Opinion | What Makes JD Vance Tick?

I mean, “Communion” does read to me like a book by a man who is a deeply anxious personality, carries serious, real scars from his childhood, and who doesn’t really know who he is, even now. I mean, as you know, he denounces striverly elites, but he quotes them endlessly in this book. And he surrounds himself with them in his life. He decries materialism, but he’s a former venture capitalist. His mentor is Peter Thiel. So when you boil it all down, he basically strikes me as someone who grew up with tremendous instability and is constantly braced for disaster. And he thought that clawing his way out of poverty would solve not just his economic troubles, but all of his existential angst. And then he wound up disappointed that the elite world he landed in had its own deep flaws, which, OK, duh. But the Catholic Church has given him structure and a sense of history and permanence. And now he seems upset that he can’t find a way to map that onto the world outside of the church.