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Revisiting Vivek Ramaswamy's Christmas Rant: One Year Later
The tome in question, in case you need to refresh your memory. One hundred and twenty five million views. This single tweet tore open a gash in the Republican coalition that has yet to heal (though I don't want to overstate the counterfactual impact here, this particular fault-line was inevitable).
Looking back, it is clear now that the controversy was never just racist shit-flinging. There is a real philosophical conflict underlying the backlash. It is perhaps most elegantly stated as a variant of the Euthyphro dilemma; is our culture good because it is American, or is it American because it is good? Vivek is a functionalist. If an aspect of American culture is non-functional, then it should be replaced. His opponents in the comments are overwhelmingly essentialists. Americanness is an ontological property that is good because of it's essential nature as American. In this context, the idea that someone might choose to discard prom queens or jock sports fandom is a threat to America itself. Of course, this begs the question, who counts as American? And we end up with the "Heritage American" discourse that has been popping up lately.
Vivek’s big issue is he’s lived a sheltered life. He’s never been with normies. 95% of the people in any country are just too dumb to win as strivers (Israel excluded). Promoting striving culture is just bad politics because 95% of the voters can’t win that game.
I don’t think striving culture makes countries rich. I think the best scientist just enjoy being scientists and are having fun. It’s not grinding for them. I think few professions benefit from striving culture. The only potential exception being medicine.
I don’t consider myself a striver. I did do math problems for fun growing up. I went to math tournaments. Why did I do it? I was having fun.
Vivek is the only Republican I would vote against. The vision for the party he has is a cancer and it’s worth giving Dems a little more power to destroy him.
It’s stupid to let Vivek run in Ohio because I highly doubt I’m the only one in the base who vote against him.
He's also just really scuzzy, even by the low standards of Ohio politicians. Musk can make these sort of arguments stick by pointing at one of several giant factories. Vivek can point to... failed biomedical stuff in an even-more-scammy-than-normal field, a politically-focused investment fund, and partial ownership of BuzzFeed.
None of it's clearly fraud, or illegal, or even likely to get the New York AG going after him, but I wouldn't be surprised if he loses more Red Tribe support than Jay Jones lost Blue Tribe support.
I just don’t see who in the Republican Party that Vivek appeals to. He seems to believe in blankslatism which is very unpopular in the high IQ parts of the GOP. He made fun of football and cheerleaders so I don’t think he’s cool with the blue collar guys. He’s not Christian. I will be completely honest that I don’t think someone can be American without conversion.
Who’s his voter base? Boomer neoliberals? I thought they all became Democrats already.
I think you’re hitting the core here.
If Vivek moved here, converted to Catholicism, named his kids Sean and Brad, starter personally going by Jim and became an obsessive football fan, maybe I’d buy it.
Because that’s basically what my ancestors did. They changed their names, punished their kids if they tried to speak the old language, named their kids almost comically American names, and just thanked god they were allowed to be here. They wanted to be American not lecture Americans on how to be better.
Four generations from now if some Vivek descendant wants to “rediscover their roots”, then fine. But America does have a culture, actually, and if you want to be an American the good news is they you can! You just have to actually do it.
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The red tribe elite is probably more blank slate than the blue tribe, if anything. They unironically believe that black underperformance is due mostly to culture and that removing blacks from the ghetto culture(and forcing them to assimilate to a better one, namely theirs) is what is necessary to fix issues in their communities. They can respect the oriental grindset but think they should age out of it with assimilation. Twitter is not real life.
I think it depends on which groups of elites you talk about. The young congressional aides types I tend to think are big on Fuentes and hbd. The 80 year old congressman may still be blankslatist.
I think rent tribe elite people want to think like Romney but I think the blacks have bad culture people have died out. Intellectually the right needed to develop a thesis on disparate impact after woke and blacks are just dumb makes a lot more sense now.
The thesis on disparate impact is 'they're uncivilized, and they should be more like us'. That is what normie red tribe elites think. The ultrapolitical ones not so much, but they're a small fraction. The fuentards are far outnumbered by people who think blacks should go to church, study, and work harder and they'd achieve white outcomes.
Isn't Black church attendance already significantly higher than white church attendance?
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I don’t even know how you would calculate the normie belief. Even anonymous surveys don’t work because people still don’t like answering things that sound racists. The belief you think they have I would agree was there belief pre-2020 but now I have no way to measure it.
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