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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.
Here is the actually comically American list of names
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Shouldn't he be converting to, like, Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism or something? Catholicism is the religion of low-skill immigrants trying to replace the founding stock of America.
I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.
If Vivek “converted” to some pointless Evangelical mega church, it would just feel hollow and unserious.
Catholics (and I include the orthodox in this) have basically just won. Protestantism isn’t taken seriously anymore, and so a “conversion” to Protestantism would similarly not be taken seriously.
Hi there. I'm a serious Protestant.
It's worth bearing in mind that in the real world, as opposed to the internet, evangelicals are doing a much better job of holding on to faith than Catholics or Orthodox. News stories about youth conversions to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy are usually looking at a few high-profile outliers rather than the overall demographic trend.
The Catholic Church in the United States, demographically, is buoyed up by large numbers of Hispanic Catholic immigrants, but if you restrict yourself to looking at people born in the US who were raised Catholic, they look very similar to mainline Protestants, i.e. in decline. They have noticeably lower retention than evangelicals. Church attendance is consistently higher among evangelicals than Catholics, as is consistency on moral or social issues. (Go through and compare if you like - 59% of Catholics are pro-choice, 70% support same-sex marriage!) If you compare what Protestants and what Catholics say about why they stay in their church, Protestants are significantly more likely to say that they believe in the religion's teachings and that it gives them spiritual comfort, while Catholics are more likely to say that it's because it's just the religion of their family or community. Note also that 1% of Americans are ex-Protestant Catholics, and 4% of Americans are ex-Catholic Protestants, which seems suggestive.
I'm not American, but I work in a religious field and I will say that just anecdotally I have run into a number of ex-Catholic evangelicals, and I would say that for every person raised a Protestant who felt that they were given a shallow spiritual education, and looked longingly at the riches of tradition and liturgy in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (and I count myself as one such person), I have met a person raised a Catholic who found that faith numbing and deadening, but who came alive on discovering evangelical Protestantism, which gave them the tools to cultivate a more passionate, heartfelt relationship with God.
I don't say this as a triumphant evangelical myself. I'm a mainliner, and I will forthrightly confess that the mainline churches are hollowed out, frequently heretical, and dying. I'm part of what I hope will be a small but devout rump of surviving mainline Protestants. My own institutions are largely betraying the faith and receiving in their own congregations the due penalty for their error.
But I would suggest that if you think that Protestantism in the broader sense isn't being taken seriously any more, or that Catholics have just won, or are in a healthier position overall, you may be in a bubble. Evangelical Protestants are probably the healthiest large church tradition in America.
What’s the point here? If Reddit claimed itself as a Christian church, there would be more Redditors than Catholics too. They could say that posting on Reddit is “attending church”, that being a Reddit moderator is being a “pastor”, claim each subreddit as a denomination even!
The point here is about how seriously a conversion by Vivek would be taken. Vivek attending a mega church every week would move the needle either 0 or negatively.
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It's funny, this is a particularly Catholic argument, in that whenever I see a Catholic culture warrior online, they are usually saying basically this ("I mean, the culture wars are basically over, we won" - first saw it during the Clinton administration). Not sure if it's an aggressive and slightly delusional form of conviction or cope, but it's almost charming, for the vast majority of us, especially in the US, who really don't care much about the schism. It's almost like seeing a "papist!" epithet in the wild.
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I don't know what you mean by "serious" Protestants. There are clearly plenty of Protestants who are serious about their beliefs. If you mean that Evangelicals are tacky and unintellectual, I won't argue, but I don't see why that would make it unserious (plus, I think the main difference between megachurch evangelicals being tacky and Roman Catholics having ornate gravitas is about 1500 years). I'm also unsure on the role of the internet in this - Evangelicals started on their current trajectory well before the internet. And, of course, Evangelicals are not all American Protestants.
I don't think it's true that Protestantism isn't taken seriously. Rather, Protestantism lacks the centralized hierarchy, unified style guide, and Ancient Traditions^tm of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which puts it at a disadvantage with people who really like those things. The aesthetics/values/ideas of American Protestantism (especially capital-L Liberal Protestantism) are heavily conflated with general American aesthetics/values/ideas, and, much like American culture as a whole, lives in an eternal present. The power of Catholic identity is not that it is inextricably tied to America, but that it isn't.
What I mean is that Protestants are not intellectually serious, and that most of the claims keeping people in their church don’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
“The Church is hiding the Bible from you they don’t want you to read it only WE have the true words of God!” was a convincing argument when it wasn’t easy to find out that this is just very literally not true.
As far as conversation to Protestantism being unserious: not only could I become a Protestant tomorrow if I wanted to, I could become a Protestant pastor, and so could Vivek.
Vivek Could announce tomorrow that he is starting a church, could call it a “Christian” church, and go around trying to convince people in Ohio that he’s a very serious Christian of some kind.
But this would all take 5 minutes, and be meaningless.
If he wanted to become Catholic, there’s a process to it, he’d need to get his marriage convalidated, baptize his kids, etc. If he wanted to become a priest (to contrast this with the seriousness of becoming a Protestant pastor), it would take him around a decade of philosophy and theology classes, he’d need to leave his family, etc. (Although I'm not sure The Church would take
That’s the point I’m making. It Vivek went through OCIA, got confirmed, convalidated his marriage, went to mass at least weekly, and baptized his kids, I think people would see it as more likely to be genuine.
If he showed up at some mega church or revivalist thing a few times and bought a Bible, I think it would read as performative.
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Just your daily reminder that in the US, the average Roman Catholic Sunday mass is tacky, and does not particularly follow unified style guides. That isn't even trad griping about things which aren't my preference like altar girls and the like; I am the Lord of the Dance Said He is a much more common hymn than anything like Faith of our Fathers, let alone the lovely classical music that inspired so many composers. Mass prayers may differ much less in verbiage, but when sung they are often set to cheesy folk music, or evangelical praise-and-worship light. Guitars are more common instruments than organs. Catholic churches vary strongly in architectural quality but the average Catholic goes to mass in an uninspired pseudo-amphitheatre decorated with designed-by-committee religious art that has nothing in common with the historical churches of Europe that nobody goes to, in a brutalist style if they're unlucky. The typical vestments look, literally, like burlap sacks. The 'ornate gravitas' that you speak of is uncommon enough in America to have special names for it(and is far less available than the other common strong liturgical preference- 'charismatic style' which apes evangelical worship services much more strongly. The majority of deeply religious Catholics in the USA imitate Evangelical outward forms). It's popular with Hollywood because it's easy to show on a screen looking and sounding cool. Most American Catholics have never heard Gregorian chant in a church service, see incense a couple of times a year, and dress worse for mass than protestants do.
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Confessional protestantism and fundamentalist evangelical-adjacent protestantism are going strong, and they don't restrict the internet anymore than hardcore Catholics do. They're hard to track and more geographically constrained but they do exist.
Can you link me to an example of a church where, if Vivek Ramaswami converted to it, Americans would see this as a strong signal that he was all in on America?
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The Mennonites don't count? I mean, Anabaptists are very much Protestant (a product of the "Radical Reformation"), and they seem rather "serious" about it to me.
Doesn't this prove my point pretty cleanly? The Mennonites are not using the internet.
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The conservative true elite is increasingly Catholic, but evangelical megachurchianity is more common for the masses. Episcopalians and Presbyterians are… not common, and don’t go to church anyways.
Wasp churches have largely died out. Catholicism still has an intellectual class which makes Catholicism the closest thing to a national religion now. Evangelicals lack intellectual rigor and have outsourced that to Catholics. Mormons are honestly probably the number 2 Waspy Christianity today.
It does seem like we’ve already had one great replacement. True heritage Americans seem to have already died out.
I don't think this is actually true per se, but evangelical intellectuals who are known for being evangelical tend to be theologians. Evangelical intellectuals in other fields exist, but they often aren't known for their evangelicalism – and conversely, evangelical theologians often aren't known outside of evangelical communities or sub-communities. (I reckon it's very Protestant to double-down on theology, do a better job developing it than Catholics, and then mostly drop the ball in other areas because they're of "secondary importance" with the predictable consequences.)
For a variety of reasons I think Catholics are better at bridging the gap between mainstream culture and Catholic culture – one of the notable reasons being that "Catholic" isn't shorthand for "right wing" whereas "evangelical" is, which tends to make Catholic intellectuals more respectable. (However I also think it's true that the Catholics have built better mechanisms/pipelines for their intellectual elite. They deserve both kudos and study for that.)
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Episcopalians are still going- shrinking congregations that skew much older than the average church, but they're not about to die out, there'll just be fewer of them. Methodists are still there, albeit older and slowly shrinking, PCA has managed to avoid full collapse even if it's got hard times for the forseeable future. ELCA(mainline lutherans)- famously not a waspy denomination- are the real mainliners who won't be around when their current congregants kick the bucket(which won't be that long).
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There were Catholics here from the start.
The efforts by modern Catholic nationalists to insert themselves into the founding ideology of the United States is a weird sort of stolen valor. They were always a small minority, even in the places that were meant to be tolerant of them like Maryland, and American Republicanism was strongly associated from the outset with Protestantism. One of the Intolerable Acts pertained to toleration of Catholics! And, of course, anti-Catholicism flared up again with large scale Catholic immigration in the mid-19th century.
(You can, of course, admit Catholics into the founding mythology, but then you have to admit basically everyone)
You can sneer at Maryland but you can't make it go away. Many have tried, none have succeeded.
Establishment of Catholicism, by giving the Midwest to Quebec.
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Yes that’s one thing I dislike about Vivek. That he seems culturally alien to America.
My second complaint is that at about a 70% probability I think his mental model of the world is incorrect. Striving only boost output in maybe medicine. I don’t think striving culture would boost American wealth.
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