Whither ‘America First’?
Vivek Ramaswamy is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and dynamic figures to have emerged from the Right over the past few years. “Ramaswamy” is not a surname that one would usually expect to find on the hard right wing of the Republican Party, but the fast-talking 38-year-old entrepreneur (and former 2024 Republican presidential contender) has made a name for himself by outlining an energetic nationalist vision for the GOP’s future — inspired by Donald Trump’s message in 2016, but going further, in some important senses, than Trump himself ever did.
One of Ramaswamy’s distinctive characteristics, in this regard, is that he thinks and speaks like an intellectual. (A trait that has made him a darling of certain subsets of the right-wing intelligentsia, and the subject of unique resentment within others). He assails the “managerial elites” and the administrative state; he waxes poetic about “Nixonian realism,” niche provisions in immigration statutes, and varying interpretations of the 14th Amendment. On immigration, he is hawkish; on trade, he favors a full decoupling from China; on foreign policy, he calls for a “revival of realism,” defining himself in opposition to the neoconservatives (using Nikki Haley, in particular, as an effective foil throughout the 2024 campaign).
At the National Conservatism Conference this week in Washington, D.C., Ramaswamy addressed a room of nationalist intellectuals and activists on the topic of “where the America-First movement will go after Trump’s election to a second term.” (I’m quoting from the written speech he used). Ramaswamy identified “a brewing intellectual rift between two camps in the America-First movement”: The first, which he criticizes, are the “national protectionists”; the second, which he identifies with, are the “national libertarians.”
On trade, foreign policy, and immigration, both of these schools break from the old, pre-Trump Republican Party. But they are distinct from one another, too. Perhaps the most trenchant critique Ramaswamy levels at the national protectionists is on the issue of the regulatory state: “National Protectionists believe in reshaping and redirecting the regulatory state to advance policies that improve the plight of American workers and manufacturers,” he says. “By contrast, National Libertarians believe the only way we are going to improve the plight of America, including our workers and manufacturers, isn’t by reinventing the regulatory state; it’ll be by dismantling the regulatory state.”
What Ramaswamy doesn’t say — but what follows from his line of criticism — is that, in counseling accommodation to the administrative state, the “national protectionists” are adopting one of the trademark positions of the neoconservatives, their purported ideological nemeses. Indeed, a newfound comfort with centralized state power was one of the most notable places where the neoconservatives distinguished themselves from the Old Right. “The neoconservatives,” wrote Norman Podhoretz — one of the most prominent early neocon thinkers — “dissociated themselves from the wholesale opposition to the welfare state which had marked American conservatism since the days of the New Deal.” As Irving Kristol, the neocon “godfather” himself, noted: “Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable … Neocons feel at home in today’s America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not.”
On trade, the two schools of nationalism diverge as well. The national protectionists are hostile to international trade as a first principle: They believe, as Ramaswamy put it, “that we should use tariffs to stop other countries (including, but not limited to, China) from flooding our markets; and to use taxpayer resources to purposefully subsidize critical areas of American production where we are less competitive today.” National libertarians, on the other hand, seek “to eliminate U.S. dependence on China in critical areas for U.S. security” via more “U.S. trade with allies like Japan and South Korea, India and the Philippines, who can fill the void left by cutting the cord from China.”
On immigration, both national protectionists and national libertarians break with the GOP’s ancien regime — which “sloppily used the rhetorical vehemence of their opposition to illegal immigration to obfuscate a deeper divergence in the party on the question of legal immigration,” Ramaswamy says — but for different reasons. (And toward different ends.) The national protectionists oppose mass illegal and legal immigration, but for primarily economic reasons: The old GOP supported legal immigration because it prioritized whatever “maximized the size of the economic pie,” whereas the national protectionists oppose legal immigration because they prioritize whatever “maximizes the well-being of American-born workers,” Ramaswamy argues.
The national libertarians, too, oppose our current legal immigration regime, but “on different grounds,” he says. “The United States is not just an ‘economic zone.’ Rather, we are a nation comprised of citizens bound by a shared civic identity — one that we have badly lost in modern America. We are in the midst of a national identity crisis, and sloppy immigration policies have only exacerbated that crisis.” To remedy this, he suggests “greater and more stringent screening for the kinds of immigrants who share a commitment to the ideals enshrined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution,” including “heightened civics exams not just for citizenship, but for even green cards or other permissions to enter the country; the elimination of dual citizenship as a category altogether; the adoption of English as the national language in the United States; and ending birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals.”
Here, Ramaswamy is far closer to the truth than his ideological counterparts: Immigration is a question of identity, far more important and fundamental than any economic question. Where he errs, however, is his conception of what that identity is. America’s “national identity is built not around a particular ethnicity or genetic lineage, but instead around a shared commitment to a set of common ideals that brought together a divided, religiously diverse group of Americans 250 years ago,” he says. “If you believe that these common ideals are essential to our national revival (as I do), then it should inform not only immigration policy, but what we expect of our own citizens.”
But American identity is far deeper than a set of “common ideals.” No national identity could ever be just a set of common ideals — it defies the very concept of a nation itself: The word “nation” quite literally means a people, with a common culture and heritage. Its Latin root, nationem, translates to “”birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe.” And as a matter of simple historical fact, it is simply not true that America — and Americans — can be denied that form of nationhood. America was, historically, a distinctly and recognizably Anglo-Saxon nation. Even today, when Anglo-Saxons are no longer the ethnic majority, it retains that character — in its legal tradition, the design of its constitutional system, and its political norms and traditions. These things did not emerge from abstract theory and contemplation, but from a distinctive and concrete people, with a distinctive and concrete character. John Jay notes as much in Federalist No. 2: “Providence,” Jay wrote, “has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”
In stark contrast to Ramaswamy’s claim that “common ideals” united “a divided, religiously diverse group of Americans” at the time of the Founding, Jay wrote: “This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”
Recognizing this does not require that we never accept anyone without this common ancestry into the political community. (That ship sailed more than a century ago, and would exclude at least half of my lineage). But it does require a thicker, more coherent conception of our national identity, which recognizes that we are rooted in the particular character of a distinctive people — a character that goes far beyond “common ideals.” This is something that the late Antonin Scalia — no Anglo-Saxon himself — noted: During his junior year of college, Scalia told a panel in 2006, “I went to England [for the first time]. And I felt at home. There is no doubt that American culture … originates with English culture.”
This is our heritage, far more critical to the formation of the American character than the principles laid out at the Constitutional Convention. One could travel to Liberia, whose Constitution is heavily modeled on ours, and be an alien — a foreigner in a strange land. Or one could travel to the United Kingdom, governed by an entirely different political system, and feel at home. The character of a people matters, as a first principle — in a fundamental sense, it is the nation. To recognize this is to understand that the character of the people immigrating to America — their real character, rather than any set of “values” or “commitment to ideals” that one could discern on a citizenship test — matters, too. As I noted back in March:
For all the high-minded talk of “American values,” the simple and obvious truth is that when you import a large number of people from a foreign country in a short amount of time, your country begins to look more like the one those people came from. This is true in all places and in all times: Italian immigration, for example, radically altered the character of America; even now, with the Italian-American diaspora fully “assimilated,” the United States is markedly different than it would have been had they never arrived in the first place.
The same was true of Irish immigration and German immigration (a major source of concern for many of the Founding Fathers); it is true of Mexicans, and Poles, and Scots-Irish, and every other cohort that has come to America from another country in substantial numbers. To ignore that, or to refuse to examine the character of an immigrant’s home — to pretend that all nations of origin are created equal — is to embed a deep and dangerous naïveté into our immigration system.
I expect Ramaswamy would agree with that last sentence, at least in the abstract. The specific character of a given immigrant is what his suggested screening mechanisms are meant to test, in a roundabout way. In that sense, he is directionally on-target — far more so than the vast majority of elected Republicans. But his commitment to an abstract “national identity,” rather than one that recognizes the concrete reality of a national character (both in terms of America’s national character, and the national character of the nations immigrants are arriving from), persists as a blind spot.
When I pressed him on this in a brief phone call today, Ramaswamy countered that his proposed litmus tests for immigrants are “much more meaningful than some vague emotional entreaty to you know, I was seven years old, and I think I remember what America was then, and I want it to go back to being that…I think that’s kind of silly, actually.” He rejects “vague musings about, you know, what land your grandparents grew up in, and what your seven-year-old upbringing was like when you were in second grade,” he says. “Because that doesn’t mean much to a national set of principles that we use to determine how we actually run and revive this country.”
In one sense, I agree with him: We can’t go back. The America I — even as a 26-year-old — grew up in is already dead. The only way forward is forward. The only way out is through. But to reclaim our future, we must have an authentic and full sense of who we are, where we come from, and where we should go from there.
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