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Oct. 16, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
20:31
Defeating the Left Without Becoming the Left
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Well, the election is now just in a matter of days, just three weeks till we get to the big day.
And if it were held tomorrow, which of course it's not, if it's held tomorrow, it's pretty clear to me that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance would be the next president and vice president of the United States.
The Senate races are still a little bit too close to call.
I'm not a horse race analyst, though.
I bring this up because in our rush to that destination, I guess it's worth remembering that November 5th isn't a destination.
It's a starting line.
For what we hope to achieve in a new conservative movement actually governing in America.
But what is that new conservative movement?
It's interesting that we've talked a lot about the evolution of the Republican Party in popular circles without really dissecting what's going on beneath the surface.
I think in many ways today, the different factions of the right comprise a coalition that is united in its opposition to left-wing excess.
It's a lot of the left-wing excess I talk about in my latest book, Truths, The Future of America First.
Yes, we are united as conservatives against left-wing excess.
But are we actually united in an agenda that we stand for?
And that's a question we don't often pause to ask, and I don't think it's particularly the question that's going to make or break before the election either.
But afterwards, when we think about a governing policy agenda of what a 51-49 majority in the Senate actually means, you might wonder, you might behoove us to wonder how that 51 votes is actually comprised, right?
How is that composed?
Well, now the question is, what actually are the factions underlying that?
The traditional explanations, you've got the neoconservatives, and one end of the spectrum, the 1990s era, Bush-Cheney conservatives, and then you've got the conservatives of the America First variety.
Okay, we can dissect that for what it means.
So we've got a deep divide, no doubt, in the conservative movement, not something that we particularly care to delve into in the 20 days left before the election, but it does quite a bit matter afterwards when you think about what that governing coalition looks like.
Traditionally, the divide is presented this way.
I'm actually going to cast this in different terms in just a little bit, but I'll give you the traditional presentation first, is that you've got the neocons at one end of the spectrum, and then you've got America First conservatives on the other side.
The neocons are historically associated with Bush-era conservatism, McCain-era conservatism, the kinds of neoliberal policies but in conservative presentation.
On issues related to trade, immigration, a general belief in more trade is good, a general belief in more economic activity through immigration is good, a general belief in foreign interventionism, a general belief, a sunny belief in the post-Berlin Wall fall that we could use capitalism as a vector to spread democracy to other parts of the world.
And when capitalism alone couldn't do it, we could use military force to do the same thing.
That was the neoconservative vision of the 1990s and 2000s.
That stands in contrast to the brand of conservatism that Donald Trump really brought to the fore, now the dominant vision for the Republican Party, which is the America First vision, the vision that rejects interventionist foreign policy.
The message of conservatism that says the first and sole moral duty of U.S. elected leaders is to U.S. citizens, that nationalism isn't really a bad word, that trade or immigration policies, if applied in the wrong ways in the neoliberal framework, could actually disadvantage it.
Americans.
That's broadly speaking what you might think of as America first.
So, so far, if you've got a Republican Party that in many ways is united only in its opposition to the left but has these couple of factions underneath it, what do those two factions actually stand for?
Well, what I believe, and I think this is actually even more interesting, is there are different shades and even, I would say, different brands of America first that rest underneath that surface as well.
I've talked about this in a prior episode of the podcast.
I'm going to be talking about this more as well.
Between the national libertarian view and the national protectionist view.
See, the national protectionists believe that trade policy ought to protect American manufacturers from the effects of foreign price competition.
Protectionists believe that the immigration policies of the United States should actually protect American workers from the effect of foreign wage competition, which depresses the amount that American workers are able to earn.
And of course, rejects the historical foreign policy premises of interventionism using our tax dollars to fight somebody else's war.
The national libertarian perspective agrees with that foreign policy view, but has some departures when it comes to the questions of, for example, trade and immigration policy.
When it comes to trade, I think the core national libertarian concern, and the national and national libertarian is key here, is that we can't depend on an adversary, an enemy, like China, for essential sectors to our own national security.
It doesn't make sense.
Today, 40% of the semiconductors that power the U.S. Department of Defense come from China.
Our military, broadly, U.S., Army, Navy, Air Force depend on inputs and supply chains starting in China.
95% of the ibuprofen and so many other pharmaceuticals in our own country depend on China.
So our adversary is essentially responsible for providing the inputs for our own security.
That was never true of the Soviet Union.
During the Cold War, of course.
And so the National Libertarian view is, no, we reject the neoliberal myth of yesterday that we could export Big Macs and Happy Meals from China and that would spread democracy.
No, that's not right.
But if we're really serious about declaring economic independence from China, Then that actually means more, not less, expanded economic and trade relationships with the likes of South Korea, Japan, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia, and so on.
Allies of the United States.
Not just on-shoring to the US, which of course is the first best option, but also near-shoring to allies.
But if you really believe in that, then that actually puts pressure on the other view of protecting American manufacturers from the effects of foreign price competition.
But if that's your sole objective, that means less trade.
With the likes of Japan and South Korea and India, which in turn actually delays the timeline that you're able to use to declare economic independence in China.
So you see there's no free lunch here.
It's just that where you place your priorities.
That's on the question of trade.
On the question of immigration, you actually have competing visions of what immigration policy in the U.S. ought to be.
The old neoliberal vision was just that the U.S. is an economic zone.
More immigration is better.
If companies are able to maximize efficiency with lower labor costs, have at it, great.
The National Protectionist view, as I explained earlier, rejects that and says, no, no, no, part of the job is to protect American workers from the effects of large mass migration.
And by the way, for the purposes of this discussion, just to be clear, everybody in the Republican Party basically today is against illegal immigration.
I think sometimes we use the vehemence of our opposition to illegal immigration, and I'm a hardliner on this one.
We use the vehemence of our opposition to illegal immigration and addressing the border crisis To paper over some real differences of opinion that we have on approaches to legal immigration.
And the protectionist, if you at least say what you will for it, is clear that the job of immigration policy is also to serve as labor policy to protect American workers from the effects of foreign price competition, which is a coherent view.
You could agree with it or not, but it's a coherent view.
The alternative view, the national libertarian view, but the national and national libertarian distinguishes it from the neoliberalism of yesterday.
Hold on a second.
We can't just view the United States as an economic zone because the United States is more than an economic zone.
It's a nation.
A nation comprised by citizens who share a certain set of civic ideals and commitments and a civic duty to that nation in common.
And even if we have mass economic migration that technically grows the size of the economic pie in the short run, That isn't good enough if it also erodes the shared civic foundation that the country is comprised of.
So say you have a bunch of people who don't speak the national language, who don't pledge allegiance to the same nation, who don't actually believe in the national values of the United States, but can labor away at lower costs in ways that grow the size of the economic pie.
The pure neoliberal vision would say that's okay.
The national libertarian vision says not quite, actually.
In fact, far from it.
We should prioritize immigration policies that attract to the United States those who actually pledge allegiance to the ideal that the United States of America was founded on, those who speak the national language or what I believe should be the national language of the United States, England, who are ready to assimilate into American culture, who are ready to depart with, when they become citizens of this country, allegiances that they may bear to other countries.
But that's a different view than saying that this is about labor policy.
It's not about protectionism of the wages of American workers so much as it is protecting the national civic foundation of the United States of America.
And also, by the way, those who are going to be willing to embody those values in working hard and adding to the economy.
That's different from the immigrationist labor policy perspective.
And so what's interesting about this is after I raised this some number of weeks ago, there's been some thoughtful dialogue around this.
I think more of this is going to come up.
But some elements of the American protectionist camp, the protectionist America First camp, said, no, no, no, this is just sort of neoliberalism in new clothing.
Isn't it just, okay, if we're going to have immigration policies that aren't concerned with protecting the wages of American-born workers from foreign price competition, isn't that just a reversion to the old norm?
And here, the challenge I would present, it's a fair attempt at a criticism.
I disagree with it, but I want to air the perspective to say that, okay, even though Vivek agrees with the future vision, and in fact, I'm far more, if I may say, I would say unabiding in my commitment to America First vision for foreign policy, even in some that may go a little soft on certain other questions, I actually stay true to that.
They may still say, okay, even if we're all in the same camp on foreign policy, when it comes to trade policy or immigration, this is just a reversion to neoliberalism.
I've seen a couple of articles that have come out that have criticized my view on those grounds.
And I think it's good for us to have this conversation.
I'm grateful, frankly, to the people who even wrote those pieces, even though I think they may mischaracterize or misunderstand me.
But I think let's talk about it.
The irony here is, actually, what I see as the reversion is actually the protectionist version.
Because the real difference between the national libertarian view and the national protectionist view is our competing attitudes towards the regulatory state.
See, part of the national protectionist position is that we want to use the levers of government To actually, in a muscular way, stand for the interests of American workers and manufacturers.
It's a coherent view.
You can agree with it or not.
It's not my view exactly.
But that's the national protectionist view, is that we've got to use the FTC to break up companies that are just too big.
We've got to use the CFPD, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to implement a cap on credit card interest rates.
We've got to redirect the Department of Education to subsidize two-year degrees or vocational programs rather than four-year college degrees, and so on.
I mean, I could go on with other agencies, too.
Department of Transportation is a big one.
We need more regulations to make sure that trains aren't falling off the tracks or planes aren't falling out of the sky, something that none of us want.
Versus the National Libertarian view, which says that we don't want to reshape the left-wing regulatory state with a muscular right-wing version.
We want to go in there and dismantle that.
Shut down the Department of Education, return the money to the states.
Shut down countless other agencies that don't need to exist today.
Thin down the federal bureaucracy and its headcount by 75% with a lot of the regulations to go along with it, not adding more regulations to the Department of Transportation, but thinning out regulations at the DOT and elsewhere across the board.
That's a competing and different view.
And so what's actually at stake anyway to sort of respond to the criticisms that I've, you know, Intellectual, healthy debate, but criticism that I've encountered in the last several weeks after I've shared my views, is that, oh, no, no, this is just a reversion to elements of the old conservatism.
Actually, I view it the other way around.
If you really trace the history here, neoconservatism was an evolution from an older version of conservatism that was opposed to the rise of the American nanny state.
So here you've got to really understand the history.
A lot of the regulatory state and the nanny state and the entitlement state and the muscular form of government, that came out of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
This actually came out in last week's episode of the podcast, which if you haven't checked it out, I encourage you to, was my conversation with Christopher Caldwell.
He's the author of a great book called The Age of Entitlement.
But he's laid out the way in which the 1960s, according to him, with the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson, comprised effectively a kind of second constitutional convention in America.
A second kind of re-bargaining of what our actual rights and substantive negative rights but also positive rights are as Americans in ways that came at attention with the original Constitution, including up to the 1st and 14th Amendments.
But since then, you traded off your sovereignty for stuff.
You got a bunch of stuff, Medicaid, welfare, etc., but you got a regulatory state that impeded your sovereignty since then.
That was the original synesthesia, and I agree with this, in the 1960s.
The conservative response to that was to say that we want to shut down that entitlement state, that regulatory state, that entire nanny state.
That used to be the classical conservative response, was to say that we don't want to replace this left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.
It would be unthinkable.
It wouldn't even make sense.
There's no such thing as a right-wing nanny state.
It's an oxymoron on its own terms in this classical 1960s, 1970s conservative response.
But that was where it began.
The neoconservatives, actually I want to talk about neocons, the real neocons, were those that through the 1990s and 2000s, Went soft on that, actually, through compassionate conservatism, through George Bush-era conservatism.
I said, wait a minute.
Okay, we're going to effectively accept the existence of the state.
A lot of that's here to stay.
But we want to run government efficiently.
Okay, we're not going to dismantle the regulatory state.
We're not really going to take aim at the entitlement state.
None of that's going to change anyway.
Let's at least make sure that it's run efficiently.
Oh, and while we're at it in terms of accepting the permanence of a certain level of, if not giant government, at least big or medium-sized government, we might as well use that to spread democracy around the world through our foreign interventionism in places like Iraq.
It actually kind of made sense, which in turn actually reinforced the welfare state, by the way.
The more you expand the warfare state, the more you necessarily have to expand the welfare state.
Because if you invade the rest of the world and cause a lot of chaos, you invite them in.
That's why, and I talked about this last week with Christopher Caldwell as well, that's why a lot of the invasions in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East where we've tinkered around are now costing Europe in the form of its mass migration and even the mass migration crisis to the U.S. But it's a certain sense in which that neoconservative vision actually hung together based on saying that we're accepting a certain level of the state existing,
but we're just going to use it kind of at least efficiently to some of the right ends, manage it, curb it around the edges from just getting too big, but not really trying to shave it down.
And while we're at it, let's go invade some other countries.
That was actually the neoconservative view.
So in some sense, what I see in a protectionist vision of the America First Right Is actually almost accepting the neocon supposition that the big state, the muscular state, is here to stay.
But here, rather than just focusing on keeping it bounded and efficient, to say that, oh, let's redirect it in advance actually substantive pro-worker, pro-American goals.
So to those who would say that my view, to go in and shut down all of these agencies, to be able to say I don't want the government making decisions of what is or is not fair competition, that I don't want the government turning the Department of Labor into its manifestation of an avatar of what we call immigration policy, or to delay our declaration of economic independence in critical sectors from China because we care about protectionism.
That somehow is a reversion?
No, no, no.
I think, with due respect, you got it wrong.
I think the real reversion is the acceptance and the codification of the neoconsupposition, which is a departure from older school conservatism, classical conservatism, that said, the state's here to stay, and effectively have the cascade of the welfare and the warfare state, one succeeding the other in this vicious cycle we've been in the 21st century.
With due respect, I think that actually the protectionist vision represents more of the reversion to one of the core premises of neoconservatism, more so than what I view as the shut it down vision, which I'm partial to, but I believe is exactly how we're going to save the country.
And I know this is not super, you know, sexy stuff in advance of an election.
It seems esoteric and not particularly relevant.
Maybe to some audiences they may feel that way, and that's fair.
You know, we've got to beat the libs, and I get that.
And I'm all in for that, by the way, spending a lot of my time and energy defeating Democrats, and not just the level of the presidency in the White House, but in down-ballot races, too.
I'm working hard even here in my home state in Ohio.
But I just think when we're working so hard, it's worth understanding and occasionally pausing to remember the why.
And for me, the right why is we want to get in there and shut the darn thing down, dismantle the nanny state, dismantle the entitlement state, dismantle the regulatory state, dismantle the foreign policy nanny state.
These things go together.
Versus adopting some of the methods of the left to beat the left, but then you kind of become the left.
And I don't like Kamala Harris's price controls, but I'm going to implement the other price controls instead.
I think that muddies the water.
And ironically, actually, I think it even makes us a little less successful because we're then able to be called hypocrites by the other side and we're advancing some policy or other.
And I do think that once we win, you know, I do think that that is a likely possibility.
If you actually want hell tomorrow, I think it's an autonomous definite possibility.
Once we win, I think this is what it's going to take to take our country to the next level, is an honest reckoning of what it actually means to be a Republican, but not just even yesterday's Republican versus the new, the neocons versus America First, but even to unpack what America First really means and what really is or isn't a reversion to neoconservatism, not just for the sake of saying a reversion is bad as an end in itself, but more importantly, what takes us to the right future for our country?
And I'm hopeful that, you know, a few years from now, the Make America Great Again movement won't, like so many of these agencies that were established, won't have to even worry about making America great again by appealing to the past because America will once again, a few years from now, be great in the present.
That leaves us with the deeper question of how do we actually make America greater?
MAG becomes MAG in some ways.
But I think making America greater, that's what our creed has always been.
Making America greater than it's ever been.
That's what the pursuit of excellence, the pursuit of a more perfect union has been all about.
We're only going to get there if we have the rich quality of debate about why we're implementing the policies that we do in our own movement.
And one of the things I look forward to on the other side of November 5th Is to be able to get back into the questions of the why, rather than, you know, going through the necessary motions you have to to win an election.
I'm all about it.
I'm all in and excited to do that.
I'm doing my part of it.
You guys probably see me on the road.
I'm traveling way too much than is desirable from a family perspective to help make that happen.
But I'm at my best, certainly, when we keep the North Star of the Y front and center.
And I think on November 6th, when we wake up hopefully to a victory, we will be ready not to just rest on our laurels, but to stay sharp by having this debate about what the future of America First is really all about.
And that is part of why I wrote this book.
Believe me, I don't.
You know, generate my wealth in any meaningful way from selling books.
But this is the fourth book that I've written, and it is, I hope, the most important and impactful one.
It's the easiest one to read, certainly, but the book is called Truths, the Future of America First.
I'm speaking those truths not just to the left, but if you read carefully between the lines, to our own side and our own camp as well.
So check out the episode with Christopher Caldwell last week.
This conversation was a little bit of a rejoinder to close the loop on some of those themes.
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