Republican presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy warned of a “listlessness in American society” caused by its abandonment of meritocratic principles in a recent speech.
Speaking at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit on March 31, Ramaswamy diagnosed what he believes is responsible for the popularity of “woke” ideas among young people in the West.
Ramaswamy began by explaining the linguistic root of the word “America,” explaining that its root lies in the Gothic word “Amalric,” meaning “master of work.”
“I’m a big believer that language often teaches us something about the truth of what language actually describes.”
“If you think about the root, the genesis of the American name itself, it is he who is the master of work,” Ramaswamy said in his speech. “The idea of hard work, effort as a means to achieve success is actually inextricably linked to that idea of America itself.”
The presidential candidate argued that modern American society has lost touch with this idea, specifically calling out former President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative in the 1960s—which ushered in a dramatic growth of the nation’s welfare state. Such policies damaged the demographics they were intended to help while drifting American society further from its merit-based roots.
Ramaswamy told The Epoch Times that this cultural shift is inextricably linked to the emergence of radical new ideologies, like those of gender fluidity and critical race theory.
“The absence of meritocracy creates a hole that allows other social structures as substitutes to proliferate,” he said. “Meritocracy is the system … that administers social good.”
“These are not coincidences,” Ramaswamy added, referring to the concurrent decline in rewarding merit with the rise of woke frameworks. “These are deeply linked, and if we get to that root cause—with an affirmative alternative vision of our own—we can stand on strong, moral, and principled footing to not only gut that system but create a new entity in its place.”
His solution: a return to meritocracy, something he believes would ignite beneficial ripple effects into various sectors of contemporary culture.
“We can actually fill that void with the answer of the question of what it even means to be an American,” he said. “If we can [enshrine meritocracy], then we dilute these alternative ideologies to irrelevance.”
The interconnectivity of political movements and cultural trends is a prevalent theme in the writings of Ayn Rand, a Soviet refugee turned prominent American novelist in the 1940s. Ramaswamy said Rand’s work profoundly affected him in college, though he does not take her work religiously as the “objectivists”—the school of philosophy inspired by her.
Still, the former tech entrepreneur sees the theme of meritocracy as crucial to American history, something inherent to the ideologies of the revolutionaries who founded the country.
“The culture of free speech that our Founding Fathers set into motion was actually a commitment to the meritocracy of ideas itself,” he said. “The best ideas win.”
Joining Ramaswamy on stage was British author Douglas Murray, who expanded on his counterpart’s warnings by targeting today’s culture of victimization.
“We’ve moved, in America in particular, from a culture of heroism to a culture of victimhood,” Murray said in his speech. “Nothing should hold you back if you have the capabilities to fulfill your goals.”
Expanding on his broader view, Murray told The Epoch times that socialism “happens by increments,” speaking on antimeritocratic ideals as being diametrically opposed to capitalism.
“That’s obviously one of the great challenges going on in America as with all the other social welfare democracies of Europe,” he said. “It’s like bankruptcy. … It happens awfully slowly and then awfully fast.”
Murray pointed to a lack of optimism—manifesting as low birth rates—as one of the West’s major challenges.
Ramaswamy closed his speech with an uplifting message, saying America may not be in decline but passing through a learning phase.
“We will get through our version of adolescence and be stronger on the other side of it,” he said. “There were many rises and many falls of Rome.”