The book is basically Atlas Shrugged Running with Scissors. Everyone around The Maker is a Taker whose frayed social safety net does not properly instill a sense of personal responsibility and all the disinterested liberal drones around The Maker are more focused on his adherence to their byzantine social mores than his intrinsic value as an individual. The Maker exists between two worlds because as a bootstrapped thought leader neither the entitleist welfare morlocks nor the misdirected benificence of the liberal eloi offer the goldilocks zone of free thought and free enterprise I'd like to thank Peter Thiel for believing in me. "Hillbilly made good" is Sergeant York or The Quiet Man. "Capitalist Rags to Riches" is 8 Mile or Straight Outta Compton. The grift is archetypal Cato Institute bullshit where success is available to anyone white who happens to befriend billionaires born of privilege.
Ok, so you think he is a member of a third group and uses his supposed membership of the first and second to play both against each other for profit. I'll buy that. Minor quibble but The Quiet Man is less rags to riches, more of a descendent-done-well returns to the old-country."Hillbilly made good" is Sergeant York or The Quiet Man.
I think that his entire story illustrates the plasticity of "group" as well as the context sensitivity of identity but that since libertarian thought leaders won't get a hard-on about that, and since neoliberals can't clutch their pearls about the genetic underclass about that, he bent over backwards to make his intended audience happy at the cost of his actual experience. I'll take your quibble on Quiet Man. It remains a comedy of manners in which the arc towards acceptance requires accepting and adapting to the coarse behavior of one's chosen group. "Rags to riches" was not my argument; after all, Alvin York doesn't get rich, he displays heroism.