Vivek’s Annual Christmas Crash-Out Veers Into Pop-Psychoanalysis

Vivek Ramaswamy, an anchor baby whose Indian parents migrated to the United States shortly before his birth in 1985, is, dubious claims to authority notwithstanding, always eager to share — for some reason, every year around Christmas — his thoughts about the merits (or lack thereof) of American culture, who qualifies as “American,” etc.

Which might strike some as a bit presumptuous.

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Last year, which I covered at the time, Vivek lambasted American culture as inherently decadent and degenerate, which, he explains, is the reason his Indian countrymen outperform legacy Americans economically and socially — a curious political posture to assume, let alone a moral one, for someone with political ambitions in America who is currently running for governor of Ohio in the heart of the rust belt hollowed out by neoliberal vulture capitalists such as him.

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Anyway, continuing the tradition, this Christmas season, in the Newspaper of Record, Ramaswamy came out swinging against the identitarian, nativist right.

“America,” he explains to Americans, in addition to being an economic activity zone, is actually really just a set of intangible ideas devoid of defining physical substance.

Via The New York Times (emphasis added):

“There are two competing visions now emerging on the American right, and they are incompatible. One vision of American identity is based on lineage, blood and soil: Inherited attributes matter most. The purest form of an American is a so-called heritage American — one whose ancestry traces back to the founding of the United States or earlier…

The alternative (and, in my view, correct) vision of American identity is based on ideals.

Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.”

You’ve probably heard the conveniently self-serving “America is an idea” argument from the likes of Ramaswamy before, so I won’t bother challenging it here as I have at length elsewhere.

Where Ramaswamy’s self-serving thinkpiece in The New York Times really went off the rails — and, as he surely has expensive consultants on retainer, I’m not sure why none of them apparently told him this was a terrible political strategy — is when he essentially diagnosed nativists/identitarians/Americans (choose your label) within the GOP coalition with a “psychosocial” mental illness.

Continuing:

“Young people are often a leading indicator of where political winds are blowing, and the generational nature of the problem is remarkable. Many voters under 30 believe they will never be able to afford a home. They’re often saddled with college debt, and absent dramatic policy interventions, Social Security will most likely be curtailed before they ever receive benefits. They are understandably bitter about it.

Their rising sense of economic insecurity conspires with pent-up psychosocial angst. Depression and anxiety are more prevalent among members of Gen Z than in prior American generations. In the absence of a shared national identity, they’re turning to tribalism and victimhood instead.”

Americans are, as can be empirically demonstrated, being rapidly replaced to the tune of tens of millions of migrants over the past few years alone — migrants who, by and large, it should be noted, don’t subscribe to any of the Americanisms that Ramaswamy posits as prerequisites to claim to be an American. Far from starry-eyed idealists in love with the fruits of Western civilization like the Renaissance or Enlightenment, they are simply economic pilgrims in search of a bag.

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Opposition to all-too-real replacement migration is not pathological; it’s rational.

Pathologizing normal human impulses/emotions/reactions and gaslighting the mental patients over whom she wields power is Nurse Ratched’s modus operandi in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — probably one of the best fiction books ever written on human psychology. And it’s what makes her such a loathsome and pernicious character.

Anyway, best of luck hawking your bullshit to Ohioans, Vivek.

I’m sure this year’s Christmas crash-out will really endear you to them.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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