Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #445

The way I would do it, 75% head count reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing. Shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not an unelected bureaucrats. Merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can't have both. It's an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There's the entitlement state, that's the welfare state. It presents itself in the form of the regulatory state, that's what we're talking about. And then there's the foreign nanny state where, effectively, we are subsidizing other countries that aren't paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state, and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we've done that, we've revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.

The following is a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy about the future of conservatism in America. He has written many books on this topic, including his latest called Truths: The Future of America First. He ran for president this year in the Republican primary and is considered by many to represent the future of the Republican Party. Before all that, he was a successful biotech entrepreneur and investor with a degree in biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. As always, when the topic is politics, I will continue talking to people on both the left and the right with empathy, curiosity, and backbone. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vivek Ramaswamy. You are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas so you're the perfect person to ask, uh, what is conservatism?

Yeah.

What's your, let's say, conservative vision for America?

Well, actually, this is one of my criticisms of the modern Republican Party and direction of the conservative movement is that we've gotten so good at describing what we're against. Right, there's a list of things that we could rail against, wokeism, transgender ideology, climate ideology, COVIDism, COVID policies, the radical Biden agenda, the radical Harris agenda, the list goes on. But actually, what's missing in the conservative movement right now is what we actually stand for. What is our vision for the future of the country? And I saw that as a deficit at the time I started my presidential campaign. It was in many ways the purpose of my campaign because I do feel that that's why we didn't have the red wave in 2022. So, uh, they tried to blame Donald Trump, they tried to blame abortion, they blamed a bunch of individual specific issues or factors. I think the real reason we didn't have that red wave was that we got so practiced at criticizing Joe Biden that we forgot to articulate who we are and what we stand for. So what do we stand for as conservatives? I think we stand for the ideals that we fought the American Revolution for in 1776. Ideals like merit, right? That the best person gets the job without regard to their genetics. That you get ahead in this country not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character. Free speech and open debate, not just as some sort of catchphrase, but the idea that any opinion, no matter how heinous, you get to express it in the United States of America. Self-governance, and this is a big one right now, is that the people we elect to run the government, they're no longer the ones who actually run the government. We in the conservative movement, I believe, should believe in restoring self-governance where it's not bureaucrats running the show, but actually elected representatives. And then the other, the other ideal that the nation was founded on that I think we need to revive and I think is a North Star of the conservative movement is restoring the rule of law in this country. You think about even the abandonment of the rule of law at the southern border. It's particularly personal to me as the kid of legal immigrants to this country. You and I actually share a couple of aspects in, in common in that regard. That also though means your first act of entering this country can't break the law. So there's some policy commitments and principles, merit, free speech, self-governance, rule of law, and then I think culturally what does it mean to be a conservative is it means we believe in the anchors of our identity in truth, the value of the individual, family, nation, and God beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for our own vision. And that's a big part of what's been missing and it's a big part of not just through the campaign but through, you know, a lot of my future advocacy. That's the vacuum I'm aiming to fill.