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Vance’s and Vivek’s Dueling Visions of America
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Vance’s and Vivek’s Dueling Visions of America
Conservatives should reject Ramaswamy’s abstractions.
It’s that time of year. A time for Christmas carols, honey-glazed ham, and a rant from Vivek Ramaswamy that infuriates the American right.
In the 12 months since the last such outburst, Ramaswamy, an anti-woke Republican and son of Indian immigrants, has managed to regain clout on the right. He’s running for Ohio governor and seems a lock for the GOP nomination, and last Friday he received a prime-time speaking slot at AmericaFest 2025, a conference organized by the conservative group Turning Point USA.
The speakers’ list for that event was a Who’s Who of American conservatism, but the absence of three prominent right-wingers—the late TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, white-nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, and President Donald Trump—set the event’s context and engendered its unexpected gravity.
Despite the fog machines and fireworks, this was no mere pep rally, but an arena of real political contestation. The speakers jockeyed for influence in the wake of Kirk’s assassination this September and ahead of Trump’s exit from the political stage three years hence. Several positioned themselves between Fuentes and the radical left as moderate, yet principled, conservative voices. By the end, a fundamental debate had emerged, a debate about the nature of America itself.
On Sunday night, Vice President J.D. Vance put forward a vision of American identity that was both unifying and authentically conservative. “Americans are hungry for identity,” Vance said. He blamed economic globalization, left-wing elites, and censorious “tech overlords” for accelerating the destruction of community and tradition. And he promoted a revival of Christianity as “America’s creed” and the historic “anchor of the United States of America.”
The speech should be interpreted in light of the vice president’s other recent reflections, including his July 2024 nomination speech. “America is not just an idea,” Vance said then. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” And this February, during a speech at the Munich Security Conference, Vance presented America as being part of a cultural bloc that also encompasses Europe, referring to “our shared civilization.”
That’s a very different view of America than Ramaswamy’s, which is alien to the conservative moral imagination.
While Ramaswamy articulated his views at AmericaFest 2025 (and in a recent New York Times op-ed), many right-wingers first became aware of them a year ago, when he delivered a Boxing Day sermon on X that amounted to a defense of U.S. corporations that favor foreigners over Americans in hiring. Americans aren’t inherently dumber and lazier than foreigners, Ramaswamy explained, but their circumstances have made them that way: “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”
In reaction, conservatives fumed, objecting not only to Ramaswamy’s implicit contention that Americans, on average, can’t excel at high-skill labor, but also to his use of scare quotes around “native” in the phrase “native Americans.” That term normally refers to American Indians, but right-wingers have used it to describe Old Stock Americans descended from the country’s original settlers, a usage with racial connotations in our era of mass migration. It was this conception that Ramaswamy plainly had in mind.
Ramaswamy’s implicit dismissal of the idea suggested he rejected any vision of American identity connected to ancestry, kinship, and heritage, the traditional ingredients of nationhood and natural objects of patriotic attachment. That vision is a conservative alternative to the liberal one of Americans being brought into a merely artificial relation by chance proximity, liberal ideology, and government-issued documents.
During this year’s rant, delivered on-stage to young right-wingers fed up with squishy Boomer conservativism, the audience didn’t need to imagine Ramaswamy wagging his slender finger, nor to infer that he adhered to liberal dogmas on the question of nationality. Again he mocked a term that has gained purchase with right-wingers, in this case, “heritage Americans.” But unlike last year, Ramaswamy also elaborated his own ideas about American identity.
The speech was an explicit meditation on “what it means to be an American.” The answer provided: to “believe in ideals,” especially color-blind meritocracy. Ramaswamy scolded the far right for believing that a citizen could be more American or less American depending on how deeply rooted in the country they are. In the speech’s most quotable line, he rejected their ancestral pride: “No, I’m sorry, our lineage is not our strength.”
In Ramaswamy’s telling, Americans are unique in comprising not so much a nation as a liberal ideological project. Of course, he didn’t put the point in quite that way, but it’s the clear inference one draws from several passages, including this:
You could go to Italy, but you would never be an Italian. You can move to Germany, but you would never be a German. You could pack your bags and live the rest of your life in China or Japan; you would never be Chinese or Japanese. But you can come from any one of those countries to the United States of America and you can still be an American.
Where to begin?
First, one thing America conspicuously has in common with Italy and Germany—but not with China or Japan—is that its political elites have betrayed its people, flooding the country with young men from alien lands, maligning any American who bemoans this unprecedented calamity, and perverting the country’s history to depict it as belonging to whichever foreigners manage to penetrate its borders.
The entire Western world faces this crisis, an extinction-level event for the nations affected. Yet Ramaswamy attempted to differentiate the U.S. from its civilizational partners by treating this development as a long-standing, salutary fixture of American life arising from the nation’s very identity.
Ramaswamy’s speech, in addition to being fundamentally liberal, was incoherent. He condemned the “online right” for offering a non-binary conception of American identity according to which Old Stock Americans were more American than newcomers. Yet his own standard of nationality—belief in certain “ideals”—suggests that U.S. citizens who reject those ideals are less American than those, like Ramaswamy, who affirm them.
In defining American-ness as belief in certain abstract ideals, Ramaswamy mixed up what philosophers call the essential and the accidental: He mistook accidental properties, which America merely happens to possess, for ones essential to its nature. Imagine a family that, taking pride in their strong work ethic, concluded they should kick out the daughter for laziness and replace her with a diligent stranger. Ramaswamy’s idea is no less absurd and, if honestly implemented, would lead to tyrannical enforcement of liberal ideology.
Of course, American values, though “accidental” in the philosophical sense, are integral to the self-conception of Americans. But Ramaswamy denigrates those values by treating them as abstractions that anyone can adopt through mental assent. In fact, American values are unportably embedded in a particular community life. Consider: Ramaswamy often praises “free enterprise,” which he depicts as uniquely American, but the free-market system that enriched the nation would have imploded had Americans proved scammers and money-grabbers rather than builders and honest traders.
The Trump administration has gone much further than right-wingers expected in alerting Americans to the crisis of mass migration and the fragility of Western civilization. Vance especially has given this theme eloquent expression. Thanks to his efforts, the vision of American identity that Ramaswamy favors is one that conservatives, finally, have managed to leave behind. Given the urgency of the crisis that Westerners face, we can’t afford to bring it back.
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