Initial Versus Current Impressions of JD Vance

Back in 2019, I rather liked JD Vance's autobiography/memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

Last night, I started watching the film version, and expect to finish it tonight. I'm also planning a re-read of the book, because both the differences between the book (as I remember it) and the film, and the differences -- if they are differences in him and not just differences of impression -- between JD Vance circa the book's publication and JD Vance now have me reconsidering my initial impressions.

My thinking at the moment, as is often the case, substantially resembles that of, and/or is prompted by another writer. In this case the former. I was talking about it with Tamara this morning, then noticed Kevin D. Williamson opining in the same vein at The Dispatch:

[H]e is so transparently a man who will say whatever his betters require him to say to get what he wants from them. Telling people with money and power what they want to hear is the only consistent throughline in his career, from Hillbilly Elegy to the present day. Once an appendage of Peter Thiel’s, now he is an appendage of Donald Trump’s after a long and bitter apprenticeship of sycophancy. ... Vance has every indicator that he is capable of being a man who profoundly doesn’t matter. It is a kind of skill.  Vance is whomever Trump needs him to be -- the perfect would-be vice president ...

While the film version does give quite a bit of credit to Vance's "Mamaw" for intervening to keep him off the worst tracks, as does the book, the combination of the film version and Vance's subsequent path has me thinking of him less as the "incredibly lucky, but to a large degree up by his own bootstraps" guy I thought I saw in the book and more as an "incredibly good at climbing the corporate/political ladder by kissing ass" type.

While I am definitely moving fast toward Williamson's evaluation of Vance's character, I'm less sure of Williamson's dismissal of Vance as a likely contributor to Republican success in November:

In the short term, Vance probably will not be much help to the Trump campaign. He may help to motivate a few disaffected young men to climb up out of Elon Musk’s digital sewer for 20 minutes and actually cast a vote, but the Trumpist base he is meant to excite is already excited .... the idea that Vance will help the campaign connect better with Rust Belt and Midwestern voters is nonsense: Vance is an Ivy League lawyer and Silicon Valley money-monkey whose literary success came from writing about poor white Appalachians rather than writing to them or for them.

I think Williamson may be under-estimating the appeal of fake "populists" to regular people.

If a guy who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars and claims to have ended up with billions (although fewer billions than if he'd invested his inheritance in an S&P 500 indexed mutual fund instead of embarking on a multi-decade career as a "famous for being famous" real estate scammer) can sell himself, with considerable success, as a "man of the people," Vance probably can too.