Taking Vivek Ramaswamy Seriously
Why an anti-woke biotech bro worth hundreds of millions of dollars is running for president, and why he thinks he can win.
One of my biggest pet peeves about election coverage is that the media is very quick to dismiss unconventional candidates. Of course, some of the wackos who run for office don’t deserve serious attention, but then there are the Donald Trumps, the Barack Obamas, the Bernie Sanderses, and the Andrew Yangs. Sometimes, the candidates initially mocked by the media end up making a deep imprint on American politics.
It was with that lesson in mind that I decided to write an article about Vivek Ramaswamy. If you’re not extremely plugged into political news, you might not have heard of him, but Ramaswamy is the third real candidate to enter the GOP primary (after Donald Trump and Nikki Haley).
As with other political upstarts, the mainstream media has mostly treated Ramaswamy as a punchline. They’ve done this not after seriously considering his campaign, but just as a matter of course.
With this article, I wanted to do the opposite: to take an earnest look at Ramaswamy, the substance and merit of his platform, and whether he has a real shot at winning the GOP nomination.
Who is Vivek Ramaswamy?
Until just a few years ago, Ramaswamy was only known for being an extremely successful young entrepreneur and investor. As the son of Indian immigrants, the fact in 2016, he was worth around $600 million was primarily seen as a good old-fashioned American success story.
That is, until 2021, when he wrote and published Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam — a book I have not read, but which pitches itself as a behind-the-scenes look at the “modern woke-industrial complex.” We’ll get to his ideology and message later on, but as you might have picked up from his book title, Ramaswamy was making a name for himself as an anti-woke activist criticizing social justice excesses.
While he had been inching his way into conservative politics for a few years, the book’s release marked Ramaswamy’s transition from being primarily a business figure to a political one. It’s also around the time that I remember first hearing his name, when he was interviewed on a podcast I listen to. But it was the following year, 2022, when his political star really started to rise, and he got regular invitations to shows with national audiences like The Megyn Kelly Show, Real Time With Bill Maher, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and many others.
And then, less than a month ago, Ramaswamy announced that he was running for president via this Tweet:
His Platform
The fundamental idea that Ramaswamy is running on is that America is having a national identity crisis. As a country, he argues, we’ve lost everything that used to give us a sense of purpose — patriotism, community, faith, merit, and hard work. The void that these things left in their wake, he says, has been filled by the new totalitarian ideology of wokeness.
How this central idea applies to tangible policy is a bit opaque. On most issues, it feels like Ramaswamy either dances around a policy prescription or filters the standard Republican position through his lens of national purpose/anti-wokeness. In his launch video, for instance, he tells viewers, “you might disagree with each other about corporate tax rates or about whether ivermectin treats COVID—but those are details.” In other words, Ramaswamy thinks that he can get a critical mass of people behind his “national purpose” campaign without sweating the specifics.
That said, there are some issues where he’s taken a clear stand, like wanting to dramatically shrink the size of the government bureaucracy, decouple from China economically, and limit tech platforms’ ability to moderate their platforms. Above all else, though, Ramaswamy wants to crush what he calls the “woke industrial complex.”
This anti-woke agenda includes banning affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. There’s also his proposal to restrict something called “environmental, social, and corporate governance investing” (ESG), which is when investors leverage their money to encourage corporations to consider how they can advance environmental or social goals. Ramaswamy sees ESG as just a trojan horse for wokeness — a way for social justice activism to worm its way deeper into corporate life in America. He’s even called it “the gravest danger that American democracy faces today.”
From my perspective, Ramaswamy’s platform is honestly just frustrating. I actually find a lot of his diagnoses about what ails America pretty compelling. For instance, I like how he talks about the fundamental importance of free speech and open debate; I agree that we need to compete economically with China; I agree that social justice activists frequently overcorrect for historical wrongs and take “wokeness” too far.
The problem is that he’s consistently sensationalist about how bad things are, which leads him to sign onto very extreme policy prescriptions. He loses me when he proposes policies like punishing social media companies who moderate content on their platforms, banning U.S. companies from doing business with China, using military force in Mexico to take out drug cartels, and shutting down government agencies from the Department of Energy to the FBI.”
In other words, Ramaswamy is too hyperbolic for my taste, leading him to extreme policy interventions that are offputting in both rhetoric and substance.
His Theory for Winning the GOP Primary
Ramaswamy’s case for why he can win the GOP primary rests on the premise that the party’s base is motivated, above all else, by the culture war. His theory seems to be that Republicans are so concerned with crushing wokeness out of public life that they’ll rally around the candidate who makes that the center of their campaign.
Ramaswamy also seems to believe that his dual message of national purpose/anti-wokeness will overshadow any other disagreements he has with the party's base — that if he can stay on message, he won’t need to take divisive stances on other issues that divide the GOP.
In addition to the brute strength of his message, Ramaswamy must see his personal background as an advantage. It’s not hard to imagine the GOP base getting excited by a young first-generation Indian American launching an assault on wokeness. Moreover, he’s a political outsider, and the GOP is in the midst of an anti-establishment moment.
Lastly, Ramaswamy’s case for why he can win relies on two other advantages he has over the rest of the field. First, he has hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth that he could pump into his campaign. This might be enough to muscle his way through the early primary states and go all the way. Second, he has nothing to lose. The worst-case scenario is that he builds his national profile, setting himself up to either run again in the future or make even more money on his next book.
That’s the optimistic case for Ramaswamy. Unfortunately for him, I think the pessimistic case is a lot stronger.
For one thing, the flip side to being a political outsider is being inexperienced. Donald Trump was able to make the inexperience work because (whether you like to admit it or not) he carried a certain charisma. But Ramaswamy is relentlessly serious, so his inexperience makes him look silly. One small example is when he tweeted, “in Jan 2025 there’ll be a new daddy in town,” in reference to himself becoming president. Another is that his campaign’s slogan is the impressively drab “excellence over politics.” And if these small details don’t convince you that his inexperience is a drag, just look at his mess of a campaign website.
A related problem for Ramaswamy is his entire personality. By that, I mean a politically toxic combination of hyperbole, corniness, and extremism. If you’d like an example, watch this cringe-inducing part of his launch video where, over a hyperdramatic soundtrack, he goes into a rant full of soaring rhetoric that begins as an attack against Democrats and finishes with a repurposed version of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech.
Moreover, the “tech bro railing against elites and wokeism” bit gets old after about five minutes. I don’t see the populist appeal to a guy with hundreds of millions of dollars railing against the country’s elites. This may have worked for Trump, but again, Trump is a singular figure in American politics. Ramaswamy has nothing close to the former president’s charisma, and his populism comes across as a performance.
Perhaps there’s no way that someone in Ramaswamy’s position could portray himself as a man of the people. But Ramaswamy does himself no favors in the self-righteous way he talks or in the way he presents himself. For example, look at the biography below from his website, which is almost comically unrelatable.
Lastly, and perhaps most damning for his candidacy, Ramaswamy and his platform are, frankly, just weird. Look, for example, at the tweet below.
I’m not sure who told Ramaswamy that “the great uprising” or his stated priority to “dismantle managerial bureaucracy” were good issues to campaign on, but they’re not. Imagine how your grandma or teenage nephew or anybody not extremely online would respond if you said that Ramaswamy is running to “dismantle managerial bureaucracy,” launch “the great uprising,” and ban ESG. These pet issues don’t make Ramaswamy exciting or fresh; they make him look weird.
When I started researching this piece, I was determined to take Ramaswamy seriously. But that task became increasingly difficult the more I learned about him and the campaign he is running. His personal flaws are just too deep, and his message too bizarre, to imagine him getting anywhere close to the nomination.
Ultimately, Ramaswamy’s fundamental weakness is that it’s hard to shake the feeling that he is better equipped to be a Bitcoin day trader than to be commander in chief. I don’t think that’s something he’ll be able to overcome, no matter how much red meat he throws to the anti-woke base of the Republican Party.
Thanks for reading Brain Candy! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
If you’re already signed up, there are two things you could do to help me out:
First, you can share this post with someone who might like it by forwarding this email or sending a link.
Second, you can pledge future support in case I ever turn on a paid subscription tier. (I won’t turn that on without telling you, and it’s really a way to gauge the viability of doing this full-time.)