"What does it tell us that liberals' favorite conservative in 2016 has now aligned himself with the hard right?"
If Vance's alleged political transformation is simply a case of unchecked political ambition and thirst for power, the bigger story might turn out to be how his political journey inverted Ronald Reagan's, who began as a "radical" in the 1960s, before morphing into a "responsible conservative" by 1980.
Liberals Are to Blame for the Rise of J. D. Vance - Boston Review
"In reality, Vance was never very far from the far right.
"His mentor in Silicon Valley circles was Peter Thiel, among the most influential right-wing power brokers in American politics today.
"Thiel’s first book, published well before he became a billionaire, was entitled
The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, and
in 2009—years before Vance joined his orbit—he wrote that he no longer believed that “freedom and democracy are compatible.'
"As for Vance’s populist rhetoric in July at the Republican National Convention, which some commentators have interpreted as signaling a shift toward a pro-worker Republican Party, the truth is that it resembled nothing so much as the anti-monopolist rhetoric of the far-right John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby in the 1970s.
"For that matter, the rhetoric of producers versus parasites is entirely within keeping of the arguments of
Hillbilly Elegy."