 How would you sum him up? Well, in the early 2000s, between about 2008 and 2011, J.D. Vance, who is not then yet famous, not then yet the author of Hillbilly Elegy, not then yet even a Yale Law student. Back then, he was in a movement shared by many of us who were looking for a way forward to a more moderate and modern conservatism after the financial crisis and after the Iraq War.