Vivek Ramaswamy is an American business leader, New York Times bestselling author, and former Republican presidential candidate. His standout performances on the debate stage and the campaign trail have made him a mainstay commentator on topics ranging from the latest electoral trends to the economy, big tech, and higher education. In this episode, he discusses his takeaways from his presidential campaign and how conservatives should be messaging to win this election season. He also breaks down what an America First platform really looks like and the need to redefine Americanism in support of our country s founding ideals. On this episode of the Sunday Special, he gets to the heart of these issues and so many more on this week s episode of The Sunday Special with John Rocha. Subscribe to John's newest book, Truths, The Future of America First, which lays out a positive vision for the future of American conservatism. If you haven t done so already, please take a moment to leave a rating and review the episode on Apple Podcasts. John is a big fan of John's work and will be looking to make sure to give John a shoutout in the future episodes of the show. Thank you for listening and supporting John's efforts to make a difference in the world of podcasting, podcasting and podcasting! John's new book, Truths: The Future Of America First is out now! is available on Amazon Prime and Podchaser, wherever you get your copy of the podcast. John s new book is available. Thanks for listening to John s Sunday Special? Thanks to John for being a good listen and John's Sunday Special is available everywhere else, John is listening to the podcast on the podcast, John s podcast is available in the past week, and much more than you can reach out to the world, and John s phone number: and more than that, too, too much of the world can be reached through the rest of the best of John s work, and he's listening to you, too you can be a good thing, and all of the good things that John s good at it, and more of that you can do that, and so much more, so much of that, you can help us all can help John s a good guy, too of that guy is amazing, good things, good stuff, thank you s thanks , and more, thank you so much, good morning, good day, good night, and good night.
00:00:00.000I think the idea that we, the people, actually can be trusted to govern ourselves, for better or for worse, which acknowledges that we're going to be trade-offs, sometimes we'll get it wrong.
00:00:09.000The idea that you get to speak your mind openly and express any opinion, no matter what that opinion is, no matter how heinous it is to me.
00:00:15.000The fact that you get to express that opinion as long as I get to in return.
00:00:18.000The fact that you get to practice your religion, whatever that religion is, as long as you're not hurting somebody else in the process.
00:00:23.000That's what made America great the first time.
00:00:26.000Vivek Ramaswamy is an American business leader, New York Times bestselling author, and former Republican presidential candidate.
00:00:32.000His standout performances on the debate stage and the campaign trail have made him a mainstay commentator on topics ranging from the latest electoral trends to the economy, big tech, and higher education.
00:00:42.000In 2021, Ramaswamy's best-selling book Woke Inc.
00:00:45.000argued for corporate America's rejection of the activist left and caught the attention of the political class by pointing to our government's perverse incentive structures and bloated three-letter agencies.
00:00:55.000In his latest book, Truths, The Future of America First, Vivek criticizes the Republican Party's shortcomings and lays out a positive vision for the future of American conservatism.
00:01:05.000In today's episode, Vivek discusses his takeaways from his presidential campaign and how conservatives should be messaging to win this election season.
00:01:12.000He also breaks down what an America First platform really looks like and the need to redefine Americanism in support of our country's founding ideals.
00:01:18.000Vivek Ramaswamy gets to the heart of these issues and so many more on this episode of the Sunday Special.
00:01:39.000I mean, campaigning, it looks brutal out there.
00:01:42.000I mean, that's a lot of time away from your family, on the road.
00:01:45.000What's it even like doing a presidential campaign?
00:01:48.000It is, everyone's different, so it depends on your style of doing it.
00:01:52.000Actually, we made a decision pretty early on in the campaign where Initially, for the first month, we went on a course that was not sustainable, which we quickly discovered, which is that, hey, I was going to do the campaign.
00:02:03.000You know, my wife, she's a successful surgeon at Ohio State.
00:02:06.000She's one of the best in the world at what she does.
00:02:15.000And so we quickly had a recalibration as a family about a month in just because it was going to be clear that I just wasn't going to see my kids and my family and that wasn't going to work for me.
00:02:25.000And Porvo was supportive of the same thing to say, listen, we're going to do this together as a family.
00:02:30.000So it's going to be a family mission for a year.
00:02:33.000We're going to up the level of support that we have, you know, from grandparents on both sides to, you know, frankly, a troop of people who we were able to thankfully, you know, hire to help us make whatever happened was possible.
00:02:45.000I bought a plane, which I've resisted for a long time.
00:02:48.000And although it's a great been a great decision, even for after the campaign to just maximize time with the family.
00:02:53.000And we said, you know what, we're Going to go all in on this as a family, but without making compromises either.
00:02:59.000Where our kids still, I believe, got all of what they needed to and more out of it.
00:03:08.000We had people, you know, able to teach them the alphabet and basic math and the same track that they were on before while we were traveling on the road.
00:03:17.000She had patients who depend on her and she made it back to Columbus when she needed.
00:03:21.000She rearranged her operating schedule.
00:03:23.000A little bit, to make for weekdays where she could be here consecutively.
00:03:28.000But I'm a big believer in the philosophy that sometimes you can have it all if you actually have your priorities straight.
00:03:36.000And I think that was one of the things that made the campaign a lot more fulfilling than seeing it as a sacrifice.
00:03:43.000For your family, rather than something that was actually more enriching for our family and even for my kids, you know, brought us closer together.
00:03:51.000My older son, we joke about this, but I don't think it's actually a joke.
00:03:59.000And there is something for kids who were born right around then.
00:04:03.000I mean, you'll know this well too, where there's a little bit of difference in their early social interaction that might've been a little bit less than kids are normally used to having.
00:04:12.000To the extent that existed, he more than made up for it, meeting thousands of people per week over the course of the campaign.
00:04:18.000And so I'd like to think that there was some positive in it for them as well.
00:04:22.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:06:00.000Harris, isn't it terrible that he beats his wife?
00:06:02.000And, you know, that is not a conducive forum, obviously, for the president to do well.
00:06:07.000With that said, the race remains incredibly tight.
00:06:09.000What do you think the president needs to do the rest of the way in order to be reelected in 2024?
00:06:15.000Yeah, look, I personally think that he actually would benefit from even a town hall style debate, which you didn't get in that sort of cramped room with two people.
00:06:25.000He's done really well in those town hall formats in the past.
00:06:27.000Traditionally, at least up until 2020, that had always been the practice in U.S.
00:06:31.000presidential history, is one of the debates.
00:06:33.000Generally, the second one was a town hall style format.
00:06:36.000I think that is a format where President Trump tends to shine, and my own advice is that I think he would do great, and I think he would outshine Kamala Harris in that setting.
00:06:42.000She probably wouldn't agree to it, but I think that that would then call out the fact that she's really, unless she has friendly moderators, more than friendly moderators, effectively co-campaigners who are with her, she was set up to potentially shine and beat expectations.
00:06:54.000I don't think that would be the case if you had actually real human beings in a town hall style format.
00:07:01.000I think that First of all, I don't believe that that debate's actually gonna have a major impact on the election, largely because Donald Trump is so known to the electorate already, and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, I think, are well... Joe Biden's been well enough known, but I think the public is a little bit skeptical of the way that debate actually played out.
00:07:19.000Even if you were in the camp of believing that Kamala Harris exceeded expectations, it was sort of an unsatisfying kind of feeling as a consequence of that, right?
00:07:29.000Because you didn't leave with a clear sense of what her policies were, that she had plans that were actually going to make your life better, rather than having clever, pre-prepared jabs at her opponent.
00:07:39.000So it's one thing to rate who did or didn't win the debate in the context of a Theatrical performance, but this isn't the thespian exercise.
00:07:47.000It's an exercise of actually voters picking who's going to be better for their lives.
00:07:51.000And so my own sense, Ben, is even if there isn't another debate, I don't think that last one is going to have a decisive impact in November.
00:07:57.000But I do think, you know, if you ask me, I think it's a it's it's probably pretty close to a toss up right now, both at the presidential level and down ballot for Senate and House races as well.
00:08:08.000For my part, I'm actually trying to spend my own time on the campaign trail.
00:08:12.000I'm going to be hitting a lot of swing states, but I'm also trying to help a lot of the Senate candidates who are, interestingly enough, when we think about what President Trump's underperformed in the debate or not, there's that debate that people are having.
00:08:25.000Nearly every pretty much every Republican Senate race across the country.
00:08:29.000And so I think this fixation on what President Trump's performance is or isn't in some ways misses the point that he's actually basically overperforming every Republican Senate candidate across the country.
00:08:41.000And I think we should we got to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves why that exactly is.
00:08:45.000You could have competing explanations.
00:08:47.000But anyway, as it relates to how I'm spending my time, I try to think about where I'm going to have biggest impact.
00:08:51.000And showing up side-by-side Donald Trump at a given rally isn't really helping him.
00:08:56.000But I think it does help a lot of the Senate candidates when I'm able to spend more time with them.
00:09:00.000And so, on the political side at least, that's where I've been devoting a good part of my time and attention.
00:09:05.000I mean, obviously, I feel exactly the same.
00:09:06.000This is the first election cycle where I've ever actually gone out and campaigned with candidates, and I'm doing exactly what you're doing.
00:09:11.000I'm trying to go out with the Senate candidates who need funding.
00:09:14.000A lot of the money's been sucked into the presidential.
00:09:16.000There are a lot of these Senate candidates who would be more competitive, but there's not tons of money flowing into their coffers for them to even use.
00:09:23.000Dave McCormick's a really good candidate in Pennsylvania.
00:09:25.000You got Sam Brown, who's a really good candidate in Nevada.
00:09:28.000You got a bunch of candidates all over the country.
00:09:30.000Sheehy's gonna win in Montana, which hopefully will Maintain that Senate majority for the Republicans and prevent sort of the worst excesses of, God forbid, a Kamala Harris administration.
00:09:38.000One of the points that you've been making, Vivek, I think better than anybody in America, is the point that the attack on Kamala Harris really should not be about her personal politics.
00:09:46.000It should be about her as sort of new face on old machine, which is really realistic.
00:09:51.000I mean, that's precisely what this is.
00:09:52.000They literally just, they photoshopped the presidential candidate.
00:09:56.000I mean, they took the president, they made sure that no one challenged him the whole way through.
00:10:39.000And if you level a critique that misses the point by half, I don't think it lands with the public in the same way, because her policies have now shifted, right?
00:10:45.000She's now running as some sort of faux centrist, selectively embracing free market policies, even though she doesn't know, at times, even what they may be.
00:10:54.000I think it misses the point to call her a socialist or a Marxist.
00:10:57.000I think she is another cog in a machine.
00:10:59.000We're not running against a candidate.
00:11:04.000And this has been, it's not to sort of claim some sort of victory lap or anything, but the truth of the matter is, just to lift the curtain a little bit, back when I was a candidate, but you know, when the debate pledges had to be signed in the Republican primary debates, the pledge was called the Beat Biden Pledge.
00:11:18.000It was called the Beat Joe Biden Pledge.
00:11:21.000And I just remember at the time calling it out to Ronald McDaniel, just saying, like, I don't think this is exactly the way we want to frame our own agenda tethered to one man who, as a practical matter, I think it's actually unlikely that we're running against.
00:11:38.000But even more philosophically, like, even if Joe Biden were the puppet, In some deeper sense, we're not actually running against him, right?
00:11:46.000He's just another cog in a machine as well.
00:11:48.000We're not running against a candidate, we're running against a machine.
00:11:51.000And I think that if you look in retrospect how that decision has aged, not just the beat Biden pledge to get in the Republican debate stage, but the way we framed a year and a half of financial and political capital expenditures, they were wasted on attacking Biden's cognitive deficits.
00:12:07.000Now take stock of how well that served us, okay?
00:12:11.000One is it actually legitimized Kamala Harris, right?
00:12:15.000It created a dynamic where whoever was going to rescue the Democrats and independents in this country from Joe Biden, it's the feeling that a tortured prisoner has towards their hero who releases them from captivity.
00:12:29.000Whoever it is, you're going to love and fall in love with that person.
00:12:33.000As opposed to really offering an indictment of the democratic machine, and not even the democratic machine, but the deeper managerial class in our country, that would have been, I think, a more spot-on criticism.
00:12:42.000But the second more practical way it hurt us is just look at the way the debates played out.
00:12:47.000So people ought to remember the September 10th debate that happened just now between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
00:12:53.000It was part of the same plan, and I'm not saying that in some conspiratorial sense.
00:12:57.000Literally, descriptively, it was agreed to on the same terms that required Republicans to debate in June against Joe Biden.
00:13:05.000So to say that this is a plan, it's not some conspiracy, literally, that was the conditions for the Democrats agreeing to debate, is that there was going to be a June debate, and there's going to be not one in July, not one in August, but all the way out in September 10.
00:13:51.000You went a whole month with the media, including CNN, including the New York Times op-ed page by the day, hitting Joe Biden harder than they went after Donald Trump.
00:14:00.000I mean, they were far more critical of Joe Biden during that month and a half period than they were of Republicans.
00:14:05.000And this is what that accomplished is it created the artifice of credibility with the general election independent voter, the undecided voter.
00:14:13.000Republicans are complaining about the media, but I'm seeing it every day.
00:14:16.000They're hitting the Democrats, really just Biden, but hitting the Democrats harder than they are Republicans.
00:14:21.000So yeah, maybe these people are a little bit balanced, such that when they trot out Kamala and the entire media then gets behind the new puppet, that has a new patina of credibility around it, even though it's really undergirded in an artifice that was in some way part of the plan, baked into the plan the whole time.
00:14:38.000And so back to us though, I'm not complaining about the game, I'm actually reflecting on how we can play it better, is that we have failed to shape our message around the essence of what's actually going on.
00:14:50.000The essence of what's going on is running against a machine, We have failed to articulate our own alternative vision.
00:14:57.000So I don't think we're going to win this election just like we did not in 2022.
00:15:00.000You could go trace back our track record over the last five cycles.
00:15:04.000The red wave that never came in 2022 I don't think really was due to Donald Trump or abortion.
00:15:09.000Facially people can blame, you know, abortion or whatever.
00:15:12.000I think it was a deeper issue where we were so obsessed with criticizing radical Joe Biden That we fail to actually offer our own vision of who we are and what we stand for.
00:15:24.000And that's not just a messaging problem, Ben.
00:15:26.000I actually think that that messaging problem is symptomatic of a deeper ambiguity around who we are and what we stand for in the conservative movement.
00:15:35.000And it's a little bit uncomfortable to confront right now, and I don't think we're going to sort that out in the next 50 days or whatever's left, fewer than that, right, to the path of this election.
00:15:46.000And so that, I think, is the harder work we have cut out ahead of us.
00:15:50.000And unless we do that, I don't think we're going to have lasting majorities.
00:15:53.000But in the meantime, we're going to have to make do with offering at least an alternative vision for the near term relative to what the Democrats are putting up.
00:16:00.000And that's a hard truth, but it's also why I named my book what I did.
00:16:05.000I mean, sometimes the old expression goes, if you care about yourself, you tell someone what they want to hear.
00:16:13.000Care about somebody else, you tell them the truth.
00:16:15.000And that's, in many ways, what also motivated me to write this book before this election, to hopefully start that conversation by starting it in late September.
00:16:24.000I hope we can still have some impact on having success in November.
00:16:29.000We'll get to more of the bake in a moment.
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00:17:30.000So Vivek, the book Truths the Future of America First.
00:17:33.000So first of all, let's start with the with the title of it.
00:17:36.000So, you know, America First has been interpreted 1000 different ways at this point.
00:17:41.000It's been interpreted as sort of a sort of from everything from foreign policy isolationism to President Trump's more hawkish foreign policy record as the actual president from a sort of Big government conservatism that preserves Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, to a smaller government conservatism.
00:17:56.000It's been interpreted in a whole wide variety of ways.
00:17:57.000Of course, the left would like to interpret it as Charles Lindbergh in 1939.
00:18:01.000But what exactly, when you say the future of America First, I think this is sort of the question you're asking, is what that means.
00:18:07.000Because what America First, to me, has always been, at least MAGA, what that's really been, is more of an anti-left impulse than a cohesive political program.
00:18:15.000It's always been a bit of an empty vessel that's being that requires somebody to fill it.
00:18:19.000And when Trump was president, he filled it with his policy.
00:18:22.000But can you have a movement that is a vessel kind of waiting to be filled?
00:18:28.000So I'll give you my perspective on this, and even in sort of titling the book Truths,
00:18:31.000you know, I want to speak hard truths in all directions here.
00:18:35.000So I think America First, this modern wave of it, I mean, the expression's existed for a long time,
00:18:40.000right, dating back, Reagan used it, it's existed for a long time.
00:18:43.000But the modern version of it, I think is a rejection of blithe neoliberalism,
00:18:49.000which I share in common in rejecting a lot of the failures of blackness and white supremacy.
00:18:54.000Blithe neoliberalism as it relates to both the intersection of foreign policy and economic policy, and also immigration policy in the United States.
00:19:02.000And that's actually what propelled Donald Trump in 2016.
00:19:04.000This idea that somehow we were going to export Big Macs and Happy Meals and spread democracy to places like China.
00:19:10.000The idea of democratic capitalism, that we could use capitalism as a vector to spread democracy abroad.
00:19:15.000It just didn't work empirically, actually.
00:19:17.000And even worse than not working, it actually, in some ways, set us further back by increasing our dependence on adversaries like China for our own military industrial base.
00:19:28.000It doesn't make any sense that the number one country we rely on for supplies for our Air Force, Navy, Army, is actually China.
00:19:36.00040% of the semiconductors powering our military equipment come from China.
00:19:46.000It also allowed China, and I'm going to stick to China because I think this is one of the single greatest areas where the neoliberal mythology failed, is it legitimized China morally with respect to the United States on the global stage when you actually had a lot of companies, and you could pick your favorite ones, right?
00:20:04.000BlackRock, you could think about JPMorgan Chase, you could go straight down the list, the NBA, LeBron James, whoever it is.
00:20:11.000Spouting off about injustices in the United States without saying a peep about actual human rights atrocities in China.
00:20:17.000And that created sort of a false moral equivalence in the global political landscape.
00:20:23.000They said, look, if you're a company, you can't enter the Chinese market if you're criticizing the CCP.
00:20:27.000But if you're actually criticizing or undercutting the United States, we'll roll out the red carpet.
00:20:30.000Not just through verbal criticism, but even through emissions caps.
00:20:33.000Right, if you're BlackRock, you apply Scope 3 emissions caps to Chevron in your voting power as a shareholder.
00:20:37.000You don't do the same thing even though you're a shareholder of PetroChina.
00:20:40.000So that creates a sort of economic and moral equivalence between the United States and China.
00:20:44.000And by the way, even a military dependence, that we're more dependent on China for our military than China is on us for theirs.
00:20:49.000So it created a great equalizing effect that otherwise wouldn't have played out.
00:20:53.000The idea that China would be at near parity with the United States, geopolitically, militarily, economically, in the year 2024, would have been unthinkable in the early 1990s, and yet that's exactly where the blithe neoliberalism of yesterday got us.
00:21:08.000You could say that at the intersection of economic policy and foreign policy.
00:21:11.000And then on immigration policy, I think we've seen a great erosion of our national identity in the United States through, among other things, the abandonment of the rule of law.
00:21:21.000You see the crisis at the southern border.
00:21:24.000I think intentional policies of beginning mass illegal migration, in part as a long-run electoral strategy for Democrats, and that's not some sort of Grand Conspiracy Theory.
00:21:33.000It's what Democrats were saying in 2012, 2013, when they were strategically printing this in Politico magazine.
00:21:39.000There's a great article that lays this out from 2012 or so.
00:21:42.000That exactly was part of the plan and it's worked exactly as planned.
00:21:45.000So I think what you see in the rise of MAGA and America First and certainly the 2016 version of it was an understandable and I think I think useful reactionary response to rejecting that
00:22:11.000And I touch on this right up from the outset of the introduction,
00:22:13.000even the prologue and the introduction of my book get right into this is,
00:22:17.000I think that there's two competing visions for what that future America First vision is.
00:22:21.000Both of them share a rejection of the neoliberalism of yesterday.
00:22:25.000But they have very different policy prescriptions for the future on trade, on immigration, on immigration in particular.
00:22:33.000You know, on foreign policy, I think there could be a little bit more of an overlap when we get to that.
00:22:36.000But I think particularly trade and immigration, I think, are the areas where there's a real fork in the road coming up, and economic policy more generally.
00:22:45.000So on one wing of this, it's that, OK, we want to produce everything in the United States.
00:22:52.000If you double click on that, that's what I would call maybe the national protectionist view, that American manufacturers are suffering because foreign manufacturers, not just from China, but from other countries, are dumping their products in the United States, which are driving prices down, which leave American manufacturers holding the bag.
00:23:06.000We don't want those other countries selling in the United States.
00:23:09.000American manufacturers can get a decent price for their goods.
00:23:13.000I think there are a number of issues with that.
00:23:14.000There's classical economic arguments that suggest that consumers actually end up bearing the cost of that.
00:23:18.000Of course, if there's less competition, you know, there's higher prices for goods for American workers.
00:23:24.000The very American workers, which I'll get to, we want to protect with immigration policy, supposedly, are the ones that we cause to leave holding the bag when they have to pay more for their way of life.
00:23:33.000But I think the more interesting argument at the frontier of the debate with the neoliberals of yesterday is that if we're really serious about reducing our economic dependence on China, right, like if we're actually serious, and I actually am, on areas like the pharmaceutical supply chain or the military-industrial base or the semiconductor supply chain, areas that are essential for America's long-run security and, dare I say, existence, That we should not depend on our adversary for those essential areas of the American economy.
00:24:02.000Are we actually serious about declaring independence from China in those areas?
00:24:06.000And I think many in the America First movement believe they are.
00:24:09.000But if yes, that actually means, I love onshoring, but it's not going to happen on a relevant timeframe without also expanding relationships with Japan and South Korea and India.
00:24:21.000And you could go straight down the list.
00:24:29.000So to say if you're against trade with those allies because you want a protectionist argument to protect American manufacturers from the effect of foreign competition, that's a goal you would achieve, but it comes at a trade-off, not just in the form of classical economic arguments of higher cost for consumers, and I don't disagree with some of that, but even with respect to the stated essential objective of declaring independence from China in those critical sectors.
00:25:14.000And you look at what's happening, I'm talking to you from Columbus, Ohio, but I grew up in Cincinnati, Springfield's right in between, and I used to spend a lot of time there growing up.
00:25:21.000It's a very different city today than it was back then, right here in Ohio.
00:25:25.000We have seen an erosion of our national identity, but that means we need an immigration policy that prioritizes what that national identity is.
00:25:33.000And this is going to quickly get to a deeper philosophical question of what is American identity, but we can turn to that in a bit.
00:25:39.000One set of immigration policies would say that we don't want competition for American workers, that if two immigrants are going to do a job for $10 an hour versus one domestic-born worker who's going to do it for $20 an hour, keep the two immigrants out and the domestic worker gets to do the job for $20 an hour.
00:25:55.000That's one that's a protectionist worldview as it relates to labor.
00:25:59.000I don't think that that's a particularly great justification for an immigration policy to protect American workers from the effects of foreign price competition, because it's a losing battle you eventually lose through America's economic competitiveness with China and other countries anyway.
00:26:12.000But I do think it is legitimate to say that we want immigrants who are not only going to add economic value to the United States of America, But also immigrants who embody and really care about the ideals that the United States was founded on.
00:26:27.000To say that every immigrant who even enters this country has to pass the same civics test required for citizenship, bring that up for the green card.
00:26:34.000I do think that English is, I don't know where you are on this, but I believe that English should be the national language of the United States, because we're a nation founded on ideals, but that can't exist if you can't express or communicate those ideals or a common culture that you create around them.
00:26:47.000But that would be a different standard for immigration policy focused on the quality rather than quantity of immigration in either direction.
00:26:54.000But to say that we need the right kind of immigrants, not just in terms of economic contributions, that's important, but also in terms of civic commitments to the United States of America.
00:27:02.000I'm against dual citizenship for this reason.
00:27:04.000You have immigrants who pledge their sole allegiance to the United States.
00:27:07.000So that will probably in the near term result in less immigration, but in principle in the long run it could go in a different direction.
00:27:14.000But that's what I think America First immigration policy looks like, is it's grounded in what American identity actually is, versus this notion that the goal of immigration policy is just, they used to be neoliberal saying it's just economic policy, now it's just labor policy.
00:27:28.000I think neither of those is the right answer.
00:27:30.000Immigration is policy about our national identity and who we are as a nation.
00:27:35.000And I think that lurking underneath all of this, and I'll stop on this, you know, diatribe you've got me started on right now after this, because I am very passionate about this subject, but lurking underneath all of this is that deeper question of what is American identity?
00:27:50.000And, you know, I think it's been said recently, and I think it's provocative, and I think it's worth talking about, that, you know, America is not a creedal nation, that people will not die for a nation solely founded on abstract ideals.
00:28:08.000And I guess if that is your view, then that might inform your view of what immigration policy should look like.
00:28:13.000But my own view is actually, I do think that it's just a fact of history that the people who fought the American Revolution did fight for a nation founded on a set of ideals.
00:28:25.000And that geographic place that America is is different than it was in 1776.
00:28:27.000I mean, those were 13 colonies on the eastern seaboard.
00:28:30.000America is just a very different geographic landscape.
00:28:32.000But what hasn't changed Is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that undergird our country.
00:28:41.000A deep philosophical divide, I think, brewing in the conservative movement that we, for very pragmatic reasons of managing the process to an election, have not allowed to see boil over.
00:28:51.000President Trump is excellent at really bridging this divide, and I think that he embodies elements of both of them.
00:28:57.000And I think in some ways that's what a movement leader needs at the right moments, is people who are able to bridge the right coalition to successfully get elected and govern.
00:29:07.000But I think at some point it's going to be unavoidable for us to really confront what philosophy of identity and then resultantly of economic policy, trade policy, immigration policy we adopt in the Republican Party and that remains very much an open question and I fall, you know, on one side of that question.
00:29:24.000You know, there's so much there in what you said.
00:29:26.000I want to start with sort of the critique of neoliberalism.
00:29:29.000So one of the things that I think about the critique of neoliberalism is that we have a fundamental sort of category error in even how we define neoliberalism.
00:29:36.000I think that when you and I oppose elements of neoliberalism, we probably mean the same thing.
00:29:41.000I mean, I agree with virtually everything that you just said.
00:29:43.000And when it comes to, for example, the extension of free markets and the idea that that is somehow going to turn China into a glorious Human rights, you know, center that that obviously was untrue.
00:29:54.000I think blaming that on a failure of capitalism is sort of like blaming a hammer for not being a radio.
00:29:58.000That's not what capitalism is designed to do.
00:30:00.000Capitalism makes goods and products and services cheaper and better.
00:30:06.000And so the idea that that's going to magically convert people into wondrous Democrats is wrong.
00:30:11.000What it did do during the Cold War is it provided a solid counter in terms of economic strength and viability to states that were opposing the economic centralization of the Soviet Union.
00:30:21.000So what I would say is that the failure of neoliberalism is less about their perception of the realities
00:30:26.000of the wonders of capitalism, much more about their perception
00:30:29.000that the humanity is effectively and essentially good.
00:30:32.000And that as soon as people get a whiff of the good life, that they will magically sort of change their opinions,
00:30:37.000which is a very non-conservative idea.
00:30:39.000I mean, going all the way back to World War II, George Orwell wrote one of my favorite essays in 1941,
00:30:44.000talking about how the sort of English social welfare state, what was not a match for the German vision of a,
00:30:53.000he said, like, why are so many people?
00:30:55.000Enamored of the of the of the hitlerian movement when it promised basically economic suffering through autarky this is what because people want a flag and people want to march and people want torches and people want to feel good and people want to feel as though they're part of a unified thing and that's more important than whatever social welfare benefit we're giving over here in britain for a lot of folks and and that's right and that's a that's a crucial insight into into human nature i think what what the people who we now label neoliberals misunderstood is they thought okay all human beings it's sort of like the bush speech That he gave in his second inaugural.
00:31:26.000We're going to free people all over the world.
00:31:35.000Some people prize a religious awakening.
00:31:38.000There are a lot of different priorities in life.
00:31:40.000And trying to say that the markets are going to solve all of those problems is obviously wrong.
00:31:44.000But I think that because the argument was made in market terms, the reaction on the right has been in anti-market terms, which is something that disturbs me.
00:31:52.000I think part of the reaction on the right, right?
00:31:54.000So I still think we're at the bleeding edge of this, Ben.
00:31:56.000I don't think, I think it's indeterminate which direction this goes.
00:31:59.000And one of the things I've noticed in traveling the country, which I've had an immense opportunity to do over the last year and a half, is there's a funny dynamic, right?
00:32:07.000You could go into a room full of America First patriots who I identify with, could be 20 people, could be a thousand people.
00:32:15.000And you could have person X walk in that room and say something like, we need industrial policy that takes care of our workers and puts American manufacturers and American workers first, and we need to make sure that that's our priority to lift up American workers, and we're the party of the working class.
00:32:31.000And you would get thunderous applause, right, if delivered in the right compelling way.
00:32:36.000I could alternatively go to that same room and tell them, we don't want to replace the left-wing nanny state with the right-wing nanny state.
00:32:42.000We ought to dismantle the nanny state.
00:32:44.000We don't want to replace the left-wing regulatory state with the right-wing regulatory state.
00:32:48.000We want to get in there and actually shut it down.
00:32:52.000If not, I think where the hearts of people are in policy, it's a greater applause.
00:32:56.000So I think part of what we need in our America First movement is a clear vision that is disruptive to the policies of yesterday that led us down a perilous road.
00:33:07.000And I think people are really open to being led on what that right vision actually is.
00:33:12.000But right now, it would begin as a reactionary impulse against what we could together call neoliberalism of yesterday.
00:33:18.000But in terms of what direction that reaction takes, I don't know that I would yet overcharacterize the right having reacted in a certain way.
00:33:26.000I think it's yet to be determined, and I'm in part in the game, because I don't expect to be a passive bystander in this.
00:33:33.000I hope to play a role in shaping the Republican Party in the direction I think we need to go.
00:33:40.000And one thing I want to say, because you and I can—it's the easy thing to do right now, of course, is like, you know, criticize people from 20 years ago and say, oh, the neoliberals, this or that.
00:34:12.000But I think the reality is the real failure was the intellectual intolerance on the right for other alternatives at the time, for alternative visions.
00:34:23.000And I think we produced many political candidates.
00:34:26.000I mean, I would put John McCain in this category.
00:34:28.000I'd probably put Mitt Romney in this category.
00:34:38.000We can have cogs in a wheel for a while, too.
00:34:40.000A lot of people who would say the neoliberal pieties without knowing exactly why they were saying them, but just know that that's what they were supposed to say.
00:34:48.000And I bring that back now, all the way through now.
00:34:53.000What made Donald Trump actually pretty interesting, downright interesting in 2016, is he rejected that vision.
00:34:58.000You might agree or disagree with his policies.
00:35:00.000He was the first Republican openly on the debate stage.
00:35:03.000Now it's so normal that it's hard to remember how heterodox this was in 2015 to be against the Iraq War.
00:35:09.000He was somebody who was calling out the effects of unchecked immigration policy.
00:35:13.000There's a conflation of legal and illegal, but unchecked immigration policy.
00:35:17.000A lot of the economic policies that left American workers and manufacturers holding the bag, a lot of which I think come from the regulatory statement, nonetheless, Donald Trump was the first person to call that out in a very long time.
00:35:26.000That's what made Donald Trump so cool in 2016.
00:35:29.000He began as a challenge to the system.
00:35:31.000But at a certain point, just as you saw with the neoliberal wing, what began as a challenge to the system, in some ways becomes the new system, where now, and I'm helping these down-ballot candidates traveling the country, as I told you, Here's a pattern that I often see, is that I'll hear these candidates start these speeches, you know, we're the party of the working class, we have to put the American worker first, uttering these pieties without asking what that actually means or why we're actually saying them.
00:35:59.000So in many ways, we're committing the same mistake that the neoliberals of yesterday committed, not so much even on the content of it, but by It's always a bad thing for any movement when you're uttering phrases without asking what they are or why we're actually saying them.
00:36:14.000And I do see the beginning of that right now.
00:36:17.000And so my goal is to check that a little bit and to take a long, hard look in the mirror and say, no, no, we're not going back to the neoliberalism of yesterday.
00:36:26.000What is the actual content of our vision for the future?
00:36:30.000And I think that it's going to make for the next few years, on the positive side, I think a very exciting and, dare I say, intellectually rich moment for the future of conservatism.
00:36:42.000And, as I said earlier, I don't intend to be just a passive bystander or commentator in that.
00:36:48.000So, you know, one of the things that you mentioned a little bit earlier that I wanted to come back to was the sort of fascinating and enroiling dissension in the Republican Party on foreign policy.
00:36:57.000So it's been very interesting to watch President Trump sort of bridge these gaps because there are these gaps that have obviously emerged.
00:37:03.000There's a more isolationist swing of the Republican Party.
00:37:05.000There's still very much interventionist swing of the Republican Party.
00:37:08.000President Trump, his verbiage is more sort of isolationist in tone.
00:37:12.000His administration was much more peace through strength and almost traditional Reagan fashion, which was You even make a threat and we'll clock into next week.
00:37:22.000I mean, when you speak with President Trump, his innate instinct when it comes to foreign policy is a peace through strength instinct.
00:37:29.000You know, I'm fond of telling the story where we did a fundraiser for him and President Trump was talking about Vladimir Putin.
00:37:35.000He says, yeah, I was talking with Vlad and I said to Vlad, you know, don't go into Ukraine because if you do, I'm going to bomb the shit out of you.
00:37:53.000That's actually a pretty good foreign policy.
00:37:55.000It turns out that wielding the stick, or at least threatening to use the stick, turns out to be a much better policy than the sort of pathetically incoherent nonsense that's been put out by the Biden administration.
00:38:07.000I think that Trump's a unique figure in this because everyone else is sort of forced into one of two boxes.
00:38:11.000One is the sort of more hawkish interventionist box and the other one is a sort of more isolationist, we only hit back if we are directly hit, get out of foreign affairs box.
00:38:20.000And again, I don't actually think the American people are in either of those boxes particularly.
00:38:25.000I don't think that I don't think anywhere the American people are versus where we should be is also even a separate question.
00:38:30.000But I don't think that those are the only two options.
00:38:33.000And, you know, this is one of the things I'm trying to do in this in this book is we're going to the book is wide spanning, but our conversation was scratching the surface of some of these debates.
00:38:42.000I hope the people who get through the book, I think the whole question at the heart of it is, who are we as conservatives?
00:38:57.000And one thing I'll say before I get into this, Ben, on the question of foreign policy, because it's a bridge between even an economic policy discussion we had and the foreign policy discussion is we need more open debate.
00:39:06.000We don't have this kind of open debate where even people in each of the siloed echo chambers between right and left, but even between different elements of the right, aren't really, I think, having this debate in the way that we should.
00:39:17.000And, you know, one of the things I try to do in the book is just distill, even for dinner table conversation, not to make this an abstract exposition of, like, an academic book, but just even each chapter ending with five points that you can bring to the discussion table.
00:39:31.000I'm not beyond the point where I have to pretend to write academic books.
00:39:34.000Like, this is very practical in terms of just making it very pragmatic for how we're able to confront some of these questions.
00:39:40.000As it relates to foreign policy, those aren't the only two options, isolationism versus interventionism.
00:39:55.000I'm against the nanny state in all forms.
00:39:58.000I'm against the nanny state in the form of the entitlement state.
00:40:01.000I'm against the nanny state in the form of the regulatory state.
00:40:04.000So the administrative regulatory state that's different from the entitlement state, the welfare state, which is generally passed by statute, the regulatory state, which is not passed by statute, but regulations that limit what you can and cannot do from the FTC to the CFPB to the SEC to the FDA, the three letter alphabet soup.
00:40:19.000And then I'm against the nanny state as it applies to foreign policy as well, the nanny
00:40:24.000state relationship that we have with other countries.
00:40:27.000My general perspective with our allies is that should the United States provide protection
00:40:31.000when we have greater capability to our allies, absolutely.
00:40:33.000The scope of that discussion should be then limited to making sure that we're making sure
00:40:38.000that our allies actually pay for it, right?
00:40:39.000So I think the idea that NATO is not meeting, like I think 17 of the NATO countries, the
00:40:44.000majority of the NATO countries are not even yet meeting their minimal 2% of GDP expenditure
00:40:50.000that they've committed to make on their own national self-defense.
00:40:53.000And in some sense, I think countries like Germany are arbitraging the United States where they're perfectly capable of doing it, but they're just having the United States do it.
00:41:00.000And so sometimes I think this devolves into discussion of whether the United States should or shouldn't be providing protection that is in the long run interest of the United States, but is even more approximately in the interest of other countries that To take my nanny state argument, I just don't want to see the nanny state in any given direction.
00:41:13.000Are we going to advance American interests through our strength?
00:41:17.000But I'd like to see a relationship where other countries are actually paying for that.
00:41:21.000And I think that has both financial and non-financial benefits for the United States, and if I may say, for the relevant other countries as well, though that's a deeper discussion we could have.
00:41:31.000Now let's talk about the number one most important foreign policy right now is, no one seems to be particularly interested in this, is strengthening our own military, actually.
00:41:40.000So we can talk about interventionism versus isolationism.
00:41:43.000That's irrelevant if our own military is actually, relatively speaking, both with respect to adversaries and with respect to other points in our own recent history, weak.
00:41:56.000That coincides with a decline in national pride, but also the foundation of war is economics.
00:42:01.000The industrial base that supports our military is largely not in our own control in the United States anyway.
00:42:10.000It's dependent on our own adversaries.
00:42:11.000So I see a lot of that debate in some ways as a red herring Compared to the reality of the fact that you can't even be an inter- I'm not an interventionist by nature.
00:42:20.000But you can't even be an interventionist without the existence of a strong military right here at home.
00:42:24.000So I'm one of these people who's actually, uh, you know, I definitely don't fall into one of those, either of the two categories of isolationist or interventionist.
00:42:32.000But I personally believe that I'm not against increasing the percentage of U.S.
00:42:38.000To the contrary, if it was the right kind of spending that actually strengthened our military industrial base, our ability to build ships for our Navy that's going short on ships, our ability to bring chip production for our own military back home, the ability to find ways to increase recruitment at a time when we're seeing declining recruitment that's actually going in the wrong direction already when we're short, that's the number one foreign policy is the strengthening of our own military.
00:43:01.000Through the gestures you send abroad only work if you actually are in a position to actually be strong.
00:43:08.000And then as it relates to our diplomacy and our foreign policy as it relates to diplomacy, I think we should be more disciplined to make sure that that looks more like diplomacy between allies rather than nanny state overgrowth, which I see as an extension of the domestic nanny state we discussed.
00:43:24.000So, you know, I think that may be an area where you and I probably have more to talk about, maybe shades of difference, but I certainly would resist characterization because I think it'd be, like, false and couldn't be further from the truth to call me an isolationist.
00:43:37.000But I think in not being an interventionist, I think it's a question of prioritization.
00:43:40.000And the next step in the prioritization of our foreign policy actually starts with strengthening our own military, which I do believe we're missing today.
00:44:03.000In the sense that we are undermanned in the fact that we spend way too much money at the DOD on a bunch of nonsense that we've built big rather than building smart, that we're getting out teched by China.
00:44:13.000China just this week put out a video of a drone show that was clearly meant to be militarily intimidating.
00:44:18.000It was 8,100 drones in this very complex drone show.
00:44:21.000And they were like, oh, isn't this cool?
00:44:22.000But what they really meant by that is, should there be a battle in the Taiwan Straits, get ready for a giant cloud of mini drones that are going to be attacking all of your assets in the Taiwan Straits.
00:44:32.000And the United States has not been spending its money in the ways that are conducive to victory.
00:44:37.000But the question is where that money comes from.
00:44:39.000And when you're $35 trillion in debt, and when you are spending now on a yearly basis $1 trillion just to service that debt, you know, the idea that you're going to be able to dig your way out of this through sort of autarkic economic policy in the United States without actually restructuring any of the welfare state.
00:44:55.000I mean, if you want to turn into Europe, it's hard to find a better way to turn into Europe than that, actually.
00:44:59.000Yeah, I mean, I think there is room for a future conservative movement.
00:45:03.000Now, I'm playing my hand here a little bit, but we're sort of doing that.
00:45:07.000I'm trying to even-handedly lay out all views, but I think there is room for a crusade against the nanny state in all of its forms.
00:45:15.000The entitlement state, the regulatory state, and I think it bleeds into foreign policy to provide, I think, a greater coherence to this idea of, OK, well, we're only going to worry about America.
00:45:28.000But for us to say that we're not going to be a nanny state, either domestically at home or abroad, I think provides, I believe, a coherent view of what the future conservative movement would look like, which is different than, you know, what the Republican Party of 2000 looked like, but it's also different than a pure reactionary, industrial policy, right-wing nanny state, protectionist, isolationist response.
00:45:51.000And I think that that is, you know, for what it's worth, I think our electorate is not interested in going back to the 2000 Republican Party anyway.
00:45:58.000But I think that between that fork in the road, I think that they're open to being led in one of those two directions.
00:46:03.000And when I talk about the future of America first, right?
00:46:05.000Truths, the future of America first is, you know, what do I mean by that?
00:46:08.000I think the hard truth is that that fork in the road is coming soon, and it's up to us to make that choice.
00:46:13.000I totally agree with so much of what you're saying.
00:46:15.000And this sort of brings us to the last topic here, which is, you know, as you mentioned, what sort of is the American identity?
00:46:21.000And it seems that we're going to have to come up with some sort of baseline level of what the American identity amounts to that is broad enough to encompass the people who live in the United States without being so broad that it becomes absolutely meaningless, right?
00:46:40.000At the same time, you don't want a definition of Americanism that is so narrow that it basically just means Florida, even though I love Florida and I live here and I think it's well governed.
00:46:47.000I'm not sure that America, broadly writ, is just a giant Florida.
00:46:52.000So what does Americanism look like definitionally, from where you sit?
00:46:56.000Yeah, so look, I do fall in the camp of believing the thing that makes the United States of America unique is that we are bound by a set of ideals.
00:47:03.000And that's different than the blood and soil vision of American identity.
00:47:08.000And I do think that that's gaining currency.
00:47:22.000Like, these are countries where you have deep blood and soil connections, genetic lineages dating back, or religious ties.
00:47:29.000Like, that is not the United States of America.
00:47:30.000So, if we pretend that somebody's more American because they've been here for seven generations versus somebody's only been here for two or one, Well, guess what?
00:47:37.000Our national identity is always going to be a weaker form than that existing in most other countries.
00:47:42.000In fact, most other countries have not only a stronger claim on that national identity, but it also denies the possibility of American exceptionalism, which is this idea that the United States, which I actually buy into, this idea that the United States of America is exceptional relative to all other nations across time and space because of the common ideals that otherwise brought together a divided, and even in some ways polyglot group of people, religiously diverse group of people in a way that's never been done in human history.
00:48:14.000I think the idea that we, the people, actually can be trusted to govern ourselves for better or for worse, which acknowledges that we're going to be trade-offs and sometimes we'll get it wrong, but that is who we are.
00:48:25.000That's what made America great the first time.
00:48:27.000The idea that you get to speak your mind openly and express any opinion, no matter what that opinion is, no matter how heinous it is to me, the fact that you get to express that opinion as long as I get to in return.
00:48:35.000The fact that you get to practice your religion, whatever that religion is, as long as you're not hurting somebody else in the process.
00:48:44.000Merit, I think, is at the heart of the American identity.
00:48:47.000And what is merit, or what is a meritocracy?
00:48:49.000I think it's a system that A, recognizes that not everyone, in fact, decisively everyone, does not have the same God-given gifts.
00:48:57.000It acknowledges that, and yet still says that we create a space, a nation, that allows you to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential.
00:49:06.000Even though it's different from mine or anybody else's.
00:49:08.000Your God-given potential, you can maximize that God-given potential in this country without any government or system standing in your way.
00:49:16.000Those, I think, begin to form the beginnings of an American identity, grounded in the rule of law.
00:49:22.000Something that we say is, you know, a nation without borders is not a nation, but that's an extension of the fact that we're a nation founded on the rule of law.
00:49:30.000So I think those basic ideals, free speech, open debate, free expression, free exercise of your own religion, meritocracy, the best person getting the job regardless of their genetics, the commitment to self-governance for better or for worse, the idea that the people we elect to run the government are the ones who run the government rather than unelected or enlightened bureaucrats as it's been done in most nations across human history and even most nations on earth today.
00:49:55.000Those are unique American ideals, and that's what I believe makes American exceptionalism possible.
00:50:02.000If you have somebody who was born in another country but is going to legally go through the right process to come to this country and share those ideals at least as deeply as the average American who's already born here and knows more about our history than the average American who's born here and is going to make at least as great economic contributions as the average American born here, I think that might be a really small number of people who fit that description.
00:50:24.000It might be a larger number of people, but that's what, to me, a good immigration policy looks like versus one that says, no, no, no, our national identity is grounded in this specific geographic space and the blood and soil and the genetic lineages of the people who occupied that space.
00:50:39.000I don't think that that's actually what America is.
00:50:42.000And, you know, I think that whether where you land on that question, Really leads to some different policies, both for economic policy, immigration policy, and even the revival of our national identity.
00:50:54.000You know, for my part, Ben, that's why I've supported some heterodox policies, like the idea that not only do I believe every immigrant has to pass a really solid civics test, testing for knowledge of history and our constitution and our legal framework in the United States, But I think every high school senior who graduates from high school should have to pass that same civics test or understanding of our country, or else otherwise serve the country before gaining the full privileges and immunities, or at least the privileges of citizenship, even if the immunities apply to everyone.
00:51:22.000So, you know, I think that that's a very different civic nationalism from I would say an ethno-nationalism.
00:51:29.000I am a nationalist, but I have a nationalist ground in civic nationalism rather than ethno-nationalism for the United States.
00:51:34.000And I think these are deep questions of identity that we're going to have to confront.
00:51:39.000And I think one of the things that would be interesting to me
00:51:43.000is how many of the conservative base in America, if you ask, the importance of our history.
00:51:49.000We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of teaching our kids history.
00:51:52.000But then you actually maybe just may want to just inquire, how many of the people actually know what the history of
00:51:58.000the United States, how many of us know what the history of the United
00:52:29.000And that's, in some ways, what I think we risk becoming.
00:52:33.000And I don't think the substitute for that is to say that, okay, we have a blood and soil vision of American identity based on who your, you know, genetic lineage was derived from.
00:52:41.000And you run into all kinds of complicated problems if you take that road, too, because then what do you do with the Native Americans, right?
00:52:47.000Versus to say, okay, there's a nation with a fixed starting point in 1776, grounded in the Declaration of Independence, grounded and enshrined in the operating manual known as the U.S.
00:53:03.000And I think a majority of our base understands that and is actually with me on this.
00:53:07.000But when you look at conservative leadership, there's a real asymmetry now where some of the most prominent voices and thoughtful voices on the right, friends of mine included, Are on the other side of this question, but there's no real prominent national voices, certainly in the realm of elected politics, on this national libertarian side of this equation.
00:53:28.000And that's, I think, part of what compels me to make this crusade against the nanny state in all of its forms the centerpiece of my own vision for the future of the country.
00:53:38.000Well, Vivek, the book is really a fascinating read.
00:53:41.000It's Truths, the Future of America First.
00:53:43.000Obviously it takes on a number of huge ideas.
00:53:45.000I think that we're all, I mean, I don't think, I know, we're all unified in the run-up to this election.
00:53:50.000Donald Trump should be the next president of the United States.
00:53:52.000The Republican candidates in the swing states need to win.
00:53:54.000And then once he's president, with the help of God, and if he's not, you know, God forbid, then a lot of these conversations are gonna break out into the open.
00:54:01.000You're planting a lot of important seeds here.
00:54:03.000So thanks for joining us and congrats on the book.