Vivek Ramaswamy’s view of America is rooted in Hindu philosophy

Vivek Ramaswamy’s compelling performance in the US presidential campaign has caught the attention of diaspora-watchers in India. But to place him in a generic category of Indian political figures abroad whom we routinely get excited about because of their ancestry or some token cultural gesture would be a mistake.

His candidature comes in a context marked by profound polarisation and vicious mutual hatred in the US between different psycho-political factions, aggravated by social media silos and weapons-grade persuasion tactics everywhere sowing divisiveness across races, genders, classes, religions, and generations.

And his messaging, which may be easy to misconstrue given the casual nature of our engagement with scrolling headlines and video clips in our social media feeds, is rooted in a profoundly educated worldview that deserves greater study in order to understand him as a phenomenon in his own right, regardless of political outcomes.

The Indian diaspora has a bit of an obsession with success which reduces its understanding of American politics to a simple game of winning and losing. During the 2020 campaign, for example, many Indian American voters lost interest in the radical, anti-war, anti-partisan messaging of former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard when a media blackout excluded her from any chance of moving ahead in the Democratic nomination process. Instead, they settled for a nominal representation for Indian heritage in the Vice-Presidency.

First-generation Indian immigrants perhaps tend to see Indians (or non-Indian Hindus, in the case of Gabbard), in foreign politics just as they see their lives in these new societies; as success in a job, not as a fundamental questioning of the job description itself.

To put it in blunt terms, the Indian American diaspora is marked by a culture of conformity and compliance in every sphere of its life, from politics and civic engagement to parenting and education (and its children often inherit that culture too, mistaking a superficial culture of questioning and progressivism in Ivy League universities and lucrative non-profit careers for the real thing).

Indian Americans love to think that they are winners and can always pick winners.

And interestingly, the perception of Republicans in the largely Democrat-leaning diaspora as “losers” now exists not just in an electoral sense but also in a moral way. Some of my friends describe the Republicans as no longer an acceptable political party, but a fascist outfit and anyone who fails to condemn it as fascist is also guilty of being fascist.

And the MSNBC-CNN caricature of Vivek Ramaswamy they consume also reinforces that certainty and perception. To them, he is “disgusting,” as are several dozen other political figures and about seventy million American voters.

The context into which Ramaswamy has launched himself is an incredibly toxic one. Everyone perhaps knows it, or at least feels it. Since the 2016 election, the US is more viciously divided not just in the level of politics but at the level of one’s understanding of reality itself.

One side simply cannot understand the idea of living with differences anymore because the other is understood clearly to be an absolute evil.

Is there a way out? Or is America doomed to go through this cycle of Republicans and Democrats merely replacing one another in power and in “victimhood” (as Ramaswamy puts it) in relation to each other?

Ramaswamy’s two books, Woke, Inc. and Nation of Victims, offer some considered answers. Unlike the usual “compliance culture” candidates, South Asian-origin or otherwise, who merely repeat an established story and offer their fealty towards it, Ramaswamy sinks his arguments deeply into American foundational (or foundation-cracking) stories. He tells a story about the American context today that comes from a place of knowledge and reflection, and quite possibly an earnest desire for reconciliation, growth, and what he calls “excellence.”

While Woke, Inc. reflects a recent trend of anti-corporate critique coming increasingly from the Right rather than the Left, Nation of Victims, despite its seemingly cliched title, offers a more sobering world-view level discourse on America.

Ramaswamy delves into history, philosophy, and law to argue that both conservatives and liberals have absorbed the culture of claiming “victimhood” and attempts to steer a path through the middle. He argues that the tendency to divide the world into victims and oppressors is not sustainable and needs re-thinking.

After laying out his positions on numerous economic and social policies (which domain experts could agree or quibble with), he gets down to a fundamental question: What is the answer to the victim/oppressor model when Western society, after all, is rooted in the ultimate “sacrifice” model of Christ?

In a chapter titled “The need to forgive,” he quotes Peter Thiel’s critique of his view. Thiel says the “solution to wokeness” was not “excellence,” but Christianity. Everyone was a victim, even Christ. So, the argument goes, a “mutual assured destruction” model of victims and oppressors will play and eventually sort itself out.

But Ramaswamy, who has espoused a unique mix of Hinduism and Christianity in his campaign speeches, disagrees with that idea.

Instead, he turns to Hindu philosophy to help him see his beloved America anew in a startling, moving, manner.

He invokes Swami Vivekananda for whom he was named, and Shankara, for whom his brother was named. He talks about renunciation, samadhi, moksha, and re-incarnation. He draws a skilled parallel between the ideals of Plato’s philosopher-kings and those that inform the “vaanaprastha” phase of Indian traditional life-stages. The task of the renunciant, he suggests, is the letting go of false selves. The “victim” and the “oppressor” are both false selves that have consumed too much energy, and a better, truer self still awaits.