Vivek is Not /Our Guy/
Is America just a geographical space that can be filled with any individual, despite his customs, way of life, and ethnic priorities?
Vivek Ramaswamy announced last night that he is throwing his hat in the ring for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination. A self-described capitalist and entrepreneur, he alleges himself to be a conservative who is determined to fight the Woke agenda that has within the last decade taken the Democratic Party and regime orthodoxy by storm.
Recognizing that the immigration issue is at the mental forefront for a vast number of Americans, especially in flyover America, he made this one of his early talking points. And in doing so, he embodied the precise problem with the framework of American political discourse relating to American identity.
His bait and switch on the immigration problem came in a typical way: he immediately shifted from problems of our immigration dynamics to emphasizing that the problem is with illegal immigration. As if the transformations of American culture over the last half a century or more were a matter of legislative technicality. And could our crisis of the clash of civilizations be solved by simply legalizing the import of the non-Western world?
Indeed, he made the claim to Tucker that he thinks we should have more immigrants like his parents (from India), citing the classic case for merit above affirmative action. It is no longer acceptable in political discourse to dismiss both of these as irrelevant to the question of cultural compatibility: to what extent would these southeast Asians find themselves sentimentally disposed to defend the honor and integrity of historically Anglo-American cultural norms?