The Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is thirty-eight years old and slender, with thick black hair, receding a bit at the temples, swept up into something approaching a pompadour. On the campaign trail, he often wears a black suit and an open-necked white shirt, and he has an unusually theatrical style, holding a clenched left fist out in front of him as he speaks. Ramaswamy’s approach on the stump is pitch-deck aphoristic: “There actually wasn’t a rise and fall of Rome—there were many rises and falls,” he told the crowd at a stop this week in Rochester, New Hampshire. Rather than engage in knotty Washington debates, he prefers to find a ladder onto a more abstract plane, on which politics is an elemental conflict. His lawn signs say simply, “Truth.”
Ramaswamy isn’t above using Fox News talking points (a favored line on Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine is that it’s “repayment for a five-million-dollar bribe,” a reference to Hunter Biden). But he likes to point out that he is annoyed with both parties (“You don’t hear me talking about Republicans and Democrats—it’s boring. Actually we have the managerial class in both of them”). He claims that the theatre of Washington politics is meaningless (“Congress is a joke”) and conceals the real action, which is taking place in the regulatory agencies. In some ways, he is taking a Trumpian insight—that elections are a reflection of emotions not ordinarily captured by politics—even further than Donald Trump. A religious audience might applaud if you say that Roe v. Wade is an abomination, and might applaud a little louder if you say that you’d permit state laws that criminalize abortion. But why not just say what all but the most programmatic among them really want to hear, which is that God is real, even if yours is a Hindu god and theirs is Christian? Rather than get trapped in endless questions about when you did and didn’t support Trump’s January 6th uprising, why not call for a revolt of your own? In Rochester, Ramaswamy said, to cheers, “Do you want incremental reform or do you want revolution? I stand on the side of revolution.”
Not long ago, Ramaswamy was polling, as he says on the trail, “not just at zero per cent but at zero point zero per cent.” Last week, a poll from the G.O.P. firm Cygnal put him second in the race, with the support of eleven per cent of Republican voters—way behind Trump, at fifty-three per cent, but just ahead of Ron DeSantis, at ten per cent. Ramaswamy, the founder of a biotech company, is a political novice—this is his first time as a candidate at any level—but that itself is a draw for the post-Trump G.O.P., which is at war with many aspects of its own recent past. His company had a high-profile failure with an Alzheimer’s drug that didn’t work, but he has ultimately amassed a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars and has largely self-funded his campaign. Long influenced by libertarian ideas, Ramaswamy developed a political profile just two years ago, when he published “Woke, Inc.,” a polemic about the capture of corporations by progressive thinking, which made him a frequent face on Fox News. It is both strange and very of the moment that he could turn this background into a viable Presidential candidacy, and he has been going about it with vigor. In Rochester, he spoke beside his usual backdrop, a banner listing ten principles of his campaign, like Commandments: “1. God is real. 2. There are two genders. 3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. 4. Reverse racism is racism.”
The Republicans challenging Trump in 2024 have all studied him, and in many cases copied aspects of his political presentation, so attending early primary events in Iowa and New Hampshire can be a bit like looking at pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of the forty-fifth President. In DeSantis, there are the oversized suits and the instinct for punching down, in Chris Christie the use of the ad-hominem attacks as an audience-seduction technique.
Ramaswamy has been described as “anti-woke” and as a “non-white candidate peddling racist dog whistles,” but neither captures what is unique about his candidacy. Unlike DeSantis, for whom “anti-woke” is a banner under which to advance aggressive social-conservative policy items, Ramaswamy uses it as a way to attack the connective tissue of power—a liberal consensus of anti-racism, “climatism, COVID-ism, globalism.” Ramaswamy’s position on Ukraine appears to be that Americans are being played for fools. Of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, he said, in New Hampshire, “What I’m not going to do is pretend like it’s a paragon of democracy. Give me a break. I mean, this guy has eliminated, like, eleven opposition parties, he’s consolidated media into one state-media arm. Coming here in his cargo pants like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he’s got half the Democratic Party and three-quarters of the Republican Party eating out of his hand.”
If Ramaswamy makes it into the spring as a realistic contender, the Randian grandiosity of his campaign may be tested. His biggest applause line and most detailed proposal in Rochester concerned his plan to fully drain the swamp by imposing term limits for all federal civil servants and eliminating seventy-five per cent of the federal bureaucracy through “mass layoffs.” (Ramaswamy says he can do this without congressional approval, and claimed that President Trump was “duped” by the “managerial class” into believing that the federal bureaucracy was protected by civil-service laws.) Many of his other policy proposals—for instance, to take military action in order to secure the southern border, “and the northern border, if necessary”—might best be understood as dares to the rest of the Republican candidates. But, then, the other candidates are taking the dares: DeSantis recently advanced a similar border policy.
A key part of Ramaswamy’s pitch is the simplest: he is young. He mentions his age often, and in Rochester he introduced the memorable fact that, if he is elected and completes two Presidential terms, his older son (he and his wife, Apoorva, a doctor, have two boys) will not yet have entered high school. At the Iowa State Fair, he rapped out a couple of verses of Eminem, a party trick of his since his undergraduate days at Harvard. In contrast to Trump’s boomer inferno —either we’re going back to a better time or we’re going down in flames—Ramaswamy suggests a conservative future. Faith, patriotism, and family have disappeared as pillars, he said on the stump, replaced by “depression, anxiety, fentanyl, suicide.” But that wasn’t the end of the story. He said, “I don’t think we have to be a nation in decline. I think the truth right now is we are a little young, actually—we’re going through our own version of adolescence. . . .You go through that crisis, you lose your self-confidence. You lose your way a little bit. You’re stronger on the other side.”
Of all the ways in which Trump broke the political model, a basic one was in the biography of a Presidential contender. Could anyone—at least anyone able to fund his own campaign—be President now? That idea, prevalent during the populist spring of 2016, has faded since. Fewer progressive outsiders have won national office than many on the left might have hoped, and the Republican Party has largely absorbed the MAGA movement, avoiding being displaced by it. The novice-candidate model hasn’t really been tested since 2016: no one really knows whether the right vibes and a Molotov cocktail in your hand still beats a political record and voter loyalty, of the sort attached to DeSantis and, more powerfully, Trump.
As recently as this past winter, when he was making waves on Fox News with anti-woke pronouncements, Ramaswamy often sounded callow: bored by political details, shamed by the failure of the anti-Alzheimer’s drug on which he had largely bet his company, and somewhat personally isolated. “I feel like the public advocacy, or whatever you call what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, has eroded more friendships than new friendships made up for it,” he told Sheelah Kolhatkar then. It felt like a very long way to the Presidency.
It may still be a long way. Last week, Politico reported on a gap in polling that professionals were working to explain—Ramaswamy performs far better in Web-based polls than in telephone ones, which might be explained by an excess of rabid young supporters. But an excess of rabid young supporters is an asset anywhere in politics, especially in a party devoid of youth. One main source of grassroots conservative energy since Biden’s election has been the backlash to the liberal moral consensus that formed during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, which deepened around the conviction that the climate is in crisis, and that greeted the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Watching Ramaswamy on the stump reminded me that Biden, who campaigned against Trump’s extremism in 2020 as a pragmatist and a steady hand, has not yet had to defend his investments in climate transformation and the Ukraine war, and made me wonder how effectively he would do so.
For now, Ramaswamy’s rise is demonstrating that conservative populist energy hasn’t fully been tapped. During the Q. & A. session in Rochester, the woman standing next to me shouted out that Kiev had been persecuting Christians, and Ramaswamy quickly added this to the list of Zelensky’s alleged crimes. When someone else implied that China was responsible for COVID, he nodded eagerly. “Yes!” Ramaswamy said. “I’m not O.K. with releasing man-made viruses from a bioterrorism lab in Wuhan.” He asked for audience members’ names and agreed with what they said, even when it pulled him nearer to conspiracy; in response, the crowd rose and applauded, and moved nearer to him, too.
After a riff about declaring economic independence from communist China, Ramaswamy worked himself around to a closing. “For too long,” he said, “we have been celebrating our diversity. So much that we forgot all of the ways that we are really just the same as Americans, bound by a common creed that set this nation into motion two hundred and fifty years ago . . . e pluribus unum. From many, one.”
Just in front of him, a young guy with a beard said, with satisfaction, “Based”—the young right’s preferred term of approval. For a moment at least, Ramaswamy had pulled the elemental trick of both a politician and a huckster: making a banal idea seem forgotten, and new. ♦
