Shownotes Transcript
I 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. The 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, the fact that you get to practice your religion, whatever that religion is, as long as you're not hurting somebody else in the process, that is who we are. That's what made America great the first time.
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 2021, Ramaswamy's bestselling book, Woke Inc., argued 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.
In his latest book, The Future of America First, Vivek criticizes the Republican Party's shortcomings and lays out a positive vision for the future of American conservatism. In today's episode, Vivek 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. Vivek Ramaswamy gets to the heart of these issues and so many more on this episode of the Sunday Special.
Vivek, great to see you. It's good to see you, man. So how's life been since the campaign? Let's start off with that. I mean, campaigning, it looks brutal out there. I mean, that's a lot of time away from your family on the road. What's it even like doing a presidential campaign? It is. Everyone's different. So it depends on your style of doing it. Actually, we made a decision pretty early on in the campaign where we were like,
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. My wife, she's a successful surgeon at Ohio State. She's one of the best in the world at what she does. We're raising our kids. Maybe three, four days a week, I'd be on the road. And then the other half of the week, I'd be at home. It doesn't work that way. And so we quickly had a recalibration as a family about a month in just because I wasn't, it was going to be clear that I just wasn't going to see my kids and my family. That wasn't going to work for me.
And, you know, Porvo was supportive of the same thing to say, listen, we're going to do this together as a family. So it's going to be a family mission for a year. We'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. I bought a plane, which I've resisted for a long time. And although it's a great been a great decision, even for after the campaign to just maximize time with the family, you know,
And we said, you know what, we're going to go all in on this as a family, but without making compromises either. Where our kids still, I believe, got all of what they needed to and more out of it. We didn't skimp on their education. We 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. And
And my wife didn't miss any cases. She had patients who depend on her and she made it back to Columbus when she needed. She rearranged her operating schedule regularly.
A little bit to make for weekdays where she could be here consecutively. But I'm a big believer in the philosophy that sometimes you can have it all if you actually have your priorities straight. And I think that was one of the things that made the campaign a lot more fulfilling than seeing it as a sacrifice for your family rather than something that was actually more
enriching for our family and even for my kids, you know, brought us closer together. My older son, we joke about this, but I don't think it's actually a joke. My wife and I joke about it. We're also serious. He was a COVID baby. He was born in February of 2020. And there is something for kids who were born right around then. I 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
To the extent that existed, he more than made up for it, meeting thousands of people per week over the course of the campaign. And so I'd like to think that there was some positive in it for them as well. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, are you still struggling with back taxes or unfiled returns? Handling this alone can be a huge mistake and cost you thousands of dollars. In these challenging times, your best offense is Tax Network USA. With over 14 years of experience, the experts at Tax Network USA have saved clients millions in back taxes. Regardless of the size of your tax issue, their expertise will work to your advantage.
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Well, I want to get to your book, Truths, the Future of America First, which is coming out very, very soon. It's great. It's filled with important ideas. I first have to do sort of the rope political talk. So let's talk about the state of the campaign. Obviously, a very, very tight campaign. You know, the debate happens. President Trump does not perform particularly well. He also is facing up against a three on one. I mean, the fact is that he was facing not just Kamala Harris, but moderators who are clearly serving her softballs. And the basic format of the debate seemed to be, Mr. Trump, when did you stop beating your wife? Miss
Ms. Harris, isn't it terrible that he beats his wife? And, you know, that is not a conducive forum, obviously, for the president to do well. With that said, the race remains incredibly tight. What do you think the president needs to do the rest of the way in order to be reelected in 2024?
Yeah, 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. He's done really well in those town hall formats in the past. Traditionally, at least up until 2020, that had always been the practice in U.S. presidential history is one of the debates. Generally, the second one was a town hall style format.
I 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. She 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. I don't think that would be the case if you had actually real human beings in a town hall style format. That's tactical, though.
Take a bigger step back. I think that, first of all, I don't believe that that debate's actually going to 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. Right. Yet you had a sort of an even if you were in the camp of believing that Kamala Harris exceeded expectations, you
It was sort of an unsatisfying kind of filling as a consequence of that, right? Because 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. So 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 a thespian exercise. It's an exercise of actually voters picking who's going to be better for their lives.
And 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. But I do think, you know, if you ask me, I think it's 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. For my part, I'm actually trying to spend my own time on the campaign trail. I'm going to be hitting a lot of swing swing states, but I'm also trying to help a lot of the Senate candidates out.
who are, interestingly enough, I mean, think about what President Trump's underperformed in the debate or not. There's that debate that people are having. Actually, he is overperforming
Nearly every pretty much every Republican Senate race across the country. And 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. And I think we should we got to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves why that exactly is. You could have competing explanations.
But anyway, as it relates to how I'm spending my time, I try to think about where I'm going to have biggest impact and showing up side by side. Donald Trump at a given rally isn't really helping him, but I think it does help a lot of the Senate candidates when I'm able to spend more time with them. And so on the political side, at least that's where I've been devoting a good part of my time and attention.
I mean, obviously, I feel exactly the same. This 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. I'm trying to go out with the Senate candidates who need funding. They need support. A lot of the money's been sucked into the presidential. There 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. A bunch of really good candidates. Dave McCormick's a really good candidate in Pennsylvania. You got Sam Brown, who's a really good candidate in Pennsylvania.
in Nevada. You've got a bunch of candidates all over the country. Sheehy's going to 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. One 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. It should be about her as sort of new face on old machine, which is really realistic. I mean, that's precisely what this is. They literally just, they photoshopped
the presidential candidate. I mean, they took the president. They made sure that no one challenged him the whole way through. He then was put in place as the nominee. And then as soon as he had a bad debate, they ousted him in favor of Kamala Harris. And the point that you've made is it would be a mistake to try and delve into Kamala Harris's personal philosophy because this isn't about that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what you mean. Yeah, I do. And I do think that's a trap we risk falling into right now. I
I don't think that the right attack against Kamala Harris is that she is a communist or a Marxist. She has, to be clear, backed policies that would rhyme with a communist or socialist left. I mean, Bernie Sanders was a socialist Democrat. She tried to run to the left of him in the 2020 primary. But
But I think in some ways gives her too much credit to call her an ideologue. I don't think she actually is. And 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 are now shifted. Right. She'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. I think it misses the point to call her a socialist or Marxist.
I think she is another cog in a machine. We're not running against a candidate. We're running against a system. And this has been is 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. It was called the beat Joe Biden pledge.
And I just remembered at the time calling it out to Ronna 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. That was a prediction. I made a lot of predictions. Not all in the right. That happened to be spot on. I was pretty early on that. But but even more philosophically, like even if Joe Biden were the puppet.
In some deeper sense, we're not actually running against him, right? He's just another cog in a machine as well. We're not running against a candidate. We're running against a machine. And I think that if you look in retrospect how that decision has aged, not just the beat Biden pledged 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. Let's just now take stock of how well that served us, okay? I think it hurt us in two ways. One is it actually...
legitimize Kamala Harris, right? It 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. Whoever it is, you're going to love it and fall in love with that person. Kamala Harris benefited from that as 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.
But the second more practical way it hurt us is just look at the way the debates played out. So people ought to remember the September 10th debate that happened just now between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
It was part of the same plan. And I'm not saying that in some conspiratorial sense. Literally, descriptively, it was agreed to on the same terms that required Republicans to debate in June against Joe Biden. So 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. And those are the conditions.
That made the June debate the earliest ever presidential debate in recorded televised history of general election debates. Why did they put it there? It was obvious. Yes, it was a free option in the world of business. You'd call a free call option. OK, so Biden was tanking. And if Biden did really well, there's always it's always a possibility. Biden did really well. Great. They've reset the race and have new momentum. If Biden does poorly, it's costless as an option because they know they could swap him out, which is exactly what they did.
So what did we do in the month after that, playing out that plan? We've attacked Biden. We've attacked the media. You 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. I mean, they were far more critical of Joe Biden during that month and a half period than they were of Republicans. And this is what that accomplished is it created the artifice of credibility where
with the general election independent voter, the undecided voter. To say, well, Republicans are complaining about the media, but I'm seeing it every day. They're hitting the Democrats, really just Biden, but hitting the Democrats harder than they are Republicans. So 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.
And 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. The essence of what's going on is running against a machine
We have failed to articulate our own alternative vision, I think sufficiently. So I don't think we're going to win this election just like we did not in 2022. You could go trace back our track record over the last five cycles. The red wave that never came in 2022, I don't think really was due to Donald Trump or abortion. Facially, people can blame abortion or whatever. I think it was a deeper issue where we were so obsessed with criticizing radical Joe Biden that
that we fail to actually offer our own vision of who we are and what we stand for. And that's not just a messaging problem, Ben. I 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. And yeah, 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 to this election.
And so that I think is the harder work we have cut out ahead of us. And unless we do that, I don't think we're going to have lasting majorities, but 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. And that is, uh, that's a hard truth, but it's also, it's also why I named my book what I did. I mean, sometimes it's the old expression goes, if you care about yourself, you tell someone what they want to hear. And if you
care about somebody else, you tell them the truth. And 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. I hope we can still have some impact on having success in November.
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So Vivek, the book, Truths, the Future of America First. So first of all, let's start with the title of it. So, you know, America First has been interpreted 1,000 different ways at this point. It'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. It's been interpreted in a whole wide variety of ways. Of course, the left would like to interpret it as Charles Lindbergh in 1939. But 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, because 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. It's always been a bit of an empty vessel that's being that requires somebody to fill it. And when Trump was president, he filled it with his policy. But can you have a movement that is a vessel kind of waiting to be filled? What do you make of America first?
So I'll give you my perspective on this. And even in sort of titling the book Truths, you know, I want to speak hard truths in all directions here. So I think America First, this modern wave of it, I mean, the expressions existed for a long time, right? Dating back, Reagan used it. It's existed for a long time. But the modern version of it, I think, is a rejection of blithe neoliberalism, which I share in common in rejecting a lot of the failures of
Bly the neoliberalism as it relates to both the intersection of foreign policy and economic policy and also immigration policy in the United States. That's the heart of it. And that's actually what propelled Donald Trump in 2016.
This idea that somehow we were going to export Big Macs and Happy Meals and spread democracy to places like China. The idea of democratic capitalism, that we could use capitalism as a vector to spread democracy abroad. It just didn't work empirically, actually. And 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. It doesn't make any sense that the number one country we rely on for supplies for our Air Force, Navy, Army is actually China. 40% of the semiconductors powering our military equipment come from China. It's unsustainable, doesn't make any sense. And you think they're going to keep supplying that, God forbid, in a scenario of conflict. Of course, they're not. It also allowed China, 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? I mean, you could pick your favorite ones, right? BlackRock. You could think about JPMorgan Chase. You could go straight down the list. The NBA, LeBron James, whoever it is, spouting off about injustices in the United States without saying a peep about actual human rights atrocities in China. And that created sort of a false moral equivalence in China.
the global political landscape. How do they do it? They said, look, if you're a company, you can't enter the Chinese market if you're criticizing the CCP. But if you're actually criticizing or undercutting the United States, we'll roll out the red carpet, not just through verbal criticism, but even through emissions caps. If you're BlackRock, you apply scope three emissions caps to Chevron in your voting power as a shareholder. You don't do the same thing, even though you're a shareholder of PetroChina. So that creates a sort of economic and moral equivalence between the United States and China. And by the way, even a military dependence that we're more dependent on China for our military than China is on us for theirs.
So it created an equalize, a great equalizing effect that otherwise wouldn't have played out. The 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.
You could say that at the intersection of economic policy and foreign policy. And 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. You see the crisis at the southern border. I think intentional policies of beginning mass illegal migration, in part, is a long-run electoral strategy for Democrats. And that's not some sort of
grand conspiracy theory. It's what Democrats were saying in 2012, 2013, when they were strategically printing this in Politico magazine. There's a great article that lays this out from 2012 or so. That exactly was part of the plan and it's worked exactly as planned. So 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 useful reactionary response to rejecting that vision.
But the question of what is the alternative vision, there we have a fork in the road. And I think that there's that fork in the road exists right now in the America First movement today. It's percolating under the surface, right? It hasn't boiled over yet. And I touch on this right up from the outset of the introduction, even the prologue and the introduction of my book get right into this is I think that there's two competing visions for what that future America First vision is. Both of them share a rejection of the neoliberalism of yesterday.
But they have very different policy prescriptions for the future on trade, on immigration, on immigration in particular. You know, in foreign policy, I think there could be a little bit more of an overlap when we get to that. But 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. So on one wing of this, it's that, OK, we want to produce everything in the United States. Screw trade. We're done with trade.
If 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. Well, you know what? We don't want those other countries selling in the United States. American manufacturers can get a decent price for their goods.
I think there are a number of issues with that. There's classical economic arguments that suggest that consumers actually end up bearing the cost of that. Of course, if there's less competition, you know, there's there's higher prices for goods for American workers. The 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. It's inflationary. But that's a classical argument.
But 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 absolutely...
For 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. Are we actually serious about declaring independence from China in those areas? I am. And I think many in the America First movement believe they are.
But if yes, that actually means I love on shoring, but it's not going to happen on a relevant time frame without also expanding relationships with Japan and South Korea and India. And you could go straight down the list. I mean, you could Vietnam around the Pacific Rim, even beyond. That means more, not less trade with those allies. That's a hard fork in the road. So 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
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 costs 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. There's no free lunch. As it relates to immigration policy, I again see a fork in the road here. Depends on what our objective actually is. So I believe that we need immigration policies that
understand the United States of America as more than just an economic zone. The United States is not just some sort of economic landscape. It's a nation with an identity. And 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. It's a very different city today than it was back then right here in Ohio. We have seen an erosion of our national identity
But that means we need an immigration policy that prioritizes what that national identity is. And 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. Now, one 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. That's one that's a protectionist worldview as it relates to labor.
I 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. But 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.
To 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. Make sure that they know English. I 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.
But that would be a different standard for immigration policy focused on the quality rather than quantity of immigration in either direction. But 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. I'm against dual citizenship for this reason. Immigrants who pledge their sole allegiance to the United States. So 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.
But 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. I think neither of those is the right answer. Immigration is policy about our national identity and who we are as a nation.
And 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 the subject. But lurking underneath all of this is that deeper question of what is American identity? And, 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 in
for a nation solely founded on abstract ideals. And I guess if that is your view, then that just that might inform your view of what immigration policy should look like. But my own view is actually, I do think that it's just a fact of history that
The people fought the American Revolution did fight for a nation founded on a set of ideals. And that geographic place that America is is different than it was in 1776. I mean, those are 13 colonies on the eastern seaboard. America is just a very different geographic landscape. But what hasn't changed is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that undergird our country. And so I think that that is a deep problem.
A 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. President Trump is excellent at really bridging this divide. And I think that he embodies elements of both of them. And 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.
But 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. You know, there's so much there in what you said. I want to start with sort of the critique of neoliberalism. So 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. I think that when you and I oppose L.A.
elements of neoliberalism, we probably mean the same thing. I mean, I agree with virtually everything that you just said. And 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,
you know, center that that obviously was untrue. I think blaming that on a failure of capitalism is sort of like blaming a hammer for not being a radio. That's not what capitalism is designed to do. Capitalism makes goods and products and services cheaper and better. I mean, that's what it does. It incentivizes innovation. And so the idea that that's going to magically convert people into wondrous Democrats is wrong. What 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. So what I would say is that the failure of neoliberalism is less about their perception of the realities of the wonders of capitalism, much more about their perception that
that humanity is effectively and essentially good. And that as soon as people get a whiff of the good life, that they will magically sort of change their opinions, which is a very non-conservative idea. I mean, going all the way back to, to world war two, George Orwell wrote one of my favorite essays in 1941, talking about how the, the sort of English social welfare state, what was not a match for the German vision of a, he said, look, why are so many people
of the Hitlerian movement when it promised basically economic suffering through autarky. It says, well, 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 that's right. And that's a crucial insight into...
into human nature. I think 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. We're going to free people all over the world. Every human heart longs for freedom. And that's not true. Not every human heart longs for freedom. Some people prize order. Some people prize hierarchy. Some people prize religious freedom.
awakening. There are a lot of different priorities in life and trying to say that the markets are going to solve all of those problems is obviously wrong. But 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. I think part of the reaction on the right, right? So I still think we're at the bleeding edge of this, Ben. I don't think, I think it's indeterminate which direction this goes. And 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? You could go into a room full of America First patriots who I identify with, could be 20 people, could be a thousand people. And 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. And you would get thunderous applause, right? If delivered in the right compelling way.
I 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. We ought to dismantle the nanny state. We don't want to replace the left wing regulatory state with the right wing regulatory state. We want to get in there and actually shut it down. And I would get equally, if not, if not, I think where the hearts of people are in policy, actually greater applause. So I think part of what we need in our America First movement is a clear
a clear vision that is disruptive to the policies of yesterday that led us down a perilous road.
And I think people are really open to being led on what that right vision actually is. But right now, it would begin as a reactionary impulse against what we could together call neoliberalism of yesterday. But 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. I think it's yet to be determined. And I'm in part in the game there.
And because I I don't expect to be a passive bystander in this. I hope to play a role in shaping the Republican Party in the direction I think we need to go. And 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 saying, oh, the neoliberals, this or that. No, no philosophy is ever perfect. And.
I think that it's easy to look back at the failures of people who made, I think, earnest decisions or guesses. The idea that spreading capitalism through democracy and vice versa was going to be a winning battle. We learned it wasn't. And it's now easy to armchair quarterback that.
I'd like to think I might have made different decisions. Who knows? I was 10 years old at the time. And so were you. But I think the reality is the real failure was the intellectual intolerance on the right for other alternatives at the time, for alternative visions. And I think we produced many political candidates. I mean, I would put John McCain in this category. I'd probably put Mitt Romney in this category. I'd put George Bush in this category of
And politicians were talking about the machine right on the other side of Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, their puppets, right? They're they're they're cogs in a wheel. We kind of cogs in a wheel for a while, too. A 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.
And I bring that back now all the way through. Now, roll that forward 20 years later. What made Donald Trump actually pretty interesting, downright interesting in 2016 is he rejected that vision. You might agree or disagree with his policies. He was the first Republican openly on the debate stage. Now it's so normal that it's hard to remember how heterodox this was in 2015 to be against the Iraq war. He was somebody who was calling out the effects of unchecked immigration policy. There's a conflation of legal and illegal, but unchecked immigration policy was
A 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. That's what made Donald Trump so cool in 2016. He began as a challenge to the system. But 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 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 like 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. So 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 saying,
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. And I do see the beginning of that right now. And 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. But
what is the actual content of our vision for the future? And I think that it's going to be for the next few years, on the positive side, I think a very exciting and, dare I say, an intellectually rich moment for the future of conservatism. And as I said earlier, I don't intend to be just a passive bystander or a commentator in that. So one of the things that you mentioned a little bit earlier that I wanted to come back to was the sort of
fascinating and roiling dissension in the Republican Party on foreign policy. So it's been very interesting to watch President Trump sort of bridge these gaps because there are these gaps that have obviously emerged. There's a more isolationist wing of the Republican Party. There's still very much interventionist wing of the Republican Party. President Trump, his verbiage is more sort of isolationist in tone. His administration was much more peace through strength and almost traditional Reagan fashion, which was
You clock, you even make a threat and we'll clock into next week. I mean, he's very clear about this. I mean, when you speak with President Trump, his innate instinct when it comes to foreign policy is a peace through strength instinct. You know, I'm fond of telling the story where we did a fundraiser for him and President Trump was talking about Vladimir Putin. He says, 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. And Vlad said, no, you won't. And I said, well, I might.
And I thought that's pretty good foreign policy. Right. Actually, I kind of like that foreign policy. Right. As President Trump then said, if there's even a 5 percent chance that we are going to do it, you're not going to do it. We're the United States. That's actually a pretty good foreign policy. It 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. But it
I think that Trump's a unique figure in this because everyone else is sort of forced into one of two boxes. One 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. And again, I don't actually think the American people are in either of those boxes particularly. Well, that's what I was going to say. I don't think that, I don't think anywhere the American people are versus where we should be is also even a separate question. But I don't think that those are the only two options. And, you know, this is...
One of the things I'm trying to do in this book is, the book is wide-spanning, but our conversation, we're scratching the surface of some of these debates. I hope the people who get through the book, I think the whole question at the heart of it is, who are we as conservatives? That question is as yet unanswered. I frame it broadly, we stand for truth. But then breaking down what that means, that's what the book's all about, and I hope people are able to
And one thing I'll say before I get into this, Ben, on the question of the foreign policy, because it's a bridge between even an economic policy discussion we had in the foreign policy discussion is we need more open debate. We 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. And, 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
but just even each chapter ending with five points that you can bring to the discussion table. I'm not beyond the point where I have to pretend to write academic books. This is very practical in terms of just making it very pragmatic for how we're able to confront some of these questions. As it relates to foreign policy, those aren't the only two options, isolationism versus interventionism. Maybe I'll back into this discussion on foreign policy coming at it from even the conversation we just had about domestic economic policy, which is
I'll give you my philosophy. I'm against the nanny state in all forms. Okay. I'm against the nanny state in the form of the entitlement state.
I'm against the nanny state in the form of the regulatory state. So 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. And then I'm against the nanny state as it applies to foreign policy as well. The nanny state relationship that we have with other countries.
My general perspective with our allies is that should the United States provide protection when we have greater capability to our allies? Absolutely. The scope of that discussion should be then limited to making sure that we're making sure that our allies actually pay for it, right? So I think the idea that NATO...
is not meeting, I think 17 of the NATO countries, a majority of the NATO countries are not even yet meeting their minimal 2% of GDP expenditure that they've committed to make on their own national self-defense. And 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. And so sometimes I think this devolves in a discussion of whether the United States should or shouldn't be providing protection that isn't 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. We're going to advance American interests through our strength, absolutely. But I'd like to see a relationship where other countries are actually paying for that. And 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.
Now 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. So we can talk about interventionism versus isolationism. That'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.
Actually, you have 25% recruitment deficit in our own U.S. military that coincides with the decline in national pride, but also the foundation of war is economics. The industrial production of the industrial base that supports our military is
is largely not in our own control in the United States anyway. It's dependent on our own adversaries. So 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 interventionist. I'm not an interventionist by nature, but you can't even be an interventionist without the existence of a strong military right here at home. So I'm one of these people who's actually, you know, I definitely don't fall into one of those, either of the two categories of isolationist or interventionist,
But I personally believe that I'm not against increasing the percentage of U.S. GDP that's spent on the U.S. military. To 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. Peace through strength, through the gestures you send abroad only work if you actually are in a position to actually be strong.
And then as it relates to our diplomacy and our foreign policies, it relates to diplomacy. I think we should be more disciplined to make sure that that looks like more like diplomacy between allies rather than nanny state overgrowth, which I see as an extension of the domestic nanny state we discussed. So, 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.
But I think in not being an interventionist, I think it's a question of prioritization. And 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. I mean, that is certainly true. And again, ties back into the economic arguments that you're making, which are largely dependent on a robust military.
economy. And the United States right now is the biggest problem. The biggest security problem we face is our economy. It's not actually our military. Our military is a major problem in 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. China
just this week put out a video of a drone show that was clearly meant to be militarily intimidating. It was 8,100 drones in this very complex drone show. And they were like, oh, isn't this cool? But 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. And that's clearly what that is meant to convey. And the United States has not been spending its money in the ways that are conducive to victory. But the question is where that money comes from. And when you're $35 trillion in debt,
And when you are spending now on a yearly basis, $1 trillion just to service that debt, the idea that you're going to be able to dig your way out of this through a sort of autarkic economic policy in the United States without actually restructuring any of the welfare state. I mean, if you want to turn into Europe, it's hard to find a better way to turn into Europe than that, actually. Yeah, I mean, I think there is room for a future conservative movement. Now, I'm playing my hand here a little bit, but we've been sort of doing that. I'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. The entitlement state, the regulatory state, and I think it bleeds into foreign policy to provide, I think, a greater coherence to this idea of, okay, well, we're only going to worry about America. And it's not, it's, what does that mean? We have interests around the world, but for us to say that we're not going to be a nanny state, either domestically at home or abroad, I think provides a
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. And I think that that is, you know, I
For what it's worth, I think our electorate is not interested in going back to the 2000 Republican Party anyway. But I think that between that fork in the road, I think that they're open to being led in one of those two directions. And when I talk about the future of America first, right, truths, the future of America first is, you know, what do I mean by that? I think the hard truth is that that fork in the road is coming soon and it's up to us to make that choice.
I totally agree with so much of what you're saying. And this sort of brings us to the last topic here, which is, as you mentioned, what sort of is the American identity? And 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 confusing.
absolutely meaningless, right? I mean, it's not just good people everywhere. It's not just freedom without any sort of content. It actually has to have some content. At 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. I'm not sure that America broadly writ is just a giant Florida. I wish it were. It isn't. So what does Americanism look like definitionally from where you sit?
Yes. 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. And that's different than the blood and soil vision of American identity. And I do think that that's gaining currency. It's popular. I'm empathetic to it.
But I think that that fails. The blood and soil vision fails. First of all, our national identity will always then be thinner than that of somewhere like Japan or Italy, for that matter. Right. Or Israel. Like these are countries where you have deep blood and soil connections, genetic lineages dating back or religious ties. Like that is not the United States of America. So if we pretend that somebody is more American because they've been here for seven generations versus somebody's only been here for two or one.
Well, guess what? Our national identity is always going to be a weaker form than that existing in most other countries. In 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 would 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 and 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. And so what are those ideals? I think that they're foundational ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
I 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, but that is who we are, that's what made America great the first time. The 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, the fact that you get to practice your religion, whatever that religion is, as long as you're not hurting somebody else in the process,
as long as I get to in return. The idea of merit, right? Merit, I think, is at the heart of the American identity. And what is merit or what is a meritocracy? I think it's a system that A, recognizes that not everyone, in fact, decisively everyone does not have the same God-given gifts. It 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, even though that's different from mine or anybody else's.
Your God given potential, you can maximize that God given potential in this country without any government or system standing in your way. That I think those I think begin to form the beginnings of an American identity grounded in the rule of law. Something that we say is, you know, we a nation without borders, not a nation, but that's an extension of the fact that we're a nation founded on the rule of law.
So 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.
Those are unique American ideals, and that's what I believe makes American exceptionalism possible. That, I believe, is our identity. And you know what? If 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 greater, 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. It 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. I just don't think that works. I don't think that that's actually what America is. And, you know, I think that whether where you land on that question is,
really leads to some different policies, both for economic policy, immigration policy, and even the revival of our national identity. 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.
So, you know, I think that that's a very different civic nationalism from, I would say, an ethno-nationalism. I am a nationalist, but I'm a nationalist grounded in civic nationalism rather than ethno-nationalism for the United States. And I think these are deep questions of identity that we're going to have to confront. And I think one of the things that would be interesting to me is how many
How many of the conservative base in America, if you ask the importance of our history, right? We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of teaching our kids history. But then you actually maybe just want me to want to just inquire how many people actually know what the history of the United States, how many of us know what the history of the United States of America actually is. And I think the the answer is somewhat embarrassing, alarming in terms of where we are, in terms of our own even native history.
understanding of our own history. Actually, Malcolm X, I think, is the one who said this. I may get the person who said it wrong, but I think it was Malcolm X, is that a nation without history is like a tree without roots.
It physically exists, but functionally it's just dead, actually. It's dead. And that's in some ways what I think we risk becoming. And 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 genetic lineage was derived from. And 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? Or whatever, right?
versus 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. Constitution. That's who we are. I want to make sure that the right does not lose sight of that. And I do think that's a risk. And I don't think, I think a majority of our base understands that and is actually with me on this. But 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
are on the other side of this question, but there's no real, I would say, prominent national voices, certainly in the realm of elected politics, on this national libertarian side of this equation. And 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.
Well, Vivek, the book is really a fascinating read. It's Truths, the Future of America First. Obviously, it takes on a number of huge ideas. I think that we're all, I don't think, I know, we're all unified in the run-up to this election. Donald Trump should be the next president of the United States. The Republican candidates in the swing states need to win. And 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 going to break out into the open. You're planting a lot of important seeds here. So thanks for joining us and congrats on the book.
Thank you, man. I appreciate it. And tell me what your viewers think after they read it. I'm excited to hear. Will do.
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