On Defending and Preserving American Identity
Vivek Ramaswamy is a never-die kid. Having lost the 2024 Republican primary, he promptly got kicked out of DOGE and then bodied in the H-1B dust-up over the Christmas break. But the fourth time might be the charm, for Ramaswamy is now running for Ohio Governor in the 2025 gubernatorial election. He is an Ohioan native (born in Cincinnati) and has Trump’s backing, so there is little doubt that he will be the Republican front-runner. This places MAGA Ohioans in the difficult (but probably necessary) position of defeating the Left by electing a smooth-talking, snake oil political GOP salesman as their governor.
Yet before we welcome Ramaswamy into the Trump camp with open arms, we need to understand that he is a cancer to the movement. This is because he is wrong about America’s origin, identity, and purpose; he is himself an anchor baby and the child of immigrants who gamed the system, and he made his wealth that fueled his political rise through crony business dealings.
American Identity
In a September 2024 speech at the Club for Growth Foundation and Reunion in D.C., Ramaswamy articulated what he believes is “a divide within the future direction of America First.” The division is between those who locate American identity in “blood and soil” and those who believe that an American is one who professes faith in a set of “abstract ideals.” The former, according to Ramaswamy, is the belief that “strong national identity” is “tied to a purity of genetic stock … [and] the integrity of a lineage’s tie to its land.” This is how most countries define and police their national identities. Only those of Japanese blood descent can be Japanese.
Yet America is different, per Ramaswamy’s telling. “I believe America is a country founded on a set of ideals that brought together a divided, even polyglot, group of people two hundred and fifty years ago.” The Indian businessman and upstart politician recognizes that there is significant discontent in the MAGA camp as to this account of Americanness. Propositional nationhood is not enough to motivate men to love and die for their country, opponents to Ramaswamy’s view say. Yet to this, Ramaswamy has a ready retort: the American Revolution disproves such fears. “I think the American Revolution was fought over abstract ideals,” he says, which is why America is different than almost every other nation in world history. The only other country similar to America is ancient Rome, where citizenship, not different shades of melanin, defined a person as a Roman.
The problem with the blood and soil version of American identity, Ramaswamy says, is that it destroys American exceptionalism. Since other nations will always have a stronger claim to purity of bloodline and longer geographical relationship to a region much more ancient than America, America will cease to be exceptional in any meaningful way. Instead, true Americans must understand that we are “a nation founded on a set of distinctive ideals, that were enshrined in the greatest mission statement for a nation in the history of mankind, the Declaration of Independence; and enshrined in the most effective operating manual for those ideals, that is the U.S. Constitution.” This is what Ramaswamy calls “national libertarianism,” a rejection of ethnic and economic protectionism and the embrace of America First propositionalism.
Vivek is right that there is a deep divide in the America First movement, and he is right about what the divide is. He is also correct that “in order to put America first, you actually have to define what America actually is.” The problem is that Ramaswamy is wrong about what America is. His view is quite common among conservatives, however, so it is difficult to blame him. He is one of thousands before him articulating this thin and historically anachronistic vision of America. I once counted myself among these enthusiasts, and I even wrote a piece in 2018 (long since deleted from the internet) in which I argued, like Ramaswamy, that “more than any other nation, America was founded upon a political and moral creed,” and that this “is what makes America exceptional in world history as a nation.” Like most Americans, what I thought I knew had been absorbed from popular culture, standard historical texts, and carefully curated biographers of America.
My change of mind occurred when I read eighteenth-century authors themselves. Ramaswamy says the Americans fought the Revolutionary War over abstract ideals. He could not be more wrong. Consider the Suffolk Resolves (Sept. 17, 1774) from the county of Suffolk in Massachusetts Bay, who were writing to King George III in protest of Parliament’s abuses. They opened their tract with an understanding of what hung in the balance:
And whereas, this, savage and uncultivated desart, was purchased by the toil and treasure, or acquired by the blood and valor of those our venerable progenitors; to us they bequeathed the dearbought inheritance, to our care and protection they consigned it, and the most sacred obligations are upon us to transmit the glorious purchase, unfettered by power, unclogged with shackles, to our innocent and beloved offspring. On the fortitude, on the wisdom and on the exertions of this important day, is suspended the fate of this new world, and of unborn millions.
Their resistance was due to the inheritance they had received, and their responsibility was not merely to themselves but to the “unborn millions” of their posterity. The colonists were upset that Parliament had ordered the “blocking up the harbour of Boston,” and had “alter[ed] the established form of government in this colony,” and were protecting the most “flagitious violators of the laws of the province from a legal trial.” In other words, the offence was against a particular land where a particular people with particular constitutional and legal customs had long lived and governed themselves in peace. Even when the resolves spoke of “defend[ing] and preserv[ing] … civil rights and liberties,” this is immediately explained as those rights and liberties “for which many of our fathers fought, bled and died, and to hand them down entire to future generations.” No abstract ideals these!
Even the Declaration of Independence, renowned for its majestic opening that is endlessly claimed by creedalists as proof of their position, was an occasional document for a particular purpose. The majority of the text, the twenty-seven grievances, are all about Britain’s perceived violations of the colonists’ land and home, the destruction of their legislative assemblies, the obstruction of the administration of justice, the keeping of standing armies and quartered troops, and the harms against family, hearth, and neighbor.
What Ramaswamy (and many who follow him) conflates is the substance of what the Americans were fighting for (very much their land, ancestors, posterity, and way of life) versus the grounds upon which they justified their independence. Those grounds were, in short, three: the tradition of British constitutionalism and common law, the Christian religion, and the natural law. Each of these contains both particular and universal elements, and thus, the confluence of them in a single people was not impossible, even if remarkable. In their struggle with Great Britain, the colonists eventually turned to the universal claims of natural justice present in each in order to defend their way of life and argue for revolution. Yet every universal truth requires a precise determination and application. That “all men are created equal” means that no man has the right to politically rule another as a master would a slave (if men are not slaves), implies that the consent of the governed is necessary for a just political order. Yet the founders knew that democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy were all legitimate regime forms compatible with the people’s reasonable participation. What form of government is appropriate for America cannot be known from the mere articulation of basic political maxims.
The colonists did not fight for liberty as a nondescript “unalienable right.” They fought for the liberty to rule themselves through local assemblies consisting of men they elected to represent them; they fought for the liberty to associate with whom they saw fit, to worship the true God as was required of them, to not be onerously taxed, to be accorded a jury of one’s peers and not forced to bear testimony against themselves, and so forth. Their liberties were particular to them and their inherited way of life, adjusted and applicable to their time and nature.
Those liberties, they knew, were rare in world history, and once lost, there was little hope of regaining them. These were liberties not known to most men, as most men were individually and collectively incapable of properly exercising and stewarding such liberties. Like Montesquieu before them, the founding generation believed that political constitutions must be made to fit the spirit and disposition of a people. Not all are capable of republicanism or democracy; some, like Plato’s licentious man in his cycle of regimes, are slavish by nature and must be harshly ruled over by others stronger than themselves. But not the British and Americans. They had long cultivated among themselves the habits, memory, and attention for civilizational greatness. This, of course, had not happened easily, but only through great national struggle, strife, civil war, and terrible suffering. Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century, the British Empire and her American colonies had established a constitutional equilibrium that all sides were happy with before the imperial crisis (1763-1776).
Anchor Baby
Undoubtedly, Vivek Ramaswamy is motivated to promote a creedal and propositional America because he is the child of immigrant Indian parents. Immigrants from outside our European heritage (more accurately, majority British and Western European) who come to America know that they are outsiders to American culture and history. They do not fit in, yet they are desperate to find a place for themselves and to convince themselves and the rest of Americans that they belong here, too. Appealing to universal and abstract ideals as the essence of American identity makes this “assimilation” possible.
In his 2024 Republican National Convention speech, Ramaswamy claimed that he was the child of “legal immigrants to this country.” Yet in a previous interview with NBC, Ramaswamy admitted that his father was not and is not now a legal citizen of the United States, and his mother did not become a naturalized citizen until after he was born (but not actually until 2004, when Vivek was 19). Ramaswamy insists that his parents were still here legally, yet we know that “legal” immigrant status is a hazy grey area. We do not know the exact reason why Vivek Ganapathy (father) and Geetha Ramaswamy (mother) emigrated to America, or under what legal status they came and were able to stay.
Yet these facts reveal that Vivek is an “anchor baby,” a child born to legal, non-citizen residents in America who was granted American citizenship by birthright. Ramaswamy is himself passionate about “birthright citizenship” per the Fourteenth Amendment, yet the irony is that he does not qualify for citizenship, and so should not be a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Citizenship Clause of that amendment was primarily intended to extend citizenship to the freed black slaves, but in all cases, it circumscribes birthright citizenship only to those who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of American law. As many good conservative legal analysts have demonstrated, the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment excluded children of foreign diplomats, of the various Indian tribes, and of non-citizen residents.
As President Trump’s recent birthright citizenship executive order clarifies, citizenship should not be granted to children whose fathers are not citizens of the U.S., even if their mother is here lawfully but temporarily. Since Ramaswamy’s father has Indian and not American citizenship, he is subject to the jurisdiction of the laws of India, not America. The question of the current legitimacy of Ramaswamy’s citizenship comes down to whether his mother’s immigrant status was lawful and, if so, if it was temporary. Regardless, the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment would have denied that they intended to grant birthright citizenship to anchor babies like Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy became an American “citizen” by gaming America’s immigrant system that had broken down in the post-Hart-Celler 1965 immigration fiasco. Thus, Ramaswamy is a product and a manifest representation of the loss of American sovereignty, the degrading of her national identity, and the erosion of her historic heritage. That he touts a creedal version of American identity that is historically and demonstrably false only adds insult to injury.
The Roivant Racket
In February 2023, Ramaswamy sold a large amount of stock in Roivant for $32 million in order to fund his GOP presidential campaign. Roivant is a healthcare technology and drug development company founded by Ramaswamy in 2014. There are many troubling aspects of Roivant and its subsidiaries. The company lost millions while Ramaswamy was chairman. In 2019, the company’s net operating loss was $530 million; in 2020 this had doubled to over $1 billion; in March 2022, the company reported an annual loss of over $924 million from continuing operations; and by March 2023, it had lost another $1.2 billion. Even though Ramaswamy stepped down as CEO in 2021, the company was badly managed under his watch.
In addition, in late 2014, a subsidiary of Roivant, Axovant Sciences, had acquired an Alzheimer’s drug, Intepirdine, for $5 million (Axovant renamed it RVT-101). The drug had failed Phase 2 trials, but in order to sell it, Ramaswamy worked with his mother, Dr. Geetha Ramaswamy, to supposedly conduct successful Phase 2 trials in 2015 involving only 684 subjects and so move the drug onto Phase 3 testing. The result was that by June 2015, Vivek was touting the drug’s success; Axovant’s shares soared to over $30 a share, the initial public offering (IPO) earned the company $315 million in purchased shares, and the company briefly was valued at over $3 billion. Ramaswamy himself took a huge payout, claiming over $37 million in capital gains taxes in 2015. Yet by September 2017, Axovant announced that Intepirdine had failed its Phase 3 trials; the company lost 75% of its value in a single day, and shareholder losses mounted. Intepirdine was abandoned, and Axovant was dissolved in 2023. Many have accused Axovant of being a pump-and-dump scheme.
When these problems are added to the fact that Roivant’s main product is pharmaceutical drugs that are greatly contributing to America’s negative health outcomes and the fact that Roivant is based overseas in (British) Bermuda and not in America (and thus part of the global hollowing out of America’s industrial heartland), one cannot help but reach the conclusion that Ramaswamy’s touted entrepreneurial genius is a well-massaged public concoction. Ramaswamy’s business enterprises are as fraught, fraudulent, and harmful to Americans as is his abstractions of American identity and his suspicious citizenship status.
Conclusion
Vivek Ramaswamy is a smart, well-spoken, and likable guy. Yet beneath the surface are troubling signs. In many ways, Ramaswamy represents everything wrong with a global, immigrant and profit-driven America geared toward universal humanistic values and crony capitalist scams that, in the end, destroy America as a people and homeland. While American’s love to think that every immigrant to this country is a hard-working, up-from-the-bootstraps, honest person simply trying to get ahead in life, Vivek Ramaswamy proves them wrong. If Americans want to truly know who they are and where they came from, and if they want to preserve what’s left of this great country and perhaps revive the America that once was, they should repudiate the Vivek Ramaswamy’s of the world. Ohio conservatives should think carefully before electing this man as their next governor.
Image Credit: Unsplash
