Moreover, personnel, as the cliché goes, is policy. If Trump really wanted to break from Reaganite economics, why did he choose Mike Pence, an orthodox economic conservative, as his running mate and head of his transition team? Why is he taking advice from Stephen Moore?

There’s a different way of understanding the transformation that Moore describes. It’s less about policy than rhetoric. It struck me as I was reading J.D. Vance’s beautiful memoir about his Appalachian upbringing, Hillbilly Elegy. What makes Vance’s book so striking is not the problems he describes: deindustrialization, drug addiction, single motherhood, a definition of masculinity that inhibits academic achievement. William Julius Wilson and Charles Murray made their reputations dissecting these ills 30 years ago. What makes Vance’s book so arresting is that the people he’s describing are white.

It’s not that working class whites didn’t suffer from these maladies in the 1980s. They clearly did, though perhaps not as starkly as they do now. But in the public discourse of the Reagan era, such problems were generally attributed to African Americans. They were attributed, in other words, to a population that did not vote for Republicans, and whom Republicans often slandered in their search for white votes. When Reagan denounced “welfare queens” and the “strapping young buck” who used food stamps to buy steak, everyone assumed he was talking about blacks.

Reagan era conservatives made two arguments about the pathologies of the inner city. First, that they were the result of culture, not economics. The root problem was family breakdown. Second, that because the problem was cultural, government programs aimed at helping the underclass would either prove ineffective, or downright counterproductive. The best thing the government could do was to exhort poor African Americans to get and stay married, and to abolish programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that made it easier for them to avoid doing so.

In this sense, Vance is something of a Reaganite. He describes his Appalachian friends and neighbors with deep affection. And he suggests that, at the margins, smart public policy might improve their lot. But he defines their problems as more cultural than economic. In the book’s introduction, Vance describes a young man and his pregnant girlfriend who hold decent jobs at a local tile factory. Their atrocious work ethic gets them both fired. Vance describes food stamp fraud, white “welfare queens” and liberal state legislators whose efforts to eliminate predatory lending would actually harm the poor people they’re designed to help. He acknowledges the decline of manufacturing jobs. But to hear him tell it, the biggest problem facing the white working class is “the feeling that our choices don’t matter.”