An American Crackpot

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 07, 2023

 

Vivek Ramaswamy has pushed all his chips in on a big bet. His presidential campaign, such as it is, is increasingly predicated on the assumption that GOP voters have become so mistrustful of institutions and establishments that they will swallow any paranoid conspiracy theory they encounter. With that assumption in mind during last night’s debate, Ramaswamy endorsed as many popular conspiracy theories as he could.

 

In the space of, at most, three breaths, Ramaswamy anointed himself the only candidate in the 2024 race brave enough to mortgage his credibility with reckless disregard for the consequences.

 

“Why am I the only one on this stage, at least, who can say that January 6th now does look like it was an inside job?” Ramaswamy asked. “That the government lied to us for 20 years about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11.”

 

“That the ‘great replacement theory’ is not some grand, rightwing conspiracy theory but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform,” he continued. “That the 2020 election was, indeed, stolen by big tech. That the 2016 election — the one that Trump won for sure — was also one that was stolen from by the national security establishment.”

 

That’s an impressively deranged litany. If the moderators hadn’t cut him off, Ramaswamy might have added that the CIA killed Kennedy, that the moon landing was a hoax, and New Coke was only ever an elaborate plot to popularize the original formula.

 

The moderators’ intervention was a blessing in disguise. To watch the clip of this bizarre digression is to feel the enthusiasm disappear from the audience as Ramaswamy’s attempt to flatter the GOP’s more socially undesirable pretensions devolved into outright nuttery. But there can be no doubt that Ramaswamy set out to validate the right’s most self-destructive pretensions.

 

This wasn’t the only occasion during last night’s debate in which Ramaswamy’s audience glazed over with genuine confusion amid his displays of passionate irrationality.

 

“Look at the blank expression,” he said of Nikki Haley. Presumably, Ramaswamy thought that Haley’s genuine befuddlement reflected poorly on her rather than her incomprehensible raconteur. The accusation that led Haley to succumb to apoplexy was his repeated effort to get her to name the “provinces” (he meant oblasts) in Ukraine where Haley intends to “send our sons and daughters in our trimmings and our military to go fight” against Russia.

 

The simpler explanation for Haley’s confusion is that she hadn’t the slightest idea what Ramaswamy was talking about. I know I didn’t. With all the intensity he could muster, Ramaswamy argued against little more than a non sequitur. Indeed, the pharmaceutical billionaire seemed to think that calumny and invective could do most of the communications work for him. His gratuitous attacks on Haley as a “corrupt,” “fascist neocon” who wants to “send your kids to die so that she can buy a bigger house” are designed not to persuade but to tickle subliminal erogenous zones in what he must think is the hopelessly addled conservative mind. Ramaswamy seems convinced that you are a barely sentient algorithm to be manipulated, but only by those as clever as he.

 

In a post-debate yarn, the candidate elaborated on his allegation that a vast conspiracy involving the active support or complicity of thousands of government officials set out to frame Trump supporters for the sacking of the Capitol. “If the deep state is willing to manufacture an ‘insurrection’ to take down its political opponents, they can do anything,” Ramaswamy told CNN’s Dana Bash.

 

Back in reality, 2020’s voters had already dispensed with the Trump presidency, and the rote process of entering the states’ verdicts into the record had no bearing on Trump’s claim to the White House. All the January 6 violence achieved was to discredit further Trump’s already baseless efforts to save some face amid his unbearable humiliation. Still, Ramaswamy is onto something. To hear the debate audience’s reaction, Republicans are desperate for anything that distances them from proximity to the January 6 rioters — an adjacency to a great crime they know in their hearts is a profound political liability.

 

The candidate’s recklessness isn’t harmless. Notorious white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes were enthralled by his support for the notion that Democrats are importing pliant migrants so they can dilute the political influence of native-born Americans. Wholesaling the idea that the 9/11 Commission covered up the true perpetrators of the September 11 attacks is an assault on the legitimacy of the American enterprise. The idea that the 2016 election was “stolen” from its victor serves only to ratify the notion that Trump’s failures as president were not of his own making.

 

It’s all nonsense, but it’s potent nonsense. It’s highly unlikely that Ramaswamy genuinely believes the paranoia he retails, but he thinks you might. In selling their own fatalism back to what he must believe is a hopelessly credulous audience of rubes, Ramaswamy thinks he might benefit. He calls that bravery. To the uninitiated, it looks more like cynicism.