What Next: J.D. Vance’s Long Game

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Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

J.D. Vance became a sought-after cultural translator when he published Hillbilly Elegy. Now, he’s a rhetorical bomb-thrower running for the Republican nomination for Senate in Ohio. But underneath Vance’s transformation is a relatively consistent appreciation for a new strain of conservatism still in the process of defining itself. Could Vance’s candidacy advance this intellectual movement on the political right? Guest: Simon van Zuylen-Wood, who wrote about J.D. Vance for the Washington Post Magazine. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Mary Harris here.
0:04.7	There is a tiny bit of salty language in today's episode.
0:12.6	For the last few months, Simon Van Zylandwood has been trying to get inside the head of one
0:18.3	guy, Ohio Senate candidate, JD Vance.
0:22.4	JD Vance has interested me ever since his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was published
0:29.6	in 2016.
0:30.6	I mean, everybody was talking about Hillbilly Elegy, whether they loved it or hated it,
0:35.4	it feels like at the time, right?
0:36.7	Because it came out right around the 2016 election.
0:39.3	Yeah.
0:40.3	And it seemed to explain something about what was happening.
0:45.0	JD Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, has been all the buzz this summer.
0:49.8	His timing could not have been better.
0:52.1	He had the error of a profit.
0:54.4	Vance, the Appalachian Yale Law School grad, does an extraordinary job of unwittingly
0:59.7	explaining something that has been puzzling most of us.
1:03.8	What is behind the fervor for Donald Trump in so many parts of America?
1:08.8	All of a sudden, he was on CNN.
1:11.0	He was on Charlie Rose and he was trying to tell the story of what was going on in this
1:17.7	moment.
1:19.4	You know these people.
1:21.4	Why do they support him?
	...

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