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In his profile of J.D. Vance for the Atlantic magazine. The writer and journalist George Packer says

Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Aller, came out at the last possible moment to shape a national

conversation. Now, it's hard to know exactly what Vance wanted to do with the book. He hadn't

yet decided to run for office, but Packer says he had risen from family chaos and Midwestern

decline to the elite world of liberal academia, says he had risen from family chaos and Midwestern decline to the elite world of liberal academia,

and he had come out of it all with a voice perfectly tuned to moderate conservatism.

But Vance was also a striver, someone who knew how to read the moment and shape himself to fit it.

Packer says this ability to socialize himself into new beliefs has been a pattern throughout

his career. So Hillbilly Elegy was published just as Donald Trump was elected in 2016,

on the cusp of this new era, the rise of magapolitics and online aggression.

And Packer says the book belonged to an era that just no longer exists.

So Vance adapted, like he always did.

So two things happened at once.

He becomes a celebrity.

Trump becomes president.

Suddenly, there's a roadblock in the path of J.D. Vance's ambitions.

The Republican Party has embraced a candidate who he had opposed.

So in January of 2017, he gathered a handful, maybe a dozen, fellow conservatives,

fellow, you know, you could say reform conservatives, not traditional conservatives,

at the Washington office of the Hoover Institution.

...