. Vance’s moving 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance, a second-year student at Yale Law School, attends a dinner hosted by the white-shoe law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, in what he describes as the most expensive restaurant in which he’s ever eaten.

Vance is stricken with social anxiety when asked whether he’d prefer the Sauvignon Blanc or the Chardonnay, the sparkling water or the tap. After sitting down to a place setting with nine bewildering utensils, he makes a beeline for the men’s room to phone his girlfriend (and future wife), Usha, for advice. “Go from outside to inside,” she explains, “and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes.”

Vance evoked powerfully the sense that his hardscrabble upbringing in Ohio’s Rust Belt and Kentucky’s Appalachian hollows had left him without the social capital necessary to move up in the world. But move up he did, with the help of powerful mentors (Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua, David Frum) and an adaptability that may have surprised even him.

Now Vance is proving a quick study yet again as he prepares to enter next year’s primary to replace retiring Ohio Senator Rob Portman. He’s found some new mentors—Tucker Carlson (who Vance insists is “the only powerful figure who consistently challenges elite dogma”) and Sens. Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton—and, with characteristic discipline, he’s remaking himself into a Donald Trump Mini-Me. That’s a pretty neat trick for a guy who, in 2016, sounded very convincing when he said, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

Hillbilly Elegy, which cited liberals like Raj Chetty and William Julius Wilson respectfully, was about promoting understanding between a deeply alienated white working class and the book-buying cultural elite. But that was the old Vance. The new Vance is about politics as total war. “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” Vance said last week on The Federalist Radio Hour. . .

. . .YES YOU CAN TAKE IT FROM THERE. . .