Ohio businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is confident President Donald Trump will win in November.
Cabinet CandidatesBut for some who may ultimately claim victory for Trump on Election Day, they’re uncertain about what Making America Great Again means.
Speaking Tuesday night at the National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., Ramaswami singled out two major factions within the America First movement and indicated which he believes is more likely to get results.
In his speech, Ramaswami noted that Trump had dealt a fatal blow to the neoliberal consensus, offering instead “a statist vision for America’s future.” While the America First movement seems to accept that statism is the way to go, Ramaswami expressed concern about what kind of statism will prevail in the future: state protectionism, which some might perceive as economic nationalism, or the state liberalism he supports.
According to Ramaswami, protectionism is driven by a desire to “protect American workers from the effects of foreign competition so that American workers can earn higher wages and American manufacturers can sell their products at higher prices.” Protectionists also seem to believe that “the regulatory state should be reformed to redirect its focus toward supporting American workers and manufacturers.”
Judging by Ramaswami’s comments, he appears to view Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), the leading contender to be Trump’s vice presidential nominee, as a champion of the protectionist wing of the America First movement.
After all, Vance has shown he is willing to step in to improve the lives of Americans through state intervention, like raising the minimum wage.
Recently, he has incurred the wrath of libertarians. Proposed in the New York Times interview The aim is to “put as much upward pressure on wages as possible and downward pressure on the services that people use.”
Proponents of national liberalism are instead “most interested in ensuring that our trade and immigration policies do not undermine our national security and national identity in the ways that neoliberal policies have unintentionally caused.”
“We don’t want to replace the left-wing caring state with a right-wing caring state.”
National Libertarians “do not believe in re-establishing the regulatory state, but rather in abolishing it. This is not because National Libertarians are indifferent to the plight of American workers and manufacturers, but because of their deep belief that the regulatory state itself is the very enemy,” Ramaswami said.
Even as he railed against the old consensus, Ramaswami also made the case in his speech for the kind of deregulation that previous national Conservative speakers have noted is a sign of the outgoing Liberal government – deregulation that some protectionist groups may resist.
After detailing the differences between the two factions of America First on the regulatory state, immigration and trade, Ramaswami stressed that he is leaning toward the state-liberal view because he believes it is “the way to help American workers and manufacturers.”
“National Libertarians (which is the group I belong to) believe that you can’t win against the left by adopting left-wing approaches,” Ramaswami concluded. “We don’t want to replace the left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state. Our goal is to completely dismantle the nanny state and its regulatory apparatus, once and for all, and for good — figuratively speaking, by burning the edifice and burning the ashes. And if we succeed, it will be the beginning of a rebirth of America that starts with the radical principles of our founding: that the people we elected to run our government will once again be the people who actually run our government.”
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