So, I've been seeing a lot of "Is Vivek Ramaswamy the new X" posts lately. And I primarily want to address the ron paul one, but I will address others as well.
First, is Vivek Ramaswamy the new Andrew Yang? I think Saagar made this claim once, based on the idea that he inherited Yang's strategy of using the internet to push his campaign. As we know, from various Yang related books, Yang kind of forged a new path for campaigns that primarily relied on social media to drive interaction instead of traditional high dollar donations. I can't comment on Ramaswamy's campaigning approach, I've largely been kind of ignoring the guy, but generally speaking, I don't get Yang vibes at all other than in stereotypes. Yang and Ramaswamy are both anti establishment and offer an alternative to traditional politics. And both are quirky, with Yang having "tech bro" vibes and Ramaswamy kinda sorta being like the conservative analogue of that. But....at the same time....no.
Yang's big thing was he ran on a policy no other campaign would touch, and much like myself, he was one of the first to try to cobble together a new ideology and voting coalition around it. It never got very far because of the demographics of the democratic party that I've discussed previously (and I find this frustrating as a "Yang guy"), but I don't think Ramaswamy offers that. He is more a Trump bootlicker. He's a young, energetic cheerleader whose entire thing seems to be to sheepdog people back to Trumpism, positioning himself as a Trump VP pick (since trump likes brown nosers), or as an alternative to trump if the dude is unable to run due to his legal problems.As such, no.
I've seen people compare Ramaswamy to Buttigieg. And I don't see the comparison other than age and maybe being a brown noser. Buttigieg is like a young Joe Biden. He's trying to get in the establishment's good graces and position himself for future success within the party. But the difference is that The GOP establishment DOES NOT LIKE TRUMP. And it doesn't like vivek either. Quite frankly, after trumpism and trump pulling the crap he is, the party's establishment is trying desperately to lead its party's voters back to more mainstream and controllable candidates who probably aren't going to incite literal insurrections. Vivek is siding with Trump. If Trump goes down, Vivek's future is questionable. He could be the trump successor and continue to harness that coalition of voters, or maybe trumpism will be a flash in the pan and burn out. I do suspect that post trump, trumpism might start collapsing. I don't know.
But yeah, either way, I see SOME buttigieg similiarities but other than being the same race, and both being brown nosers, they're not much different. The conservative 1:1 analogue of buttigieg would be someone who sounds like Mike Pence but is in his 30s or early 40s.
But the one that I find most interesting is I've seen some republicans comparing him to Ron Paul, and I find this one interesting given I was a Ron Paul supporter back in the day. Basically, like Yang, Paul had that internet demographic, with little to no real world support. But ideologically, they can't be any different.
As I said, Vivek...he's just a trump brown noser. He's just trying to adopt the most extreme positions to outflank the other nominees, regardless of whether he looks like an idiot.
Ron Paul...well, as someone who was on the Paul train in 2008, let me explain his appeal at the time. We just had 8 years of Bush. Republicans controlled both congress and the presidency until 2006, and then congress in 2006 because of malaise over the iraq war. Like what happens with cyclical politics, the side in power ends up losing support over time, and even conservatives were seeing the warning signs. On top of this there was a generational divide. Older conservatives were often like Mike Pence. They were both religious, and conservative. And honestly, the younger generation at the time, millennials, just didn't care for that as much. We were more live and let live, and had gay friends, and kinda backed off of the social issues somewhat. In addition, we had a malaise with the old school reagan conservative at times. The fact is, neoconservatism in the bush era didnt age well. Bush cut taxes, then went to war, and now we got this massive national debt that doubled under a republican's rule, combined with an unpopular war that it seemed obvious in retrospect we never should have gotten into.
In some ways, Ron Paul seemed to be the conservative answer to all of this. He wanted to get us out of the wars, return to small government, cut taxes, cut spending, focus less on social issues and let people live as they want, and this appealed a lot to young conservatives at the time. It almost came off as a return to form. Like getting back to the way conservatism was supposed to be, not what conservatism in the late 2000s actually was.
And of course, in 2008, the republicans missed the memo, we got John McCain, no one really liked him, and he got destroyed by Obama. It's like, the party establishment, at the end of an 8 year term, keeps wanting to run a third term of the guy who won the last two times. So we end up getting gore after clinton, and mccain after bush, and hillary after obama. And as it turns out no one really likes that. The party in charge has an attitude of wanting to continue the same legacy, and is incapable of introspection, so morale on the incumbent side is low and people are holding their nose, while the other side is a change agent that wants to offer something different. In some ways, Ron Paul was the conservative Bernie Sanders. The alternative to the current status quo establishment politician of the times. And much like with Bernie, the conservative establishment HATED paul, and ended up largely suppressing him in terms of media coverage, leading to ron paul supporters on the internet being very vocal and anoying about their candidate (kinda like how we bernie bros do/did that with bernie sometimes).
Vivek isn't that guy. He's a continuation of a highly controversial one term president who is popular within their own party, but not among the general electorate.
In 2008 on the republican side and 2016 on the democratic side, morale was at an all time low just about. Even the party's ardent supporters in both cases were like "ugh...fine, i guess ill hold my nose", meanwhile the other side was fired up, and independents swung toward the side with more enthusiasm.
On the flip side, Trump IS enthusiastically supported by his voter base. It's the PARTY ESTABLISHMENT that hates his guts and wants him gone because he's a liability in the general election, since the other side, while not fired up for their guy, is united in absolute fear and hatred of this guy, and independents are like "ugh, these trumpers are in a cult, biden it is then."
It's not like Biden actually has positive support. Only DNC bootlickers and neolibs look at biden as if he's truly great. Meanwhile the GOP does have a cult of personality around trump and are FANATICALLY SUPPORTIVE of him. Vivek Ramaswamy is just trying to cash in on that trend and position himself as the only super pro trump guy on stage. He might energetically get the support of the trump supporting base in a debate where trump himself is absent, but he himself is just a flash in the pan, and going against the party trends.
What the party wants to do is desperately find someone who can foil trump, the way the DNC constantly foil bernie sanders and the like on the left. They're trying to find that establishment anti trump option that no one on the right might be crazy for, but they'll show up and hold their nose and vote red. Vivek isnt that guy. He's not much of anything. He's just a trump cheerleader trying to continue the cult of trumpism and only shines in trump's absence.
He doesnt even offer any unique policy positions worth mentioning. Paul offered a vision of limited government that for better or for worse was worth considering and valid among supporters. Yang offered UBI. Bernie offered social democracy. What does vivek offer? He's just mccain to trump's Bush. He's just Hillary to Trump's Obama. He's like George HW bush, that guy trying to repackage what the last guy offered and who might capture the enthusiasm of the most ardent supporters but who lacks the charisma and the vision.
Generally, party alignments and realignments operate in those cycles. You have this once in a generation guy who comes around and realigns the parties, and then you got successors who try to walk in the same footsteps, but are progressively less successful in doing so. It's like some guy forms these coalitions, and then future candidates try running the same game plan, only to fall short as cracks in the ideology form, or the successor lacks leadership abilities or moral purity, and then eventually the entire ideology falls apart.
Failing ideologies seem to be more of a "flash in the pan" type than successful ones. Ron Paul's movement seemed to die out. Bernie's is floundering post bernie with weaker candidates like williamson and names suggested like nina turner. And as I said the other day, I feel like the UBI movement is dying because Yang brought it to attention, and after he abandoned it, it's now imploding and steadily losing steam in this post covid world of high inflation.
Vivek just...isn't "that guy", he's "the successor to that guy" who has none of the charisma and who kind of ends up exposing the faults of the previous guy's ideology. I look at vivek, and I just see an energetic nutcase who has no idea what hes talking about. Maybe he could position himself as a trump successor if trump is himself unable to run, but honestly, to anyone outside of the trump cult, he sounds certifiably insane. As I said, Im baffled people like him. There were objectively better conservative candidates on that stage. And while Im not the kind of guy to vote republican at all at this point (I'll vote blue, vote green, or even abstain before i vote red these days), honestly, as an ex conservative who left when everyone started going insane, I look at the likes of Haley, Pence, or Christie, and I see the conservatism of my youth. It's not what I want any more, but they're packaging the ideals in a more relatively sane package.
So yeah. That's my opinion on that.
Btw, I do think Ron Paul, for all of his faults, did succeed in a way. He did inevitably drive the GOP right. He is indirectly responsible for the tea party. Once McCain had lost and that wing of the party had been repudiated, the tea party arose in its place, and I do think it had the same "back to roots" energy Paul's campaign tried to harness. It's also what convinced me that conservatism was in fact, not a good thing at all.
I kinda wished the left would've been able to pull off its own similar victory. I hoped if Hillary lost the democrats would have a similar moment and we would have a tea party movement on the left, and we kind of did, but it wasnt successful, and now I'm dealing with crazies on my own side, causing me to distance myself from both the establishment dems and the left. So maybe while some level of back to roots is needed to serve as a reality check, sometimes that level of moral purity isn't a good thing as it just drives people to extremes. And I've honestly been repulsed from both sides here. Post 2010, I got alienated with the tea party and left conservatism. Then post 2016 I saw the rise of SJW politics and "democratic socialism" in the US, and as we can see, I'm distancing myself with both of them.
The difference is that while I abandoned conservatism completely, with the left, I just repudiate exact ideologies while offering my own alternatives. And as I said, my current ideology has no lane in the democratic party. Which is why Yang never got more than 2% and got destroyed in the mayoral race, and why the UBI movement seems to be dying right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment