The Moment In The Debate That Made Me Hate Vivek Ramaswamy
Well, the most powerful moment that made me hate him.
Howdy!
Here are three brief thoughts about current events.
Why Vivek Ramaswamy Is So Insufferable
During last week’s Republican debate, Vivek Ramaswamy came out pumped up on either excitement or meth and drove everyone mad. I described him in the moment as “a coke addict who keeps dropping the price of the used car he is trying to sell me every time I mention I’d like to run the VIN and get a carfax report.”
I was apparently not alone in this revulsion as lots of people have taken to the web to explain why they can’t stand him. Some of it is described well by Josh in this post about how Vivek reminds him of Harvard’s “section guy”:
“Section guy” wasn’t a specific person, but an archetype — that guy2 in your discussion section who adores the sound of his own voice, who thinks he’s the smartest person on the planet with the most interesting and valuable interpretations of the course material, and who will not ever, ever, ever shut up.”
Yes, a thousand times, yes, but there was one specific moment during the debate that I thought really captured Ramaswamy’s insufferability.
In the middle of a back-and-forth with Mike Pence, Ramaswamy said the following:
“This isn't that complicated, guys, unlock American energy, drill, frack, burn coal and embrace nuclear, put people back to work by no longer paying them more to stay at home, reform the US Fed, stabilize the US dollar, and go to war [on the administrative state].”
Anyone who believes that US energy policy, economic policy, monetary policy, or the administration of the federal government is not “that complicated” is an idiot.
Those are incredibly complicated subjects! People get doctorates in those subjects. They spend their entire careers focused on those subjects. And they still get it wrong!
The smartest people working in the best faith implement public policy with the expectation that X will happen, and half the time, it doesn’t. Y happens. Or X+Z happens. Or whatever. Because that’s just life. No one’s batted .400 since Ted Williams, either.
When those policies fail or create too many negative externalities, you can seek to fix them or not, improve them or not, modify the theory, and adapt the application or not.
People who choose the “or not” are dangerous ideologues.
But Ramaswamy is worse than that. Those people have a theory of the case. Maybe they’re too stubborn to abandon it when it fails, but that’s a second-move failure. Ramaswamy not only has no theory of the case, he is appalled by the notion!
All politicians do what Ramaswamy did, to some extent. They pretend that complicated subjects can be solved in soundbites. But Ramaswamy went further and mocked people who know enough to know these subjects are hard.
This is a thing that populists do. But smart populists use populism as a means to an end. Populism as campaign tactic. At most, it’s populism as general vibe direction informing policy implementation. Populism as actual governing philosophy is unspeakably stupid. (Particularly in a country so polarized that both halves the country think the other half is a Neanderthal.)
Saying things are easy or simple when they are anything but is what adolescents with low self-esteem do. What they are saying to you is, “It’s simple,” but what they are saying to themselves is, “If it’s simple, then I can understand it.”
One of my favorite things to do is talk to people who have jobs I know very little about. I don’t mean NASA scientists. I mean people who work at paper mills. I might understand the general gist of their work, and I might think I’d be quite good at it, but when you talk to someone who wakes up every day and actually does it, you learn all of these fascinating small things that they have spent thousands of hours thinking about. No one in history has spent as many hours thinking about this very minor bit of printing as have people who do it every day for a living. They have tips and tricks that you never would have imagined because they do it every day. They think about it every single working hour. And you? You just have spent a few hours on this subject.
Everyone knows what it’s like to suffer a backseat driving dilettante. And that’s who Vivek is. And that’s what Vivek reminds me of.
Maga Talking Point Is Racist
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