Opinion | The Unnerving Changeability of JD Vance

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir that made JD Vance a celebrity, he described constantly remaking his childhood self to fit the rotating cast of father figures his unsound mother brought into their lives. “With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool — so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear,” Vance wrote. “With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of ‘girlieness,’ I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children.”

Vance’s yearning for a father is a constant theme in the book, as is his willingness to rationalize the flaws of the men he looks up to. At one point, he is reunited with his biological father, who gave him up for adoption when he was in kindergarten. The women in Vance’s life — not just his mother, but also his beloved sister, grandmother and aunt — told him that his dad had been “mean” and abusive, but he doesn’t believe it, preferring to think that there had only been “a bit of pushing, some plate throwing, but nothing more.”

His father was a devoted Pentecostal, and for a time Vance gave up his Black Sabbath CDs and became one, too. “I’m not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him — both, I suppose — but I became a devoted convert,” he wrote.

“Devoted convert” may be the role he inhabits most naturally. In 2016 Vance speculated that Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s his running mate. A lot has been written trying to understand Vance’s ideological journey, but at least part of the story seems to be hiding in plain sight in his book. In attaching himself to the most bellicose patriarch he can find, he’s re-enacting a childhood pattern.

There is, of course, nothing inherently pathological about changing one’s political views. Vance, however, swapped out not just his beliefs but his entire public persona in just a few short years. “Hillbilly Elegy” contains an indictment of “conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics” who spread lies about Barack Obama’s religion and birthplace. And it laments the corrosive cynicism that led many in his white working-class community to embrace these falsehoods.

Vance presented their views as self-defeating: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us,” he wrote, adding, “You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.”