At Donald Trump’s rally in Vandalia, the Republican nominee for governor invited a 10-year-old boy onstage and attempted to lift him to the microphone. The boy lurched backward, and Ramaswamy scrambled to keep him from falling. “Whoa!” he said. “Big guy!” To be fair, the kid was a bit of a chonker, but the problem wasn’t that Ramaswamy had failed a strongman contest. It was that he should have been smart enough to stick to the traditional baby-kissing photo-op. Instead, he managed to turn another opportunity to look like a normal human being into a viral demonstration of the opposite. 

Consider the video in which Ramaswamy shows off his baseball skills, or lack thereof. Last month, his campaign released a quick hit in which he recited his “10 Things I’ll Do for Ohio” agenda, filmed partly inside a batting cage. This was presumably meant to communicate several things at once: youth, vigor, and quintessential Ohio regular dudes-being-dudes stuff. But instead, viewers became fascinated by Ramaswamy’s swing, which, if I’m being generous, looked like a 6-year-old waving around a foam pool noodle. According to an eyewitness, Ramaswamy made contact on a mere five of 25 pitches in the slow-pitch cage, and the finished video simply replayed the “best” swings. The clip was mocked into oblivion within hours and quickly deleted from Instagram, though it lingered on TikTok, where the top comment asked the essential question: “Why would u post that swing?”

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It’s hard to imagine a more perfect political own-goal. Ramaswamy is actually athletic (he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player), but tennis presents an obvious problem: it’s the sport of country clubs and Wimbledon (which Ramaswamy also attended last year). Baseball, by contrast, is Americana. So we got the spectacle of the rail-thin Ramaswamy playing badly at the sport focus groups presumably recommended. Maybe he should have stuck to eating stadium hot dogs instead?

Then there was the clown in the three-piece suit who had a serious question for Ramaswamy about health care policy. Or rather, the mime asked a serious question, and the clown translated it. That was the surreal scene at a Turning Point USA event this spring at Ohio State University, where the Republican nominee for governor found himself fielding a question from a silent man in white face paint assisted by a red-nosed interpreter. The clown introduced himself as a “red-blooded American clown,” apparently to distinguish himself from the more Left-wing faction of Big Clown, and assured Ramaswamy he hadn’t been infected by the “woke mind virus.” It felt like a hilarious Nathan Fielder bit, yet the fact that this anecdote has barely registered nationally says something about Ramaswamy’s feckless Ohio gubernatorial bid — the whole thing feels like a clown show. 

The trouble follows him even into rooms that ought to be friendly. At the Young Americans for Liberty convention at Xavier University in Cincinnati in July, Ramaswamy was heckled from the moment he walked on stage, pressed on Israel among other issues, and he left after several minutes of a scheduled 30-minute speech. The trouble peaked when, speaking to a room full of young people, he said people of his generation had “already made it” and would be fine, while their generation would “pay the price.” To an audience of college-age libertarians already primed to revolt, it sounded like a billionaire shrugging at their future. “You’re a political cretin, and you need to get the fuck out of here,” one audience member reportedly yelled at Ramaswamy. The candidate then told the room that the real divide was between “winners and whiners” (and a crowd that didn’t see itself as whiners, therefore whined), prompting a columnist for The Columbus Dispatch to say the speech belongs to “the hall of fame of embarrassing political performances.”

Ramaswamy keeps tripping over the same rake because he is attempting something more difficult than winning an election — he’s trying to change genres mid-career. His 2024 model was a different product: fast, combative, and hyperverbal — tailor-made for the internet. Put him in a television studio like fellow talk-a-mile-a-minute conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, and he would redirect hostile questions, deliver six provocations in 90 seconds or fewer, and walk out with enough clips to feed Twitter for a week.

Running for governor requires a different breed of creature. You can’t govern the Buckeye State entirely from the replies to an Elon Musk post on X. (On a similar note, Musk’s 2024 barnstorming campaign on behalf of President Trump drew yawns until he pulled out his giant pocketbook.) Here’s the thing: state politics remains stubbornly physical. It requires church basements, county fairs, football games, college auditoriums, and prolonged conversations with men who would like to explain exactly what happened to the bridge on Route 7. Hence, the Harvard- and Yale-educated biotech multimillionaire turned national MAGA celebrity seems stuck in what might be described as an elaborate Normal Ohio Guy Simulator, and keeps failing all the side quests. 

Did you hear the one about how he told Ohio reporters that he loves long drives? His campaign finance reports told a different story. The data shows that he has spent nearly $690,000 leasing aircraft since launching his campaign, including nearly $560,000 paid to a company whose listed address is a house he owns. Federal flight records reviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal found that some of those flights were the kind of journeys most Ohioans would undertake armed with a Honda Accord and a hot Sheetz coffee: Columbus to Cleveland, Columbus to Youngstown, Columbus to Port Clinton. So not long drives, short flights then? One Republican put it to him bluntly: “Park the damn jet.”

When childcare costs came up last year, he suggested Ohio could make life easier for parents by keeping children in school until 4 p.m. and potentially moving toward year-round schooling. It was an impressive inversion of populism: instead of making childcare cheaper — simply make childhood shorter. The proposal was contained in a casual social-media exchange, rather than a formal policy announcement, his campaign later stressed. That nevertheless disappeared when the video was reposted. Oops. 

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None of this would matter if Ramaswamy were cruising toward the governor’s mansion, which should be a given for a Republican in Ohio. Donald Trump carried the state three times, most recently by 11 points. Republicans hold every statewide non-judicial office. The last Democrat elected governor was Ted Strickland in 2006. Yet according to the latest Suffolk University/USA TODAY report, Ramaswamy is down nearly 10 points to Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director who became one of Ohio’s most recognizable figures during Covid. Polymarket has dropped Ramaswamy’s odds of victory to just 34%. No doubt, some of Ramaswamy’s struggles are by proxy, driven by his affiliation with MAGA and the country’s growing dissatisfaction with the second Trump administration. But the own goals aren’t helping.

Some of the hostility is coming from an especially awkward direction. Ramaswamy spent years cultivating the Very Online Right, but portions of that movement have become increasingly hostile to him due to racism. Nick Fuentes has urged his followers to deny Ramaswamy the governorship and attacked his Indian heritage in explicitly racist terms. At conservative events, hecklers have challenged him on immigration and H-1B visas (of which Indians are the largest recipients by far). Ironically, the candidate who made his national reputation arguing that America should transcend identity politics has thus found himself confronting an identity problem inside his own coalition. 

This may explain the increasingly desperate Ohio cosplay. But you have to pull the act off convincingly. Yes, you can memorize the right folksy talking points and put yourself in all the right photo-ops, but the ease with which a successful politician moves through those encounters is harder to acquire. Now, there’s a clip of him almost dropping a 10-year-old boy everywhere, with New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen declaring it “worse than Dukakis in the tank.”

Perhaps, but the real tank job here is one rapidly fading campaign for governor. 

Abundance progressives and pro-growth conservatives are right to reject the hostility to science, industry, and entrepreneurialism of “de-growthers,” who dream of an economic stationary state in the near rather than distant future. Such a stationary state existed for most of human history, when long periods of economic and technological stagnation meant that powerful individuals and states could increase their wealth only by plundering the weak. The explosive growth and once-unthinkable technological advances of modernity have vindicated the 18th-century British writer Jonathan Swift since he wrote in Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

But we can reject mindless anti-growth ideology without mindlessly embracing growth for its own sake. Yes, we need growth — but good growth, not bad growth. To understand the difference, don’t look to the Silicon Valley overlords who are increasingly determining the shape of politics on both sides of the political spectrum.

Good growth leads to, and sustains, countries with strong middle classes and workers and families with decent wealth, leisure, and the power to bargain with their employers. Bad growth maximizes gross domestic product at the expense of individual autonomy, social solidarity, and other fundamental elements of a decent human society.

As an economic metric, GDP is compatible with both good growth and bad growth. Because it measures output per hour worked, it can be improved in a good way — improving the productivity of each worker, lowering the prices of goods and services for society as a whole, and allowing workers to earn the same income with less effort, assuming they can bargain effectively with employers to share in the profits.

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But GDP can also be boosted in bad ways by expanding the hours worked in a country without boosting individual worker productivity. In a modern industrial society, in which the majority of adults must toil for wages, GDP can be raised by cutting social-insurance benefits to compel the elderly to have much longer working lives, or by legalizing child labor. Abstract GDP would go up, but few people other than some employers and capitalists would be happier.

It’s also possible to expand GDP without increasing productivity by flooding a country with migrants. Excessive immigration may lower wages in various occupations, immiserating natives and immigrants alike, even as GDP improves in numerical value because of the population-driven ballooning of the workforce. Conversely, birth rates that outstrip productivity growth can impoverish a country, even as its GDP rises because more workers mean more work hours.

In a good society, work must be balanced with time for family and community and recreation.  Members of a society with a healthy work-life balance would be rational to choose somewhat less growth in personal income and the national economy — if the higher-growth alternative requires sacrificing essential social values.

Edith Cresson, the Prime Minister of France from 1991 to 92, is (barely) remembered today for asserting that a quarter of men in Anglo-Saxon countries are homosexuals who aren’t interested in women and that the Japanese were “little yellow men” who “sit up all night thinking how to screw us”. Whatever may be the case with Anglo-Saxon men, the Socialist premier was right to defend the work-life balance of the French against East Asian cultures of overwork, however chauvinistically: “I said they were working like ants. We cannot live like that, in minuscule apartments with a two-hour journey to work like animals. Work and work and work and producing children to work like animals. We want to keep our social security, our holidays, and live like human beings.”

Long work hours have been correlated with low fertility rates, and East Asia has some of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 2024, South Korea won the dubious honor of being the country with the lowest fertility in the world for six years in a row — 0.75, far below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a national population without mass immigration. In response, South Korea has imposed a 52-hour work week — compare that to the 35-hour work week in France and 36 to 40 hours a week in Germany. Likewise, Japan since the Seventies has suffered from an epidemic of karoshi — stress-related death by overwork.

Which brings us to Silicon Valley. The tech tycoons who have emerged as the dominant oligarchy in 21st-century America have contradictory views of work and life in the future.  Many predict that automation will eliminate most jobs, making it necessary to create a universal basic income that allows citizens to enjoy a minimal level of subsistence without working at all.

Other tech leaders, however, want to import the East-Asian model of overwork and fanatical schooling to the United States (and the West more broadly). According to Elon Musk, who despises labor unions and laws protecting American workers, Chinese factory workers “won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, initially appointed by President Donald Trump as co-director with Musk of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency, has claimed that East- and South-Asian students are superior to American students. In an X post that likely doomed his political career, he wrote: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…. More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’. More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall’.”

Ramaswamy is confused. Individual Indian-Americans excel in many areas, but national productivity is the result of well-designed economic, legal, and political institutions, not overwork by particular individuals. That explains why India, with the longest work hours among the top-10 economies (49 hours or more per week), is much poorer than the United States (38 hours) and Canada (32.1 hours). Indeed, thanks to their productivity, countries with high per-capita GDP in general have lighter workloads.

Not content with opposing organized labor and wage-and-hours laws, many of today’s techno-libertarians dream of carving up democratic nation-states into “freedom cities” or “charter cities” — privately owned cities free to create their own regulations without interference by the countries in which they are geographically situated. This is the revival of an old and very bad idea, formerly embodied in the United States in early-industrial-era company towns and mining towns policed by private detectives — and symbolized today by the high-tech despotism of city-states like Singapore and Dubai.

If the new city-states were bottom-up democratic versions of Athens or Florence, the idea might be appealing. But the tech oligarchs have something more sinister in mind — top-down autocracies in which privileges bestowed on workers by investors and managers replace civil rights in a given territory.

Curtis Yarvin, treated as a guru by some tech executives, has popularized the acronym RAGE (Replace All Government Employees) and called for a “Butterfly Revolution” to centralize “absolute sovereignty” in a corporate state with a dictator-CEO. And foreshadowing Trump’s appointment in 2025 of Musk to head DOGE, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney in 2014 called on then-President Barack Obama to appoint Google boss Eric Schmidt as CEO of America, terminate all federal employees, turn federal power over to the tech industry — then resign.

Symbolizing the convergence of libertarianism with the libertine drug culture in Silicon Valley and the Burning Man festival, Peter Thiel has funded a project to promote private “seasteads” unregulated by nation-states, which might allow medical experiments on human beings that are banned elsewhere: “Could you have something where you use psilocybin” — the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms — “or MDMA” — better known as the rave culture drug ecstasy — “as an antidepressant drug? Or could you get new medical treatments where you break the FDA monopoly on medicine worldwide?”

A comment on X by a Thiel protégé, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, suggests the danger of replacing liberal, constitutional democracy with the tyranny of an all-powerful tech-industry Wizard in a private charter city of Oz: “If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will try and quickly hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Public executions and deregulated experimentation on human beings, combined with technological innovation as a goal in itself — it is hard to imagine a better example of bad growth.

Then there is the Freedom Cities Coalition, which calls for states to cede land to new private corporate governments exempt from selected federal and state laws and regulations, no doubt including labor laws. President Trump, who in his second term has largely abandoned his working-class voters in favor of tech plutocrats like Musk and Ramaswamy and David Sacks, has called for 10 such post-national, privatized corporate zones on the soil of the United States.

In this dystopian fantasy, America’s federal lands — divided in the 19th century by Lincoln and his allies into homesteads for free family farmers who were considered to be the bulwarks of bottom-up democracy — would now be given over to capitalists and managers to create special economic zones like those in China that host Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, which has had to install “suicide nets” to prevent overworked and underpaid workers from jumping to their deaths from their dormitory towers.

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In Honduras, experimental corporate-controlled charter cities like Prospera, which drew more than $100 million in investments from tech libertarians including Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Adam Draper, were seen as so menacing by locals that the Honduran government has repealed the laws that enabled their establishment.

Undeterred by the popular rebellion against Prospera, libertarians bankrolled by tech plutocrats are promoting new, semi-sovereign company towns in places like the Presidio in San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay.

In the “Immigration and Workforce Strategy” section of its Orwellian proposal for a Guantanamo Bay Charter City, the Charter Cities Institute proposes using it as a probationary detention center for potential immigrants to the United States: “this model also introduces a phased approach to immigration: Individuals demonstrate their skills and reliability in Guantanamo Bay before transitioning to the US mainland.”

The new Guantanamo Bay charter city would combine Dubai’s indentured-servant workforce with the pleasing façade of a Potemkin village: “by controlling the narrative — weekly media updates, tours for foreign dignitaries, and televised speeches from the new city — administration officials can shape the story of ‘America’s frontier spirit, revived.’”

A humane and enduring society doesn’t resemble a mining boom town or a slave plantation or a nightmarish “freedom city” of the kind promoted by ketamine-dosing, harem-collecting, neurodivergent tech oligarchs. Technological innovation and economic growth are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Good growth is economic growth that balances desirable technological progress and economic innovation with equality of condition and worker bargaining power. Bad growth increases GDP at the cost of the powerlessness of most citizens in the workplace, as well as the voting booth.

Edith Cresson inadvertently spoke for all human beings, French and Japanese and Hondurans and Americans alike. We are not ants.

Yet as Musk is reportedly being ushered out of the administration, there is reason to be skeptical of overheated reports of a fundamental rupture.

Points of divergence are obvious, to be sure. MAGA represents a repudiation of older neoliberal orthodoxy, the article of faith once held by the mainstream of the Republican Party and the triangulated center-left of the Clinton-Blair and Obama years. Capturing the GOP through the gravitational force of Donald Trump, MAGA rejected the imagined globalist free-market paradise in which products and workers flowed freely in a borderless, flattened world. Dreams of a liberal international order led by US and European elites have been shattered as old allies now regard each other with deepening mistrust. Deportations, tariffs, and a focus on regional hegemony have become the centerpiece of a robustly America First reorientation.

DOGE, by contrast, appears to be a reconstitution of a longstanding libertarian agenda. While MAGA emphasises the need for a powerful government acting forcefully on behalf of its citizens, DOGE has revived unfulfilled Reagan-era commitments to downsize and outright eliminate vast swaths of the federal government. It promotes an agenda of deregulation and economic and individual liberty. Its commitment to a more porous economic landscape is now muted, but not forgotten.

The techno-libertarians preference for open borders (at least, for some classes of newcomers) has been silenced for the moment by the furious MAGA response to then-DOGE co-director Vivek Ramaswami’s efforts to increase the number of H1B visas for engineers from Asia. Musk’s dreams of colonizing Mars likewise reflect DOGE’s deepest commitments not just to a borderless world, but a borderless humanity, as does his most recent claims on X that biological humanity is a “boot-loader” for “digital super-intelligence”.

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Yet stories about the divide, mainly from journalists in mainstream newspapers and journals, increasingly seem to be born of a lack of political acumen born of an excess of wishful thinking. A yearning for a crack-up and attendant dysfunction has blinded many political observers to the more complicated reality of coalition politics. American politics invariably gives rise to political coalitions that are always to some degree internally incoherent.

However, philosophical incoherence does not equal governing inability or paralysis. The success of all political coalitions depends in equal parts on deeply shared animus against a common enemy, on the one hand, and overlapping consensus in some key areas, on the other. If those two main conditions persist, then a successful political agenda, even amid a degree of constrained internal conflict and compromise, is not only possible, but likely.

This was true during the Reagan administration — when pro-business libertarians, Cold War Hawks, and social conservatives were able to maintain a working coalition; and it was true during the two terms of Obama, when the woke “identitarians”, the old labor Left, and neoliberal technocrats were able to maintain an esprit de corps.

Like those two administrations, the Trump coalition enjoys a common enemy and an overlapping consensus. For that reason, the MAGA-DOGE coalition will persist in relative comity at least until the start of the next campaign cycle, which begins in fewer than two years. Even after that point, MAGA-DOGE will be the working coalition to which presumptive 2028 Republican candidate, Vice President J.D. Vance, will seek to appeal and ride to victory.

Indeed, there is no better figure than Vance to provide a window into the reasons why this coalition is not in the midst of fracturing. Not only has Vance studied with seriousness their respective intellectual sources, but as a matter of deeply personal biography, he understands himself as a cohesive combination of those two intellectual and political streams. In three notable speeches, Vance has already begun to lay out his vision for both his own and America’s political future, one which is notably attentive to rendering the apparent contradictory MAGA-DOGE coalition into a complementary whole.

The first speech was delivered on 11 February, 2025, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. The second speech — arguably his most impactful to date — was delivered three days later at the Munich Security Conference. The third speech was delivered on 18 March at the American Dynamism Conference. All three spoke at least implicitly about the relationship of the two parts of the Trump-Vance coalition, with the latter of the two offering the most explicit effort to date to synthesize the two seeming opposites.

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The first of these speeches appeared to be the most “DOGE”-friendly, with Vance chiding Europeans especially for their eagerness to place peremptory limitations on AI developments. He lauded recent advances in AI, offering a firmly “techno-optimist ”spin characteristic of the DOGE worldview. In his encouragement of a “deregulatory flavor”, the influence of the likes of his benefactor Peter Thiel is evident, particularly in Thiel’s expressed concern for the ways that fears of apocalypse have thwarted innovation and led to an era of technological stagnation.

However, in other respects, even in his most DOGE-friendly speech to date, Vance simultaneously emphasised how AI developments stand to benefit those of a MAGA persuasion. Several times, Vance nodded to the common enemy of both DOGE and MAGA, the weakened Leviathan of woke progressive authoritarianism. Highlighting their shared animus, Vance insisted before his largely European audience that AI should “remain free of ideological bias” and be deployed in ways that avoid being co-opted as a “tool of authoritarian censorship”.

But his most MAGA-inflected point was to underscore AI’s potential to generate new jobs in a plethora of industries. Vance rejected a common fear of MAGA technophobes (such as that expressed in Tucker Carlson’s support for at least a temporary ban on driverless trucks), stating that “AI, I really believe, will facilitate and make people more productive. It is not going to replace human beings. It will never replace human beings”.

He expressed his excitement over the ways that AI development was “grounded in the real and the physical economy”, emphasizing the hands-on work of doctors, manufacturers, and soldiers. To further the appeal to MAGA denizens, he emphasized current US leadership in this technological space, one that translates into benefits for American national security. Foreshadowing his other major speeches early in his term as vice president, Vance constantly emphasizes how MAGA ends and DOGE ends share considerable overlap.

The widely discussed Munich Security speech again had elements intended to reflect, and appeal to, both elements of the Trump-Vance coalition. Again, the “common enemy” was identified: the oppressive regime of progressive speech and idea regulation. Vance called out European liberal elites for their promiscuous use of government power to suppress disfavored views and even disqualify candidates and entire political parties from electoral consideration.

The “free-speech” dimension of Vance’s remarks reflected the libertarian commitments of the DOGE constituency, while the clear efforts to liberate “Make Europe Great Again” views from legal and political constraint are the necessary precursor to populist electoral success. In effect, Vance was signaling that (in this case) DOGE means are necessary for MEGA ends. Only a more libertarian approach to speech and political expression would clear a path to a comparable populist movement in Europe, one emphasizing the need for secure borders, a producer economy, and greater military realism.

These themes were reiterated in a more recent speech by Vance, this time in Washington at a summit organized by Silicon Valley disruptors such as Marc Andreessen. At that event, Vance confronted head-on the dominant narrative of a divide between “techno-optimists” and the “populist Right” of the Trump coalition, declaring that he rejected the idea of an unbridgeable divide between the two as a “proud member of both tribes”. Vance echoed themes from his Paris speech, emphasizing not only the desirability and even inescapability of innovation, but praising its potential to benefit workers — even citing Saint John Paul II — according to their work lives ever greater dignity.

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But in a speech before a Silicon Valley audience, Vance underscored a main MAGA point: “deindustrialization poses risks both to our national security and to our workforce”. While acknowledging the potential loss of meaning that technological disruption of older industries poses to the industrial workforce, Vance emphasized a point intended to win over both MAGA and DOGE constituencies: globalization’s “hunger for cheap labor” has been bad both for American workers and bad for innovation.

Strengthening the American manufacturing sector, he noted, would have the benefit of reintegrating what globalism has separated: design from manufacturing, engineers from assembly, thinkers from doers. Indeed, speaking in quasi-Marxian language of the dangers of “alienation”, Vance in fact articulated a view that could be easily shared by the most pro-union factory worker and the most libertarian technologist: work and products improve with integration.

An oft-repeated theme in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk is how the Tesla and SpaceX boss rejected the Steve Jobs model of “designing” in Cupertino and manufacturing in China. Instead, in every one of his manifold endeavors, Musk has sought to bring into close proximity the engineers and the fabricators, believing with considerable evidence that their separation leads to the inability of each to learn from the limitations and insights of the other. Rather than discerning a DOGE-versus-MAGA narrative, Vance stresses how the aims of each align, even as they seek to defeat a common enemy.

More clearly and consistently than anyone in this not-yet-100-day-old administration, Vance loses no opportunity to articulate the basic alignment of DOGE and MAGA. As with any coalition, there are and will continue to be tensions (as Vivek discovered). Vance may yet be proved wrong that technologies such as AI will prove beneficial not only to workers, but to humanity at large (I, for one, hope that humanity is not the “biological boot-loader for digital superintelligence”).

But Vance is not only intellectually, but politically the “child” of DOGE and MAGA. Like any child, he aims to articulate the virtues and compatibility of his parents. Those who believe, or hope, that the coalition is on the verge of dysfunctional collapse may be surprised by how durable it is — and will remain under a successor administration.

Like 58-year-old Kamala Devi Harris, America’s Vice President, Ramaswamy and Haley are in the 1% of the US population that is Indian American. Despite their shared heritage, all three grew up in different Americas — though in each, Indians were rare, exotic and little understood. Harris, born at the end of 1964, was among the first members of Generation X, while Haley is solidly in the middle of that cohort. Ramaswamy, as a geriatric millennial, is firmly a child of the Eighties and Nineties.

For Harris’s generation, the dominant image of India in the American imagination centred around gurus such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose association with The Beatles brought them to public prominence. In its most benign manifestation, India meant mysticism and spirituality, though sometimes this would transmute into cult-like communities around charismatic and exploitative figures who drugged their followers and inspired anxious newspaper headlines.

Seven years later, during Haley’s childhood, India had become a byword for overpopulation and global environmental catastrophe. The Western view was summed up in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1969), in which he described a night in Delhi that “seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging… People, people, people, people”. By the late Eighties and Nineties, however, when Ramaswamy was growing up, this view of India and Indians had become less hostile: the most prominent Indian American was Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons.

Largely as a result of their different childhoods, these three politicians responded to being outsiders, aliens despite being born in America, in disparate ways. Harris, the product of Sixties liberal idealism, has never denied her Tamil Brahmin mother’s identity; she was, after all, raised by an Indian woman after her parents’ divorce. But Harris’s attendance at the historically black Howard University and her Baptist religion points to the fact that she has chosen to align more closely with her African-American roots. Though she is both a black American and an Asian American, it is widely accepted that Joe Biden selected her because of her identity as the former.

Meanwhile, Haley, who grew up in the recently desegregated South, has talked about her lack of a place in a biracial world; as a young girl, she was disqualified from a beauty pageant because she was neither black nor white. Raised a Sikh by Punjabi Indian parents, Haley has never publicly distanced herself from her Indian heritage, but her conversion to Methodist Christianity, her decision to assume her husband’s Anglicised surname, and her somewhat racially ambiguous appearance have all furthered the perception that she is a model of smooth assimilation.

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Ramaswamy, by contrast, cuts a different profile. The self-styled “skinny guy with a funny last name” is entirely candid that his Hindu religion is unfamiliar to most Americans. Married to another Indian-American professional, Ramaswamy is an exemplar of an emerging group that is often termed the “new Jews” in the media. They are American, but distinctive, notable and stand out.

Look around today and Indian Americans hold prominent roles in all walks of public life. In tech, the CEOs of Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are both Indian American. In politics, they are particularly dominant in the ruling party. Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna are prominent progressive voices in the Democratic Party, and among five Indian Americans in the House of Representatives, while former engineer Saikat Chakrabarti served as chief of staff for Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. Towards the party’s centre, Neera Tanden, director of Joe Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, has been a consigliere of Democratic leaders since advising Bill Clinton in 1992. And in more technical domains, the Surgeon General of the United States is Vivek Murthy, while the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is Arati Prabhakar.

This boomlet in prominent Indian Americans is a function of two complementary dynamics. First, and perhaps most obviously, America is truly a land of opportunity, a nation where immigrants can ascend to positions of power and accrue great wealth through dint of hard work and application of human capital. Yes, racism may exist, but it is no bar to advancement.

Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, it seems that South Asians, at least in politics, have talents and cultural dispositions that make that flourishing easier. Like other highly skilled Asian immigrants, Indian Americans are wealthier and more likely to be married and well-educated than the average native-born citizen — and yet, there does not seem to be a similar rise to cultural prominence in politics among East Asians as South Asians. A common explanation for this is that, as English-speaking and highly verbal elites from a society where disputation and competition are taken for granted, South Asian personalities and cultural orientations are better suited to the rough and tumble world of America’s ruling class, where self-promotion is no sin and assertion is taken as a given.

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Hip-hop: the last bastion of American freedom

By David Samuels

Vivek Ramaswamy is perhaps the end result of this dynamic. With an undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, he perfectly captures the balance between technical and verbal fluency that is the marker of many South Asian elites. His brash, assertive and pugilistic debating style would not be out of place at an Indian American social gathering. And, crucially, he has accrued a vast fortune, a symbol of an opportunism that is entirely all-American, where getting rich is seen as glorious and a sign that one has “made it”. As a result, unlike earlier generations of Indian Americans, who aimed to blend in, the millennial Ramaswamy brings his distinctive South Asian personality to the fore, synthesising it with American assertiveness and claiming Donald Trump’s Maga mantle without embarrassment.

But should we be surprised? This is, after all, how it has always been. From Irish politicians to Jewish intellectuals, immigrants have transformed this country and reshaped it in their own image, all the while maintaining the cultural DNA that goes back to the intrepid British settlers who set out for a frontier for both the sake of God and gold. Ramaswamy and the current crop of Indian American public figures are simply what is old made new.