If I were tracking the 2024 Republican Presidential Primaries the way I tracked the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries (I’m not; the Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update was a huge pain in the ass and I don’t have the time to spend on it), Vivek Ramaswamy is exactly the sort of fringe candidate I’d give some time and attention to.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the millionaire entrepreneur and author of Woke, Inc., told National Review on Monday that he is “strongly considering” a run for president and expects to make a decision “very soon.”
Ramaswamy said he’s been drawn to the idea of running to address a “national identity crisis” that has left Americans hungry for purpose, meaning, and identity.
“We are at a point in our national history when the things that used to fill that void — faith, patriotism, hard work, even family — have disappeared,” he said, adding that in its absence, “wokeism, climate-ism as an ideology, radical gender ideology, Covidism” have become secular religions that fill that “black hole of identity.”
Conservatives have gotten too good at pointing out the problem and “trying to stamp out the poison without actually addressing the real problem,” said Ramaswamy, who has been dubbed the “CEO of Anti-Woke Inc.” The solution, he says, is to “fill that identity void with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep, that it dilutes the secular agendas to irrelevance.”
Those such as President Biden who deliver a vision of national unity by beginning in the middle and calling for compromise are doing it wrong, Ramaswamy said. In order to build unity, the country must return to the “extremism of the ideas that set America into motion: free speech, unbridled meritocracy,” he said.
“I think most people believe these ideals and most people think their neighbors and their colleagues believe these ideals to be true as well, but they can’t be sure anymore, because they don’t feel free to talk about it,” he said. “And so that’s been one of the hallmarks for me, is to start talking openly, again, to lead the way by actually doing it.”
Ramaswamy founded biotech company Roivant Sciences in 2014 and served as its CEO until 2021. That year, he published Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, which says that despite “rosy promises of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world,” stakeholder capitalism “robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity.”
In May 2022, Ramaswamy announced the launch of his new financial firm, Strive, which would focus on “excellence capitalism” rather than encouraging American corporations to get involved in social or environmental issues.
The Ohio-based firm was created to solve what it says is a fiduciary problem created by investment companies such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which have used clients’ funds to “exercise decisive influence over nearly every U.S. public company to advance political ideologies that many of their clients disagree with.”
“Over the last two years, I have traveled the country and listened to the concerns of everyday Americans who want to be heard in the places where they shop, work and invest,” Ramaswamy said in a statement at the time. “We want iconic American brands like Disney, Coca-Cola and Exxon, and U.S. tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google to deliver high-quality products that improve our lives, not controversial political ideologies that divide us. The Big 3 asset managers have fueled this polarizing new trend in corporate America, and that’s why we’re going to compete with them head-on to refocus American companies on the shared pursuit of excellence over politics.”
In September, Ramaswamy published his second book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.
He told National Review on Monday that he has been working to create a space for open conversations about a return to American ideals in recent years.
“I wasn’t free to speak as an elite CEO or the other environments I had been in, but I purposefully stepped aside from my job as a CEO to make this my mission over the last three years, to start talking openly,” he said.
He wants to “revive the American dream in the 21st-century context,” a vision that is of personal importance to Ramaswamy who has “lived the full arc of the American dream” as a first-generation Indian American. Ramaswamy, who attended Harvard for undergrad before attending Yale Law, is the son of a General Electric engineer and a geriatric psychiatrist.
Another box he checks is “Can self-fund,” as he is reportedly worth $500 million. That’s the sort of money that can easily get you to the finish line…in a senate or governor’s race. As Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg proved, spending $50 to $200 million
Is he a better speaker than Steyer or Bloomberg? That’s a pretty low bar, but yes:
That’s the latest video from his YouTube channel. Which, as of this writing, has 44 views.
So you can begin to see the scope of the problem.
Ramaswamy is a guy who might make a serious candidate for a lower-level job, but who wants to run for President as an outsider message candidate. In that sense, he’s a lot like Andrew Yang was for Democrats in 2020. But while Yang’s message was a bit eclectic for Democrats, Ramaswamy’s seems to be a lot closer to the default position for Republicans. It’s hard to see the necessary war against radical social justice being a wedge he can use to calve votes from higher profile and more experienced candidates.
It would be great if there were a Republican candidate in the 2024 Presidential race who was running to destroy wokeness…and who was also a proven elected leader of a large, successful state.
Like, say, Florida.
That’s the sort of candidate a majority of Republicans could get behind…
Tags: 2024 Presidential Race, Andrew Yang, Elections, Republicans, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy
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We really, really need to get past this idea of a one-shot “gonna fix everything” candidate that’s going to be all things to all people, all the time.
Not to mention, this personality worship complex like we’re building around Trump. This whole “man on a horse” thing is not the path we ought to be going down, and it will result in tragedy.
The thing we need is for the electorate to become a whole hell of a lot more demanding and critical of these assholes. That’s the real problem; everybody wants an instant solution, the one-man heroic fix-it situation. That’s not how this works… We took years to get here; it’s going to take years to get out.
Lots of people are running to position themselves for a VP slot on the ticket.
Suspect Vivek would be ok as the GOP VP candidate.
I think a Ron DeS/Vivek ticket would be pretty damned good. Would love to see the D SJW VP candidate debate an extremely successful POC like Vivek. Great TV
I suspect there will be a flurry of potential candidates vying for….something. The claim will be, like Nikki Haley, that they’re presidential timber, but all but a couple will most certainly not be.
Several would, however, be quite good in other posts: cabinet secretaries, chiefs of staff, PR front people, UN ambassadors (something Haley already seems good at), etc. and it’s possible the “me for president” thing is an attention grab to get noticed.
Whomever replaces Biden, and I’m confident it will not be a Democrat, will face a very, very rough 4 years as they attempt to unwind all the damage. From the Resolute desk all the way down to cabinet-level under secretaries, each of those posts will require a very large diameter spine, which seems in very short supply in Washington.
It would not surprise me to discover there’s been some extremely quiet and and even more extremely confidential discussions on that topic being held in northern Florida.
Whoever gets left holding the bag is in for rough times.
I try to envision how all this is going to wind up working out, and I just can’t.
The agencies and institutions are captured; they were likely captured back in the 1920s, when I think back on it all. I mean, how else do you explain Hoover’s fifty-year lock on the FBI? How the hell did that ever happen?
Then, there’s Fauci. He should have been fired for incompetence back during the AIDS epidemic, and multiple times since. The COVID fiasco is a direct outgrowth of his presence in the government; without him, who would have been funding gain-of-function research in China?
The problems are so widespread and diffuse that it’s not even funny. I’m starting to come around to the idea that my mom has always espoused, which is that the whole thing has just gotten too damn complex for anyone to manage. It’s a vast self-licking ice-cream cone of incompetence and venality.
I mean, let us suppose you do get in power in 2024. Where do you start? Where do you propose to get new, untainted bureaucrats to take up the positions in all these places? Could you realistically just abolish them? Whole thing is probably just a vast waste of time and effort, beyond reform. Or, so I think in my darker moments.
Kirk: I agree with your view re “one-man wonders”. That never ends well. What is needed is strategic thinking, grinding away at the roots of Leftist power, and getting back to Constitutional government (or else, as Jefferson suggested.)
Where do we start, as you ask? Good question. My suggestion would be to concentrate in two places: Get the Feds out of the schools (at all levels), and take action to dismantle and de-fang the “Administrative State”, per Philip Hamburger (cf his book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”). That unconstitutional, self-justifying “Fourth Branch” is a big part of the problem in itself.
Conservatives at all levels must refuse to comply with the current orthodoxies and speech codes, and call absurdity out for what it is every time it is shoved in our faces. That will have costs, but there is little else that private citizens can do–aside from removing their children from the Government indoctrination centers–and legally acquiring and learning to responsibly handle and operate firearms, and teaching their children the same. I doubt that our volunteer military will casually accept orders to fire on their fellow citizens, from what I’ve seen of them. The most important thing about being armed is that it shows that you are serious.
I say this knowing that I invite vituperation, but Trump is not methodical nor strategically-thinking enough to make significant progress here. His greatest contributions, I think, will be remembered as the Abraham Accords, and moving the “Overton Window” of political discussion, which the Bushies and RINOS seem to think a fact of Nature, rather than merely a strategem of Leftist design. Most of the rest of what he did, unfortunately, was undone by the Biden Cabal within a few months of the last “election”.
Vijay seems sound, but not as a Presidential candidate. He will be perceived as inexperienced, and frankly, not too many American natives know or have worked with many Indian ancestry Americans. (I have.) The unfamiliarity could be a problem with low-information voters, which is most of them. Maybe a VP or key Cabinet member. DeSantis seems to have the diligence and killer instinct that is called for in these times, but who can say for sure?