When Vivek Ramaswamy withdrew from the US presidential race, I was overjoyed. He has since endorsed ex-president and fellow businessman Donald Trump… It’s not ideal… but he’s no longer running, which is great. My issues with Vivek can be summed up in two main points: 1. I think that he is an opportunistic and unprincipled populist, and 2. I think that he is a hypocrite. These points overlap in many ways, but I’ll discuss them seriatim below.
Opportunistic Vivek
It is, of course, at the forefront of my mind that Vivek was a politician marketing himself as a businessman first. He is a brand, first and foremost. It is the fact that he is a successful businessman who chose to enter the political ring that makes him a politician. All politiciams should be scrutinised because they are inherently opportunistic until they prove otherwise. Substantively, I think that much of the guy’s campaign focussed on undocumented immigrants and “securing the border,” not because he was particularly passionate about the subject matter, but because he knew that it worked for Trump in 2016.
He chose to adopt the populism that Trump exploited because he knew that it was a formula for incensing the working class masses of Middle America. I am not a fan of populists or anti-immigrant sentiments, but the borderline fascistic ideology is only a small part of what grinds my gears. It is the insult that upsets me more.
The intentional exploitation of xenophobic tendencies for political gain gave me pause, especially because I knew that it was intentional. Everything he did was intentional. It may be the libertarianism values I espouse, or the bored theatre kid in me, but when I close my eyes and think of Vivek, the image that energes is a seething Patrick Bateman mid-bludgeon, enjoying his orgasmic, psychopathic thrills. Only, instead of bludgeoning someone to death, he is insulting people’s intelligence.
Deep down, I genuinely believe that Vivek thinks that “those people” are too silly to be reasoned with, and as a result, he has to emotionally manipulate them into supporting him by fuelling their sense of lack. It is run-of-the-mill marketing, but it is still insulting. I would more quickly trust a shark that told me it just wanted to speak about its lord and saviour Jesus Christ while I had an open wound and was bleeding out on the Pacific Ocean floor than trust a word that comes out of opportunistic Vivek’s mouth!
To facilitate his condescending opportunism, he opined that the children of undocumented immigrants should be denied birthright citizenship in the same way that the children of diplomats are denied the same. The argument was dumb. Vivek proffered that it was because diplomats were not subject to the law that they could not receive that citizenship benefit. His dubious analogy was that undocumented immigrants were criminals and, therefore, were not subject to US law. As such, their children born on US soil should not receive the Constitutional birthright citizenship.
To the drunk or the illiterate, the comparison was sensible. To the sensible, it was drunk and illiterate. The pesky little fact that being a criminal requires a person to be subject to the criminal jurisdiction (which diplomats are not) and be convicted as such (which diplomats cannot be), gets in the way of that tirade. A smart, Harvard-trained lawyer would know that this was foolish circular reasoning…but convenience trumped reasoning because those people are too stupid to know that. I rest my case on this point.
Hypocritical Vivek
A perfect example of that unfortunate man’s opportunism was his hypocrisy when it came to market principles. Our dearest Vivek took to Twitter to praise Javier Milei’s deregulation of the Argentine housing market and the consequent doubling of supply with 20% down and decreasing rents. Vote for him, he said, and it would be a vote for deregulated markets! He conveniently knew of the benefits of deregulated markets but refused (or failed—which is worse) to acknowledge that those same principles applied to labour… and therefore immigration by extension!
This was a most disturbing foursome among himself, Hayek, Friedman, and Keynes, and was very disappointing. Protectionism has never known a prettier, more deceitful face!
To add insult to injury, all this lamenting and fomenting about anchor babies while using market economics like a Miss America world peace campaign came from the chief anchor baby!
Vivek, a first-generation American immigrant, was, through his magical birthright citizenship, the means by which his own mother could become an American. His father, who was on a non-immigrant visa, and who is still not a US citizen, was his family’s route to the US and the only reason dearest Vivek was able to have the opportunities that he could in Ohio. He chose to become the chief campaigner against himself, making a narrow distinction based on the fact of his father’s visa, knowing fully well that his intelligent Indian compatriots whom US citizens want to hire are unable to get work visas because of systemic failures brought about by the kinds of policies he was endorsing. Much less for the remainder of non-Indians whom US citizens also want to hire, who cannot legally enter the US workforce because of counterproductive, bureaucratic nonsense.
I don’t know about you, but a person who not only warns but tries to prevent me from doing the very thing he did, which worked for him, is not trustworthy. That is the epitome of hypocrisy. With that thought, I leave you to think, knowing that in about four years, this man will show up again to try and charm the boxers off many a Midwestern, beer-drinking uncle.
Her Caribbean Legal Musings 