Vivek Ramaswamy is not the presidential candidate that young people were hoping for | Opinion

When young people say that we want more of ourselves taking office, we are not talking about Vivek Ramaswamy.

The 38-year-old multimillionaire founder of Roivant Sciences and 2024 Republican presidential hopeful is notorious for falling short of his own words. Having intelligently crafted a campaign, “TRUTH,” around condemning self-victimization and “wokeism,” he is keen on reaping the benefits of being the fresh young competitor in a room of older politicians, showing off swagger in his smile, wordplay and Ivy League debate skills. To his credit, that confidence did score him major points at Wednesday night’s GOP debate, after which he reportedly fundraised $450,000 for his campaign.

But younger Americans, notably Gen-Z, appear to be skirting farther away from supporting Ramaswamy — and for good reason, too. A gap in priorities is one thing, but his hypocrisy is another, so much so that despite being the youngest Republican candidate to run for President ever, he fuels the stereotype that young politicians are inexperienced, self-centered and best left in the margins.

Opinion

At both the debate and on his campaign trail, Ramaswamy frequently prefaces himself as the son of poor immigrants who grew up amid opposite circumstances from the majority of his competitors and Harvardian peers.

“I didn’t grow up with money,” he said last Wednesday. “...I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for…”

“My parents came to this country 40 years ago with no money,” he later said in an August 17 speech at the Nixon Library. “In a single generation, I have gone on to found multi-billion dollar companies, and did it while marrying my wife, Apoorva, and raising our two sons.”

These are exaggerations, and in doing so, he reduces the hardships of low-income immigrant communities to mere props for his own self-serving narrative. A quick search into Ramaswamy’s family history will reveal that his father is a lawyer and a mother is a psychiatrist, both highly educated, members of the upper caste in India who immigrated to the U.S. and then pursued further education. Ramaswamy himself attended an elite private high school — where he would also start managing a stock portfolio that his parents had started for him.

By trumpeting his self-madeness and commitment to American patriotic values through a tinted lens, specifically comparing himself against Trump’s Old Money background, Ramaswamy dismisses critical systemic challenges confronting communities of color and perpetuates the model minority myth that Asian-Americans — and other children of immigrants — owe their success to hard work, and hard work only.

In addition to wanting to ban lottery visas, he does not care for — and in fact, openly challenges — the affirmative action policies that have hoisted many immigrant and low-income individuals into top colleges and coveted jobs, despite differentiating himself from other candidates on the basis of his self-alleged early impoverishment.

His background is far from the only thing he puppeteers.

Ramaswamy wants 18-year-olds to know that “there’s more to life than the aimless passage of time,” yet seeks to limit their political involvement by raising the legal voting age, requiring civics tests for younger voters and denouncing youth-driven climate change activism as cultish.

He came across as Donald Trump’s best friend during the debate, but wholly slammed his presidency in a 2022 Politico op-ed, writing: “While Trump promised to lead the nation to recommit itself to the pursuit of greatness, what he delivered in the end was just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole.”

Then, in a recent debacle with The Atlantic, he suggested that federal officers could have been involved in the 9/11 plane crash but then called out the journalist for misquoting him after the public backlash at his stance. The journalist later posted an audio transcription of the interview — and there was no misquoting error.

The recurring theme of Ramaswamy’s campaign seems to be attention over action, even if it means suddenly changing directions or staying silent to please the particular audience he is speaking to.

His face card is the only card he has to play, and he protects it desperately, even making blatantly misleading claims at times. Perhaps his most polarizing, and effective, tactic has been dishing out his very right-leaning “hot takes” on sensitive topics marinating in national conversation, including LGBTQ rights, border security and transgenderism.

Beyond his verbalism, Ramaswamy’s commitment to improving the quality of American life leaves much to be proven, however. He is actually an “unaffiliated” voter according to Ohio voting records, meaning that he did not vote in the state’s 2022 and 2023 primary elections, or in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. He has also used his presidential run as an excuse to delay lawsuits filed against him by former workers at his company.

He dismisses wokeism, covidism, depression, anxiety, fentanyl and suicide — some of the most serious challenges facing the nation’s youth — as “new secular religions in American life” that he said had replaced values of hard work and faithful patriotism, without acknowledging the very lack of resources and support systems required to solve these very real problems.

Ramaswamy is not alone. Many younger conservative TV personalities, such as Candace Owens, Brett Cooper, Amala Ekpunobi and Pearl Davis, have also built entire platforms around unapologetically attacking wokeness, issuing a counternarrative to college liberalism and having “common sense” on polarizing issues — but what sets Ramaswamy’s situation apart is that he is running for president.

And as a candidate who claims to be “driven by data and evidence,” someone who has pledged “to speak freely,” detached from “corporate” pressure, where was this empiricism when he was paying a Wikipedia editor to remove an affiliation he had with a Harvard scientist who helped develop the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, just days before he announced his presidential run?

Transparency is the desire and drive of Generation Z, well on track to become the most educated generation in American history. We have a lot to say, a lot to learn, and even more to offer when it comes to addressing imminent challenges passed down and magnified by previous generations.

We need government officials who are cognizant of the youth’s needs while still being committed to uplifting all voices, even those who do not see eye to eye with us on every issue. A president is so much more than someone who inserts their own truths and determines the right moral direction for the country to move in -- he or she cares for us all, whether or not perspectives align. What there isn’t room for are slogans and false spins.

One thing is clear: Ramaswamy is not the presidential future we have been hoping for.