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Jan. 13, 2025 - Epoch Times
48:02
Vivek Ramaswamy: DEI Is a 'Cancer'
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So we have this victimhood metastasis where everyone wants to think of themselves as a victim.
We have to recognize there is no winner in America's oppression Olympics.
Today I sit down with Vivek Ramaswamy, author of the 2021 best-selling book, Woking.
Affirmative action is the systemic racism that's still here in America today.
And I'm sorry to say it will then create the new kind of anti-black racism that we had spent so many decades moving on from.
Today, we dive into his new book, Nation of Victims, which looks at America's culture of grievance on both the left and the right, and how Americans have lost a sense of purpose and identity.
This, he says...
has paved the way for politicization of business and the rise of woke capitalism.
I think a culture committed to excellence demands inequality of results, demands inequity of results.
I'll say the quiet part out loud.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Yakelek.
Vivek Ramaswamy, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
It's good to be back.
Thanks for having me, Jan.
Well, Vivek, I've finally managed to finish your book, Nation of Victims.
You know, I had you on about a month ago, just talking a little bit about it.
Absolutely fascinating piece.
You're looking at kind of the other side of Woke Inc., which is, you argue, is even the more important side, and we're going to get into that in a moment.
I want to get your opinion on something right now.
There's this investor letter that Elliott Management, one of the larger hedge funds in the world, sent around.
It's basically talking about how...
Global economy is on a path to hyperinflation.
It might lead to almost societal collapse.
This is something in an actual letter.
This is not theoretical.
This is not sci-fi.
So what do you make of that?
I actually write about this extensively in Nation of Victims as well.
And so it's deeply related to even some of these themes of excess followed by victimhood.
But in a nutshell...
I think we are in a period of inflation.
We might be entering hyperinflation very soon.
I think the Federal Reserve has been late to raise rates.
But at a very high level, what's going on right now is more scary than the last cycle of hyperinflation in the United States.
Because you now have to raise interest rates against the backdrop of not Ronald Reagan's deregulatory policies, not Ronald Reagan's tax cuts that otherwise stimulate the economy to balance out the effects of rising interest rates to curb inflation.
But now you're doing it against the backdrop of Joe Biden's economic policies, which are not particularly favorable to private commerce or business.
His war on fossil fuels, which in turn is contributing to an energy crisis, a supply-demand imbalance for global energy that in turn contributes to inflation, which then in turn requires a greater raising of interest rates, which cools down the economy against the backdrop of those.
You know, I would say unfavorable, commercially unfavorable regulatory policies, that you have a double whammy.
And I think that's what's unique right now relative to the 1970s to early 1980s in the early areas of Paul Volcker raising rates under Ronald Reagan.
It was at least a yin for yang, and now instead you have actually a one-two punch.
And so I tend to agree that I'm very cautious heading into where we're going as an economy for the next several years.
I think we're in for hardship.
I think we have an era of hardship that's waiting for us.
We have been skiing on artificial snow for the last decade and a half with free money raining like mana from heaven on high with the Federal Reserve printing it.
And by the way, central banks around the world doing the same thing.
At some point when that artificial snow machine turns off, as we're starting to see in the United States, we realize that we forgot how to actually ski on the real thing.
And so that's in some ways the bad news.
The good news is, in the long run, I'm an optimist because I actually think that could be an opportunity for us where we build the muscle memory that we have lost after a decade and a half of losing it that allows us to understand how we actually create things through actual ingenuity, actual productivity, actual notion we've forgotten our economy, hard work.
And I think that that's in some ways been covered up by the excesses, the excesses of monetary policy in particular over the last decade and a half.
And by excesses of monetary policy, you basically mean just printing insane amounts of money.
That's correct.
That's correct.
Yep, exactly.
I think it's true in the United States.
It's true in much of the modern West.
It's true in most democratic societies around the world.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, we had chronically easy money, chronic low interest rates that I think have, in some ways, you could look at the bright side of it.
I think the net cultural effect of it is that it has actually created a time of artificial ease.
And I think that we're going to pay for a lot of those sins, sins of excess, in the couple of years ahead of us.
And so whether that's going to be a financial Armageddon or not, that's not necessarily, you know, my view.
I don't think that this is, you know, look, let's just put it this way.
Very few people have been consistently good at predicting financial Armageddon, and many times more has financial Armageddon been predicted than it has materialized.
And so that's, you know, all of the forgotten predictions of people who predicted financial Armageddon when it didn't play out.
We don't remember those.
So I'm not saying that that's exactly what we're in for, like a 2008-style crisis or worse.
But I do think we're in for an era of some economic hardship.
But I think that could actually end up being good for our culture if we learn from it.
So actually, you argue this in both Woke Inc, your first book, and I think in the second book as well, that this situation that you just described actually allows for a situation where people focus in the corporate world on things that are very different than the creation of actual value.
That's right.
That's right.
And so the case I made in Woke Inc was that the politicization of business is bad both for business and for our body politic.
It's bad for business because...
Every business has a unique and worthy purpose.
Usually that's true because if you don't have a worthy purpose, people aren't going to pay you for the service that you provide.
They're not going to pay you more than it costs you to provide it.
So almost by definition, there's a presumption in favor of most businesses having a worthy purpose when they serve their customers.
But when we impose these top-down political and social agendas on those businesses, they're less good at making widgets.
That people can buy from them, which in turn creates less valuable businesses, which in turn creates a less prosperous society that holds everyone back.
So that was my critique, but also Milton Friedman's critique, right?
That part wasn't original.
The part that, if I may say so myself, was a different spin, a different moment of progress in the conversation that I aimed to add in Woking, was that it wasn't just a threat to capitalism.
It was also a threat to democracy.
And the reason why is that in a democratic society, citizens are supposed to decide how we settle our political differences through free speech and open debate in the public square, where everyone's voice and vote counts equally.
And when we delegate the authority to make those political decisions or those social decisions, whether and how to fight climate change or systemic racism or whatever, what we're really saying...
Is that those guys get to make those decisions behind closed doors, business elites in corporate boardrooms, etc., according to a one-dollar one-vote system.
Not a one-person one-vote system, but a one-dollar one-vote system, which I think sucks the air, the lifeblood out of a democracy, which is one where every citizen's voice and vote ought to count equally on the kinds of questions, the political, normative, social questions.
That a citizenry ought to decide rather than a corporatocratic class in the boardrooms of corporate America.
So that was where I was with Woke Inc.
But the thing that compelled me to write that second book, that it sounds like you just finished reading, is it does really take two to tango, right?
And so Woke Inc., I take a look at the top-down phenomenon, the merger between government and private enterprise together doing.
What neither one could do on its own.
I even traced the ways in which government is using private companies to do through the back door what government couldn't do through the front door under the Constitution.
Things like big tech censorship.
Things like the climate agenda that major financial institutions are pushing through their banking arms, through their asset management arms.
But at the same time, the question I ask in the second book is, what is it about our culture right now and our national psyche that still creates an entire generation?
That's buying up this nonsense, right?
What about the demand side of this?
So in some ways, Woke Inc.
was about the supply side, the supply of the BS. And the second book, Nation of Victims, is all about the demand side.
What is it about a culture that actually eats up these, you know, I would say one-sided narratives?
And in a way, why is it that corporate America is dancing to that tune?
So they go together.
Well, no, and this is very interesting.
Let's stick to Woking just for one more moment.
The supply side, so to speak.
It's not obvious, and this is very powerful, frankly, in your book, making this case, but it's not obvious that corporate America, with their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders, would take this path, right?
Oh, it's far from obvious.
Yeah, it's counterintuitive.
Completely counterintuitive.
And you, of course, make the case that it has to do with these very kind of loose monetary policies.
That's part of it.
That's part of it.
Give me the whole picture.
Yeah, I mean, the whole picture takes the whole book to read, but I can give you a couple underappreciated elements of it, all right?
One of the stories I do trace in Woke Inc.
is the story that goes back to the 2008 financial crisis.
You know, we're here in New York City.
I actually was working in New York City starting the fall of 2007. On the eve of the 08 crisis, I was working at a hedge fund here in New York.
So I had a front row seat to what happened then.
What happened is in the aftermath of the 08 crisis, you had large government bailouts to the big banks here in New York and on Wall Street.
I was an opponent of those bailouts.
As a side note, I remain an opponent of those bailouts.
I think that was a bad mistake.
I think we continue to pay for those sins to this day in ways that are not just economic but cultural.
I'll come back to that.
But anyway, in the aftermath of the 08 crisis, what happened was that the guys on Wall Street went from being the heroes that you were supposed to emulate if you were a young guy coming out of business school or whatever to becoming the bad guys.
And Occupy Wall Street was literally occupying Wall Street.
It was on Wall Street's doorstep.
And the capitalist class in this country, they were on their back heels.
And so what they recognized was, look, Occupy Wall Street, that is a tough pill to swallow.
They want to take our money, redistribute it to poor people to help poor people, reform and reorder the system of who controls the keys to power over the market.
That's a tough pill to swallow.
But it turns out that there was a birth of a new wing of the left right around the same time that had a slightly different theory of the case than the Occupy Wall Street left.
What the new left said was that actually it wasn't about economics, but it was about racism, misogyny, and bigotry, and climate change, and all that stuff.
So that's actually what presented the opportunity for big business in this country to bail itself out culturally.
It wasn't just the government bailouts.
They bailed themselves out culturally a second time over, where they said that, look, here's what we're going to do.
We will embrace those demands of the new left.
We will talk about systemic racism all you want, as long as you don't talk about systemic financial risk.
We will...
Muse about diversity and inclusion.
We'll appoint some token minorities to your boards.
We will pontificate about the racially disparate impact of climate change after you fly in a private jet to Davos.
We will do all of those things.
But we don't do it for free.
We effectively expect that that new wing of the left look the other way when it comes to leaving our corporate power structure intact.
And that is how you get, it was kind of the joke of the last book, was you got a bunch of big banks, got in bed with a bunch of woke millennials.
Together they birth woke capitalism.
And they used that to put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
That was the trade they made.
It worked so well for the capitalist class here downtown, New York City, that Silicon Valley then got into the act.
What they realized was that, okay, it worked for the Wall Street guys.
The threat to our monopoly power right now, if we're sitting in Silicon Valley, comes from the left.
Even the Obama left, right?
They wanted to break it up.
Big tech was cool on the left before it was cool on the right.
And so what they realized was, look, we can defang that threat to our power structure if we agree to lend to some of that monopoly power to advance your substantive ends.
We'll censor speech you don't want to see online.
We'll take down misinformation as you define it.
But again, we don't do it for free.
We effectively expect that the new Democratic Party look the other way when it comes to leaving our monopoly power intact.
And so that's how the game was played.
The rest of corporate America starts copying the act.
Coca-Cola gets to make statements about new voting laws in Georgia, systemically racist voting laws like requiring voter IDs, news about how do you teach their employee base to be less white, that was the word they used, how to be less white, while actually getting to get off the hook.
On their own products' impact on the nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity, including, by the way, in the black community that they profess to care so much about.
So, you know, Nike, whatever, condemn slavery 250 years ago in the United States, yes.
Don't say a peep about actual slavery in China today, in the Shenzhen province, or using labor abroad to generate $250 sneakers that you sell to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school.
This is great.
It works out for all parties, but it was this...
Cynical arranged marriage.
The reason it was counterintuitive is I don't think either side really had too much respect for the other.
It was a marriage in which each partner had secret scorn for its bed partner.
It was closer to mutual prostitution, but it worked for as long as each side got something out of the trade.
And that was the story of the birth of this.
You know, illegitimate child, the woke industrial complex that I argued was far more powerful than either big government or big business, because it was this chimeric, almost monstrous hybrid of the two.
And that was, in many ways, crushing the will of the everyday citizen and diluting the voice of the everyday American in the economy as well.
So many people of this ideology, for example, started to populate the HR departments of these big corporations and started hiring people that were similarly inclined because they knew the right code words and so forth.
The way I look at it is, it is when wokeness met capitalism that it got supercharged with the full force of green pieces of paper behind it.
Before that time, wokeness in America was basically It was a fringe philosophy in the halls of some academy somewhere at some liberal arts college.
It was supposed to be a challenge to the system.
And if you ask the question about when did this go from being about being a challenge to the system to becoming the new system, it's when wokeness met capitalism, that it was supercharged with the potency of market power that effectively made it ubiquitous.
And this has led—I mean, not just this, and this is the case you make in the new book, Nation of Victims, that— You know, we're kind of in the midst of a national identity crisis and it's not just among the left.
That's right.
And so this is where I get to the bridge to the second part of what I was talking about, which is it takes two to tango.
On the flip side, this corporate trick wouldn't have worked.
If there weren't a consumer base and an employee base that effectively demanded that same behavior of the companies.
And I don't think I treated that issue enough in Woking because it's a separate and complicated question.
Yes, there's this cynical top-down institutional marriage between government and big business.
But what about the millennial generation, my generation and younger?
In fact, I would say increasingly most people, even under the age of 40 in the United States, demanding this.
You know, sort of virtue signaling behavior and even encouraging it through their consumer buying behaviors and their employment work patterns.
So that's a cultural question.
Less to do with corporate America and big government, but more to do with our culture as we know it.
And I think my net diagnosis, and this bled from the end of Woke Ink into even the beginning of Nation of Victims, is that we live in this moment in our country where our entire generation, Jan, we are hungry for a cause.
We are so hungry for purpose and meaning and identity at a point in our national history where the kinds of things that used to fill that void for purpose, things like patriotism and hard work, that comes up again, and family, faith, whatever it might be, national identity, the kinds of things that used to fill that void for purpose.
Slowly receded, if not disappeared, in modern life.
And that leaves a black hole of identity in its wake.
And when you have a vacuum that runs that deep, that is when poison begins to fill the void.
That is what allows wokeism to find its home at the heart of that American soul.
That is what allows scientism, as distinct from science, right?
The scientism, the secular, different secular religions, one at a time.
Preying on that soul.
What is it?
It's the vacuum that actually creates the attraction to that poison.
And so one of the things, I looked in the mirror after I wrote Woke Inc.
I mean, look, I went on a national tour across the country.
Before this, I was a biotech CEO, but this is when I became much more vocal on these issues, pointing out what I quickly came to find was...
An infinite list of hypocrisies, of businesses, of universities, of government's relationship with business, of this new woke cancer infiltrating nearly every major institution.
The hypocrisies were endless.
It was almost too easy by the end.
But I looked myself in the mirror and asked myself, okay, how are we actually solving the problem?
Yet there's some value, sure, in shining a spotlight on the problem and educating people on it, to the extent you know how.
But we're not really moving the needle.
Unless we fill that black hole, that vacuum for purpose with something more rich, something more meaningful that dilutes the poison to irrelevance.
And I think that's the project I took up in this second book is, okay, we've got this void of purpose.
Where from here?
And if we don't fill that void for purpose with affirmative values like excellence, I mean, that's the case I make in the book.
A vision of American identity centered on the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, individual self-actualization, the destiny of realizing your journey as an individual.
That's part of what it means to live the American dream.
It's part of what it means to be American.
But if we don't fill the void with something more affirming, that's when you get victimhood that fills the void instead.
And I think the case I make in the first half of the book is that victimhood has become our new national identity.
The call to action I make in the second half of the book is we need to...
Fill that identity vacuum with something else based on the shared pursuit of excellence as part of what it means to be American.
But the path from getting from A to B is a complicated one that runs through some uncomfortable terrain.
So I want to touch on something that I thought was really, really interesting in A Nation of Victims and related to exactly what you're talking about now.
You point out that, I believe that some surveys were done and so forth, that it's like the people that Are objecting to inequality, something very reasonable for people to object to, but it's actually the unearned inequality that is the thing that people have the big issue with.
They don't mind so much if they feel like someone has done the hard work or has demonstrated the excellence to get higher status or something like that.
So there's a couple of dimensions to this, Jan.
One is from Woke Inc.
and the other is what you're talking about with respect to Nation of Victims.
I think that one of the things that we lose in the debate about material inequality is that the first thing we can do is just lower the stakes in the debate.
If the green pieces of paper that you and I have or someone else has or doesn't have are really just green pieces of paper that buy things, right?
In the scheme of things, if you have a nicer car than I do or I have a nicer watch than you do, all right, well, I probably want the nicer watch or you probably want the nicer car.
But in the scheme of things, that's one category that matters.
If it's just that, okay, you've got more green pieces of paper in your bank account, maybe your tie is more brand name than mine, but who cares?
They're just things.
It's just materialist, you know, superficial stuff in the context of what the human experience really is, in the context of what it means to be a co-equal member of a society.
We can be co-equal citizens in a society, even if your tie is more of a name brand than mine.
I think part of the problem with this new trend of so-called stakeholder capitalism or ESG-informed capitalism or whatever, what that does is, no, it's not just the fact that you have more green pieces of paper than I do.
And it's not even the fact that you have a luxury car where I only have a mid-tier sedan or whatever.
It is also the fact that your voice counts more than my voice in our body politic because your say on how we fight climate change, if you have a seat in a corporate boardroom, Is more impactful than my seat at the ballot box, because that's all I get.
That your view on how we should fight systemic racism or racial equity or racial injustice or whatever through implementing quota systems in who gets promoted at the company where I work imposes that agenda on me, that political agenda on me, where all I have for my voice is the voice of the ballot box, because I don't have the same dollars that you do.
So I think this is the first step in this debate, and this is terrain all covered in woke ink, is that we skip to the inequality debate, talking about inequality in dollars, without first asking ourselves whether we've already just made a mistake by even over-fetishizing the green pieces of paper by allowing them to be too important in terms of what they even represented.
So we're already in a smaller, lower-temperature zone of this discussion.
But let's get to the bottom of it even further.
I think have a lot less of a begrudging attitude towards successful capitalists if they knew and had faith in a system that that person was rewarded for the value that they uniquely and individually created, rather than many who happened to get that head start for the mere act of being born.
Right?
And I think this is a conversation I tease in the book a little bit.
Forget about whether you favor high taxes or low taxes.
I'm more in the low tax camp, right?
I don't trust the government to manage money as much as I do through the decentralized allocation of resources.
But put that to one side.
That's not the debate I'm touching here.
Let's say you want high tax or you want low taxes.
Whichever it is, do you prefer to get more of those tax dollars into the system through taxing income as you earn it?
Which actually makes it harder.
For someone who's starting from the ground floor to work their way out?
Or do you want to take a closer look at how one generation transfers wealth to the next generation?
If you had to pick between the two, right?
Let's say the government only needs a tiny amount of revenue to run.
Let's say the government needs a ton of revenue to run.
I prefer the tiny model.
But whatever it is, I still think that there's a conversation to be had about weighting it much more heavily towards picking it up on intergenerational wealth transfers than on picking it up in income that you tax every year along the way.
More importantly, I think that it would have the effect of making good on the promise of true equality of opportunity while completely shedding our collective insecurities about the inequality of results.
I think a culture committed to excellence demands inequality of results, demands inequity of results.
I'll say the quiet part out loud because I think we need to.
Not everyone is going to...
Reach the finish line at the same time.
Not even everyone is going to get to the same finish line, whether that's on the basketball court, whether that is in the classroom, whether it's in the system of free market capitalism.
We're not going to have a system where everyone wins and loses equally if we have a true culture of excellence.
They don't go together.
But against the backdrop of at least starting on or around the same line...
And also against the backdrop of saying that even if somebody does get to that destination, it's just a question of things.
It's just a question of materialistic differences, but not normative, moral differences, citizen self-worth differences.
In that sense, we're still all equal.
I think that's the way to sort of weave our way through what is the otherwise, you know, I would say thorny thicket of the debates we've had for...
Over 100 years in this country about inequality.
Thinking about this idea of unearned inequality, we have so many examples, especially over the last few years.
I'll give one example.
I was just looking at a thread written by Vinay Prasad, professor of epidemiology at UCSF, looking at all the ways in which the CDC, for example, Provides the public health guidance for the nation—these are supposed to be the elitist of the elite public health officials—has utterly failed.
It's actually quite the list to read.
You might think to yourself, my goodness, these people are in charge.
They're essentially setting the tone for everything that we have to do because everyone says we've got to follow these guidelines.
They're not demonstrating excellence, and that's unfair, and I'm angry.
I agree with you, there's this narrative of victimhood, but there's also this narrative coming from this idea of anger at the fact that many really incompetent people are in charge, and you're forced to live by their edicts, or something like this.
What do you think?
I think that it's a broader discussion than just the unearned.
The unearned sort of rewards.
I do think that there's a separate issue relating to just mistrust and earned mistrust of institutional leaders in our country, right?
So I think that that builds on the theme that we were just having about unearned status, right?
I was talking about the context of inheritance, but more broadly in terms of People who ascend and occupy positions of authority in institutions, I think, are increasingly putting those positions in ways that are decoupled with this idea of merit.
I mean, merit is, I define in the book, a system of allocating rewards exclusively according to principles of excellence.
Excellence is, in turn, an internal system for self-actualization of purpose of any institution.
You know, from institutional purpose follows excellence, and from excellence follows merit as a system of distributing those rewards.
Increasingly, the people who are in charge of those institutions are behaving not only in ways that dilute the purpose of those institutions, but are also put in those positions in ways that betray the principles of merit.
And I think that that's a different sense in which I think the public correctly, I think, senses that there's a...
There's an unearned status, an unearned reward that's not even financial in nature, but that goes with a certain, I would say, reward of status that was unearned.
I think, does the diversity, equity, inclusion, cancer in this country play a role in creating that unearned status?
Of course it does.
I think many people are put in those positions for reasons that...
Have little to do with their job qualifications.
But it's not just that it was some sort of, you know, racial or sexual minority or whatever that wasn't as competitive as the person who otherwise would have gotten that job in a colorblind system.
It's that the idea that you can do it for that reason then opens up the possibility that, well, if we weren't going to do it for merit, we could do it for DEI reasons.
But, you know, if we've thrown out merit, it can be somebody else's self-interested reason too, right?
It could be, okay, well, you know, I'll just put someone there because they're going to be less of a threat to me, right?
If I'm a co-equal or if I'm on the board, you know, I'll put someone there who isn't going to threaten my power structure in the organization.
There could be other unmeritocratic reasons for doing the same thing, too.
So it's a double whammy.
Not only are you getting unqualified people from certain underrepresented groups or whatever.
That itself undermines the entire justification for merit at all.
And there's all other kinds of self-interested corrupting forces that then fill that void too.
So I do think that's a big part of what's sown the seeds for this public mistrust in the idea of merit, because, you know, the right doesn't really exist in the way, you know, many institutions practice their behaviors.
Well, at this point, I have to ask you, you know, the Supreme Court is actually looking at affirmative action as we speak.
You know, what do you think?
I think the Supreme Court should strike down affirmative action, finally put a nail in that coffin.
This is a mistake that was made decades ago.
Let's recognize the mistake for what it was and at least move on to a better way of rectifying alleged racial inequities in outcomes.
There are racial inequities in outcomes, but what accounts for that, I think, starts...
At a very young age, in the families and in broken public schools starting as early as kindergarten or preschool, go upstream and fix those problems instead of using this cosmetic band-aid on the back end of the process.
Because you know what?
If affirmative action worked, then you wouldn't need the same racial minority groups who needed it to get into boarding school.
Who then needed to get into college, who are then the exact same racial minority groups that then needed to get into graduate school, who are then the exact same racial minority groups who needed to get into the workforce.
If it was working, you wouldn't need to double count or quintuple count at every step of the cascade.
Now, I'll tell you, I was at Harvard for college.
I was at Yale Law School.
I see it firsthand.
It's the same groups, the same people that require the same affirmative action programs every time through.
That means it's not working.
It's a pretty good sign that it's not working.
It's also a disservice to even the qualified members of those minority groups who do get those positions because of merit, because no one can tell the difference.
At the end of the day, they're going to reward people of certain races.
Well, even if somebody scored really highly or was excellent in their performance, they're going to be judged in an unfair way by their non-favored peers.
In the first instance, it is this form of anti-white and anti-Asian racism.
One of the things I talk about in Nation of Victims was actually a study, the last rigorous study that was conducted on this as well, I think it was by the guy Espen Shade, who found that when you look at elite colleges, I think you looked at the top 10 elite colleges or 10 of the elite colleges, there was an over 400-point gap between SAT scores that an average Asian applicant would have to score versus the average black applicant.
Let's keep in mind this is a 1600 scale test where I believe you can't score less than a 400, literally.
400 is the lowest score you can get.
And the difference between the Asians who apply to those colleges and the black people who apply to those colleges is an over 400 point delta.
Nobody talks about affirmative action for the NBA or the NFL, but if you were to apply this to the NBA or NFL, it would be the equivalent of asking someone who's black to make a half-court shot, but someone who's Asian gets a stair step right up to the hoop to go do a slam dunk.
It's something that would ruin basketball.
Nobody would want to watch basketball or watch football if it was informed by principles of affirmative action.
We shouldn't think it's anything different in science or engineering classrooms either.
It's an assault on merit.
It's an assault on excellence.
And I've said this before.
I said it in the book.
I'll say it again.
An assault on merit and an assault on excellence is an assault on the American soul.
Part of the essence of what it means to be American is to be able to pursue excellence unapologetically.
And affirmative action, I think, is the...
I think you can pretty confidently say.
I think it is the single greatest form of institutionalized racism in the United States today.
Anti-white, anti-Asian racism, but which then creates a backlash wave of new anti-black racism that we otherwise would not have had, but for the grievance that affirmative action creates amongst the people who are penalized by it.
So that's what I say.
You ever think, you know, the creation of the grievance is intentional?
I think there's a lot that happens behind closed doors that is explained by I just don't think this is the one case that fits that description.
I don't think the creation of the grievance was intentional.
I think the creation of the white savior complex that is indulged by creating a system that gives back.
To black people who supposedly couldn't hack it on their own.
That's an indulgence of sort of a white savior complex.
But I don't think that they intended to foster grievance.
I think they intended to foster gratitude.
So I think instead what happened is they created new grievances in other members of the disfavored races in this game we're talking about, whites and Asians, that then created new forms of racial animus.
Towards the people who are perceived to have taken their spots.
And then you get on an airplane and you see a black pilot and you say, well, I know that they just eliminated testing requirements because of a mandate to achieve racial equity.
I think many people will.
They won't say it out loud, but they will think twice when they see the black pilot in the cockpit wondering if they're in the hands of a slightly less qualified pilot than they otherwise would have been in a world without affirmative action.
And that is no one's fault other than the people who created the system that allowed one to even possibly make that inference.
That is what I call true systemic racism.
Affirmative action is the systemic racism that's still here in America today.
And I'm sorry to say it will then create the new kind of anti-black racism that we had spent so many decades moving on from.
I want to shift gears a little bit.
Essentially, you make the argument that it's not just the left that is basically thinking of themselves as victims.
It's also conservatives, very much so.
You have a whole chapter dedicated to this, and then you end up in this arms race of victimhood.
I want to get you to talk a little bit about that.
You also issue a challenge, and the challenge is— You know, we have to lay down our arms, right?
But then there's a lot of people that might not think it's been a fair game, fair battle.
So tell me.
Yeah, so the chapter is entitled Conservative Victimhood.
And this is one of my reflections and one of my concerns is that I worry that this culture war we're in ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, where both sides are infected with the same cancer.
Yet still continuing to fight each other, not knowing that they're actually members of the same victimhood tribe.
And one of the points I make in this chapter is that there are legitimate reasons for conservative victimhood.
We could spend hours talking about them.
Some of them I even lay out in Woke Inc., by the way.
Others of them I didn't lay out in Woke Inc., but are more economic in nature.
You think about, let's take the policy decision that we made in this country.
For the dollar to be the reserve currency of the world.
I think that is a good thing for the United States, by the way, for the dollar to be the reserve currency of the world.
It gives us control of the global financial system.
It's what allows us to freeze terrorist assets on demand.
It is what lowers borrowing costs for the United States.
But if the dollar is the reserve currency of the world, that means that there's a little bit of artificial extra demand for the dollar above and beyond what would have existed under market conditions where the dollar was not the reserve currency.
What does that mean?
That's an artificial buying pressure that pushes up the average price of the dollars.
We have a strong dollar.
But a strong dollar is actually bad for exporters because that means their goods are incrementally more expensive, artificially more expensive on the global stage.
So it's great for importers in the United States, but it's bad for exporters, bad for manufacturers.
Well, they're left holding the bag.
It's a great policy that grows the size of the pie for everyone in the United States overall, but leaves one group of people, you know.
People who live in today's Rust Belt holding the bag.
Then you go to the next policy.
Think about student loan forgiveness.
That's recent in the news.
Well, again, somebody who borrowed money to go buy a truck or whatever it is and build a career as a trucker in that industrial Rust Belt, they didn't get their loans forgiven for buying that truck, even though somebody who went to Bryn Mawr College or whatever it might be did for being a humanities major.
I'm not saying that...
You know, we can question the merits of that policy.
I personally think that policy was a boneheaded policy, but put that to one side, that's the same group of people then left holding the bag.
Then you look at where's military enrollment coming from.
Well, you know, it turns out that we do need a military to defend this country, that we don't get to live the free lives that you and I live without actually having people willing to defend it.
Well, again, same group of people holding the bag.
Then you look at the intellectual property system.
Well, the intellectual property system is effectively a government-created...
No subsidy to knowledge-based industries, and no subsidy is free.
It effectively comes at the cost of manufacturing industries, the same manufacturing industries and people who worked in it who were penalized by the dollar as reserve currency policy framework that created the strong dollar.
So anyway, I could go on and on, and in as rigorous a way as one could want, hopefully, paint the case for conservative victimhood, Trumpian victimhood, justified.
Reasons for victimhood that resulted in the election of Trump in 2016 as the expression of that frustration.
Got it.
But you know what else we could do?
Go to the left-leaning version of this conversation.
You know, we're here in New York City.
I'm sure there are a lot of them happening.
There'll be the same sob story told by somebody else about the black victimhood narratives, about redlining in this country, how literally there were laws written that prevented black people from living in certain neighborhoods.
Take the war on drugs, you know, the...
Again, it's trite because everyone's talked about this stuff ad nauseum, but there is a difference in arrest rates for crack cocaine versus non-crack cocaine.
So one is more disproportionate and prevalent in the black community.
Well, they'll say, you blame us for having unstable family structures where you're the guys who took the father figures and put them in jail.
The black victimhood epidemic is now creating a new epidemic of white victimhood culture in our country.
Second-generation Asian kids are now growing up in this country trying to describe themselves as persons of color, inventing hardships for themselves that they didn't actually go through, but their parents or their grandparents actually did in coming to this country.
And so we have this...
This victimhood metastasis where everyone wants to think of themselves as a victim.
And at some point, I think that we have to recognize there is no winner in America's oppression Olympics.
There is no gold medalist.
If there's a gold medalist, maybe it's China.
China may be the gold medalist of America's victimhood Olympics.
Our assault on merit over here.
But America as a nation is who loses in the end.
And so at some point...
We're going to have to get past the grievance tug of war, saying that, you know what, you have a grievance?
You think you were oppressed?
Well, guess what?
I was oppressed by even more, right?
That's the white victimhood complex in response to black victim.
At some point, we've got to stop, guys.
We're done.
That's the part where I say lay down arms.
Okay, everyone might have the real valid reasons for their claims on victimhood, but start to forget about your claim on victimhood and reclaim your claim on excellence.
That is what we need to revive in our culture, or else we're not going to have a nation, certainly not a competitive one, left at the end of it.
We'll just have a hollowed-out husk of America as a geographic space.
But, you know, what are we, a bunch of higher mammals roaming around a common geographic space?
We're not animals.
We're human beings, free agents who came together to found a nation built on principles of excellence.
We're going to have to return to reviving that national spirit if we're to have a chance of passing the torch on to that next generation, which is why, you know, I even bothered to write this book.
Each side needs to forgive the other.
And this is what you argue.
The response to that, I can kind of hear it in my ear because I see it almost every day.
For example, there was this recent article in The Atlantic calling for pandemic amnesty for everyone that did poor things or vilified others during the pandemic and so forth.
And people are saying, well, okay.
There needs to be accountability for these terrible behaviors.
Sure, maybe even we can do forgiveness, but what about accountability?
Forgiveness and accountability are two separate conversations and one is not a substitute for the other.
What I actually worry about is we might be in the worst of all worlds where we wallow in grievance without accountability.
So in a certain sense...
I worry that we're in that worst-case scenario where everyone experiences grievance, but we're not actually doing the things to hold the people who erred to be accountable.
I argue for the exact opposite of that, where we should have forgiving attitudes to one another as fellow co-equal citizens.
But that doesn't mean if you commit a crime, you don't do your time.
That doesn't mean that if you fail as a leader that you aren't put out of a job so that somebody else is put in that spot in return.
And I think it's a very different balance we need to strike.
Not the double whammy combo of both grievance without accountability, but a forgiving view of human nature, of co-equal citizens as co-equal partners in building a nation while still recognizing the fact that if you were put in a leadership position and you failed, you deserve to be held accountable.
If you broke a law, we will rehabilitate you through our criminal justice system and through our rehabilitation system.
But that doesn't mean that you're not held accountable for bashing in a storefront in the summer of 2020. Forgiveness doesn't mean that you don't bear some level of punishment and go through a rectification system.
But I think we can do both of those things at once.
Not only can we do both those things at once, I think they're actually even synchronous with one another.
I think part of respecting someone's humanity is to recognize that they deserve a level of being held accountable for I think the path from victimhood to excellence runs through a lot of complicated terrain.
And that's probably the most important part of the book.
I think the path from victimhood to excellence runs through forgiveness.
I think it runs through hardship.
I also think that there are good reasons to be optimistic.
There's a lot of analogies that people draw today between the rise and fall of the American experiment and the rise and fall of Rome.
That's why I spent a couple chapters in this book detailing the history of Rome.
I had to brush off some of my Roman history.
Actually, I studied Latin in seventh and eighth grade.
That was most of the Roman history I learned came from those years in middle school.
And one of the things I reminded myself of is, you know what?
There was no one rise and fall of Rome, it turns out.
There were many rises and there were many falls.
And you know what?
There are many rises and many falls of the American experiment, too.
There have been.
And I think that, yes, we may be at a low point.
We may be at a nadir.
But I don't think we're done with this one yet.
I think we have many generations yet left to go.
And if we can take the hardship that I think we're going to encounter in the next couple of years, but remind ourselves that Hardship is not the same thing as victimhood.
Hardship can be what reminds us who we are, both as individuals and as a people.
Then we will be stronger for it as individuals and as a nation on the other side of it.
And I'm actually optimistic that that's exactly what's going to happen.
It's just that we're going through a rough patch in getting there.
My concern is, I'm like you, I'm very bullish on the U.S. I think the U.S. can handle a lot and people can figure things out.
But what if we get so weak?
That this nefarious power, the Chinese Communist Party, can really take advantage and take over.
That is one of the risks we need to guard against, which is why I have been as vocal as I possibly can on this issue.
I think it is the single greatest threat to the future of America, to the future of the free Western civilization, free countries, and democratic freedom around the world as we know it.
And you know what?
I think that...
They're deeply aware of some of the kinks in our armor.
I talk about this extensively in Woke Inc., about the relationship between stakeholder capitalism and ESG, applying asymmetric standards in the West that they don't apply in China.
That's actually in service of China's own agenda.
But you know what?
There's kinks in their armor, too.
And as long as we educate ourselves to become more aware of it, I think we might be able to come out on the winning side of this, because history teaches us that it is the ego.
The hubris of dictators and autocrats that eventually proves to be their Achilles heel.
I have no reason to believe that it will not be the same for Xi Jinping.
He's just taken over that third term.
We just need to prepare ourselves to be as excellent as we possibly can.
You know, Rome fought that.
Punic War with Carthage over the small island of Sicily.
I asked the question of whether Taiwan might be the Sicily of our time.
But the question is, are we Rome or are we Carthage?
And that's a question for America to answer through decisions we make in our culture, through decisions we make in our economy, even decisions we make in our military.
As I point out in the book, we're in the middle of this divest to invest program.
I think an ill thought, ill conceived military policy where we're decommissioning ships precisely during the window that China might make its move on Taiwan.
I think this is a complete rethink from.
Institutions ranging from government to military, to our economy, to our culture.
But I think if we can revive our path back to excellence in each of them, then my bet is still on America, leading that way, not only for you and I, but for our children and for the free world as we know it.
It's going to take real work, and it's a big part of why I wrote these books, and it's a big part of why I hope we can educate our fellow citizens to do what needs to be done.
Take that hardship that we're about to go through, that we're already going through right now, and to be strengthened by it rather than to be defined by it.
Well, Viva Kramaswamy.
It's such a pleasure to have you on again.
Thank you, Jan.
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