There is a moment near the centre of JD Vance's new book that reads less like political memoir and more like a confession spoken in a cold church: a spectacularly successful young man, Yale-educated and professionally triumphant, stands before the ordinary fact of fatherhood and realises, with a kind of vertigo, that he has been educated for entirely the wrong things. "I knew exactly how to help my kid get into a good college," he writes, "but was woefully underprepared to make him a good man." It is the kind of sentence that lands differently depending on where you are standing — and that, perhaps, is precisely the point. The book, which resists easy categorisation, asks a question borrowed from the New Testament: not how to secure a place in heaven, but what must be dismantled, personally and culturally, in order to live with genuine purpose.

Vance's earlier work, *Hillbilly Elegy*, mapped the devastation that substance abuse had wrought across generations of rural Appalachian families. His new argument extends that same grammar of addiction outward and upward — proposing that the norms of elite modernity are, for the ambitious professional class, every bit as corrosive as fentanyl is for those whom that class prefers not to see. The diagnosis itself is not strikingly original, drawing on a long tradition of Western self-critique that stretches from Tocqueville to Lasch, but its force comes from the rawness of Vance's own reckoning. He describes Yale Law School as a place where progressive orthodoxies operated with the quiet authority of doctrine — where voicing scepticism about a settled moral position meant swift expulsion from the circle of the approved.

What he finds unsettling, and what gives the book its genuine tension, is that the right performed exactly the same ritual, with different passwords.