With the rise in popularity of the Republican Party’s youngest presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, it is important to get clear on what his campaign fundamentally proposes: renewal of national identity through the historic formalisation of the cultural features of American identity, including making English the country’s official language, with an overriding emphasis on economic growth as essential to the American project and even identity.
Ramaswamy’s campaign, therefore, is premised on an implicit admission that the country has experienced a phase of cultural disintegration and needs the state to institutionalise that which, before, could be taken for granted, and that present historical conditions bring to bear new pressures that require such institutionalisation. This may all be correct, both in terms of diagnosis and prescription.
Much of what he brings to the Republican table is better than what his opponents stand for. For example, he represents the younger, anti-interventionist, anti-Neocon current of the Republican Party. His campaign is aligned with anti-bellicose Trumpism, whereas DeSantis, for example, seems more ambiguous on the issue.
However, Ramaswamy (not unlike Trump) largely articulates the problem of cultural disintegration and the need for a renewal of national identity in terms of a discourse about American greatness as economic greatness, meaning GDP growth and global competitiveness. We will therefore focus on his economic proposals.
Apart from generally prioritising GDP growth (aiming for 4% annually), we may summarise Ramaswamy’s approach in terms of
- Stabilising the value of the U.S. dollar (with respect to major foreign currencies)
- Abandoning carbon-emission reduction policies
- Attracting legal immigration on par with GDP growth
The Fed as instrument to stabilise the value of the U.S. dollar and potentiate GDP growth
Ramaswamy understands wage growth as a trailing indicator showing that an economic cycle is past its peak. He criticises the Federal Reserve for treating wage growth instead as a sign that inflation is about to take off and, therefore, reacting to it by raising interest rates, exacerbating the post-peak downturn, and leading to a credit crunch:
[The Federal Reserve] makes the mistake of using late-cycle market indicators like wage growth as a signal, as though they’re leading indicators of inflation. And so that does a couple of things … [when the] Federal Reserve … sees those late-cycle indicators (like wage growth) take off, they treat them like a leading indicator to raise rates precisely into a business cycle that’s already over its peak. And what does that do? It actually accelerates the down cycle and the downturn in the economy, leading to a credit crisis, which then leads to calls for bailouts. We saw that in 2000, 2008, and we’re now beginning to see it in the year 2023. And you wonder why real wage growth has been so flat for 99% of Americans over the course of the last 20 years.
He proposes that interest rates not be hiked up when wages are rising: “The reality is that wage growth is a trailing indicator. It’s a late-cycle indicator of the fact that the economy has already done well or even overheated.”
The Federal Reserve loses on two counts: 1) It loses both on the count of trying to smooth over the business cycle when in fact it exacerbates that into a boom-bust-bailout cycle instead, [and] 2) It’s also fundamentally hostile to wage growth in this country itself, and they’ve done a disastrous job at implementing even their own stated objective of balancing inflation and unemployment.
The criticism that the Fed is “hostile to wage growth” is valid but, as we will see, contradicted by Ramaswamy’s own approach to immigration. He goes on:
[The idea] that inflation and unemployment are a real trade-off is a false premise based on old British data … a curve known as the Phillips curve that itself is false. It’s an academic relic. But even if that academic relic were true, the Federal Reserve has itself done an awful job of even trying to implement that vision of its agenda.
Instead of tinkering with the value of the U.S. dollar, the Fed should focus on stabilising it with respect to other global currencies (something like a global currency standard acting like the old gold standard), allowing for rational, long-term capital allocation across the economy and foreign investment, leading to GDP growth.
The right answer is [that] we need to put the Fed back in its place. … We need to restore a U.S. Federal Reserve that goes back to stabilizing the U.S. dollar as a unit of measurement. Think about the number of seconds in a minute or the number of minutes in an hour. If that were floating, we would never show up to a meeting on time. The analogy is [that] when the dollar isn’t a stable unit of measurement, you have distortions in capital allocation across an economy that actually are an impediment to GDP growth. It’s no accident [that] GDP growth has actually gone down dramatically. … In the early 1970s, the U.S. left the gold standard. So as the U.S. president, what am I going to do? I’m going to put the Fed back in its place by telling them to focus on stabilizing the U.S. dollar, you could say as measured against a basket of currencies.
Carbon-emission reduction policies as Chinese strategy to block U.S. growth
Ramaswamy views the policy of lowering carbon emissions as stemming from a “climate cult,” which he describes as a hoax, maintaining that rising temperatures are not particularly dangerous, with cold causing more deaths and fossil fuel emissions increasing greenery. Therefore, he proposes:
[Abandoning] the climate cult in all of its forms … public companies now have to report how they’re contributing to carbon emissions. … It’s what they call the “anti-impact” framework. [It] has shackled the American energy sector, and that is the number one obstacle to GDP growth in this country. … I personally think that both parties are playing small ball when it comes to how to deal with the deficit: tax cuts, tax increases versus spending cuts. GDP growth is our answer. This climate cult is shackling us from achieving GDP growth … while leaving China untouched because the very projects that Chevron drops here are picked up by PetroChina on the other side of the world.
Ramaswamy views the push to reduce emissions as being largely China-led. Of course, the ideological roots of modern ‘woke’ Leftism, including mainstream environmentalism, are not Chinese. They should not be reduced to a foreign power play. These roots are Western, ideologically committed, and aligned with an elite project to decrease social cohesion and increase political control. But I do not necessarily think Ramaswamy would disagree with this.
In any case, he is right to identify “green” politics as being largely “about punishment, self-flagellation, dominion, and control.”
Legal immigration as permanent correlate to GDP growth
Ramaswamy understands a healthy economy as being characterised by GDP growth, which in turn will accompany varying rates of legal immigration. In general, he seems to believe that the healthier the economy is, the higher its GDP growth will be, and the more legal, appropriately qualified migrants it will take in.
Ramaswamy had the following to say during a very clarifying interview with Candace Owens, in which he was also questioned by Trump-supporter Rogan O’Handley:
I think part of the problem [is that] … we have deep ingratitude in this country. Ingratitude from the Rashida Talibs and the Ilhan Omars who come here as immigrants, but frankly, it’s an ingratitude that grates on me if somebody grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, fifth generation [American], and hates this country equally as Rashida Talib, Ilhan Omar, or AOC for that matter. It’s the same problem [in either case]: people don’t know something about this country. Thus, I favor making English the national language. I think the U.S. is a country founded on ideals, but you have to have a common language to express those ideals with one another.
The problem I want to hone in on is that Ramaswamy’s policies would ultimately contribute to the loss of social cohesion he decries. His is a mainstream position on immigration: he believes in immigration as fundamentally dictated by economic need. Ramaswamy elaborated during the interview referenced above as follows:
There’s this Tom Cotton bill—and I love Cotton—[but] I don’t support the absolute number cap [on the number of immigrants] because I think that’s sloppy. I think that we have to be much more precise about what we’re actually solving for. I’m solving certainly for a revival of national identity. That’s what this whole campaign is about. That’s what my first and second term[s] in office will be all about. But I think that we have to solve for that national identity grounded in who we are: revive civic duty, revive actual civic knowledge about this country.
Stop viewing the U.S. as just an economic zone. We’re not just that. We’re a team of citizens. We’re not just a nation of immigrants. As a kid of immigrants, I go out of my way to say this all the time: We’re not just a nation of immigrants. We’re a nation of settlers. Yes, I am one of those settlers in this country, and I understand that some people may say, “Oh, you’ve only been here for one generation, whereas I’ve been here for six.” Well, I disagree with you because I am as deeply rooted in this country … [or] more so than many people with ingratitude who take it seven generations in. So that may be where we have a debate, and let’s smoke that out, because I do think that current exists, and you’re right, it bothers me. But I’m an American nationalist, and the fact that I’m first generation shouldn’t stop me from feeling that way. But on policy, I suspect there’s not a ton of daylight between us.
And yet, although the country is not “just an economic zone,” but “a team of citizens,” it is to base immigration policy on (supposed) economic needs:
The way I think about the debate about military spending is that it isn’t [about whether it should be] more or less. No, it’s [about] the right kind. Same thing with respect to immigration. … Too much immigration is just chain-based migration: people bringing their parents or other people who aren’t really making contributions but may even [be] cost[s] to this country. I am all in on ending that. But it is a hard fact today that we do have more jobs in this country than we have people. Talk to any small business. Talk to any large business. It’s just a fact that that’s an impediment to economic growth.
Of course, this embraces the logic according to which any rise in demand for labour justifies importing that labour sooner than raising salaries to try and get existing labour to work. Even if Americans flat-out refused to do certain jobs, if social cohesion and national identity are truly valued, it would make more sense to build factories in migrant-exportinging countries than to bring the workers in.
Ramaswamy’s anti-number’s cap approach to immigration (his opposition to a definite cap on the number of migrants to be accepted) could make sense if it came with a set of criteria that de facto keep immigration low, albeit fluctuating with other factors. But when it accompanies the ideas we’ve criticised above, it is a recipe for mitigating a problem while staying on the same course.
Emphasising that the government should promote national identity naively assumes that state-mandated tests and pro-patriotic propaganda can revive American identity and patriotism in the face of policies that seem to favour a significant and steady flow of immigrants. The reality is that people carry their cultural baggage with them, and if they arrive in large enough numbers, this will impact the culture of the country receiving them.
Unfortunately (I suspect as a result of not having thought it through to its final consequences), Ramaswamy’s thinking on this point implicitly assumes the market prevails over the nation. It cannot, therefore, be described as a “nationalist” policy. He labels himself an “American nationalist,” but his position is not consistent with this title (although it may be more consistent with it than the positions of many of his rivals for the Republican nomination).
There is a great deal more to explore regarding this issue, but we leave this for a future essay.
To conclude, there is a lot about Ramaswamy’s positions that is good—in fact, better than other Republicans—but his focus on GDP growth is reductive, tending to de facto eclipse his defence of national identity and, on the issue of immigration, slotting him into a fundamentally mainstream position, despite his hardline stance on the southern border.
