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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.
This anti - Vivek rhetoric is wild to me. He was one of the most eloquent avid culture warriors and had the skin color and balls to say what everyone was thinking more than Trump or DeSantis.
I am tired of presidents that play dumb or are dumb. I want 4-syllable words in speeches and the worship of merit. I want to crush pro-black racial spoil systems, salt the earth so they never return, and I'll take any ally anywhere to accomplish it.
I understand that many in the red tribe don't want these things but I would have voted for him, easily, even with the scuzzy businesses.
If you believe in hbd and are concerned about racial spoils systems then how could you do anything that might increase the number of Indians in America? The vast majority of Indias population is no more intelligent than American black (probably lower due to race mixing). A few Brahmins are fine but anything that risks potential immigrants of 100’s of millions of lower class Indians is a gigantic risks.
Infinity Indians isn't the argument I'm making, and I don't think Vivek ever made it either.
But that seems like what we will get. Heritage Americans don’t like being racists or mean. Indians will advocate for other Indians. Without limiting Indians today we end up with infinite Indians which eventually means the large amount of low IQ Indian populations.
I don't know the statistics about how Indians advocate for one another. I work in tech, so I see plenty of the ingroup preference there. I agree it's a risk, but I also don't think high-caste indians are interested in importing their lower-caste brethren.
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Huh? Vivek went on a rant about American laziness wherein he listed a bunch of reasons why America would crush India in a war and somehow came to believe they were bad things.
Do you doubt in any way the pervasive culture of laziness in this country? His comment hit a nerve because deep down we know it's more true than not. It transcends racial lines. Talk to a millennial or Zoomer about hard work or striving. They're almost alien concepts.
I think American culture would be improved dramatically with 10% more striving: white included.
His rant isn't really about laziness though. Laziness is not what causes people to prioritize "prom queens" and "jocks". Indeed, the prom queen and the jock are examples of excellence in their own fields, that being maintaining physical beauty + good social status and athletic prowess. And what he further gets wrong is thinking these things are somehow anti-correlated with the things he would personally like to see popularize like "math olympiad champ" and "valedictorian", while in America they are not. Perhaps if he were more in tune with real American culture he wouldn't be buying into left wing movie tropes as indicative of real life. But here, in the real world, you can be prom queen and get a 1500 on your SAT and maintain a quality GPA (whatever that means in 2025 is not something I know, when I went to HS 4.0 was still considered exceptional, but grade inflation has probably changed that). In the real world you can win a science competition while making all conference or all state on the football team (or in my case winning a regional title in an individual sport).
Indeed, if we drill down into Vivek's screed, it is simply self serving ignorance. It was a bunch of jocks, who happened to also be brilliant, who ran the British Navy as it established an empire that easily subjugated Vivek's people, and Americans of the same ilk then won the world wars and beat back communism (which, again, Indians thought was really cool). But he attacks things he does not know, and/or cannot compete on (and in fact many other Indians tend to struggle in these realms as well). No mention of his sporting in his background, and we would expect from his rant he was not prom king. Indians as a whole struggle with athletics, having the lowest Olympic medals/capita of any large nation.
And is there a laziness problem? Yes, but it is not some problem with Prom Queens failing to cram in a dozen extra problem sets a day so they can get their SAT score from a 1400 to a 1450, and its not because some jock does a half ass job on some meaningless homework assignment given to him by an overeducated English teacher who couldn't get with the jock she liked when she was in HS. No, its the stoners and the antisocial kids that need to be reformed, but since Vivek buys into the Hollywood high school myths of dumb jock and repressed genius that gets shoved into lockers he doesn't have any real applicable solutions. Instead he has a dumb rant against the very great things about America that cause America to put every other country into the metaphorical locker.
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Honestly, now this is all I can remember about Vivek's culture warring. Sad!
How do you feel about pro-import the world to compete with your children? Maybe no slots at our top research institutions should go to Americans who are American, but this will translate into a better America via culture. Then again, what if this were but a guise to continue importing the rest of the world to compete with your roofer's kids, too? Same old, same old.
I agree with a significant creedal or ideological element in the American spirit. I also don't believe I'm opposed to America, the nation and its people, improving in some way. I agree that America should try to brain drain places where or when appropriate. Yet many people before Vivek have said they want to brain drain the world of its genius and that being American is something more than blood, soil, or whatever fairy dust is in the air. Others have made defenses of certain visas or programs as important or valuable things for the nation. Had he made a limited defense of his preferred program he might been booed but forgotten. Instead, he said we Americans must change because of and motivated by a specific, topical visa discourse. Not the nationality that needs to change, but the culture-- for the race with China. Nobody bought it as, in my opinion, they shouldn't have. They still shouldn't.
Say what you will about black Americans, but at least they've spilled blood for the country. That's not something adequate software engineers are going to do even if we double our efforts or import them wholesale. Not even if they did improve the culture.
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Vivek's problem is that his whole persona is designed to appeal to edge-lords on twitter, when edge-lords on twitter are a overwhelmingly Democratic Party constituency. Meanwhile the MAGA crowd having taken his statements at face value have concluded that he must be either a beltway grifter or a progressive Trojan Horse.
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