Vivek Ramaswamy: belief

Transcript context

…So what’s your criticism of that? So my concern with it is even if that’s well-motivated, I think that it recreates many of the same problems that they were setting out to solve. I’ll give you a really tangible example of that in the present right now. I may be alone amongst prominent conservatives who would say something like this right now, but I think it’s true, so I’m going to say it. I’m actually even in the last year, last year and a half, seeing actually a rise in anti-black and anti-minority racism in this country, which is a little curious. When over the last 10 years we got as close to Martin Luther King’s promise land as you could envision, a place where you have every American, regardless of their skin color, able to vote without obstruction, a place where you have people able to get the highest jobs in the land without race standing in their way. Why are we seeing that resurgence? In part, it’s because of I believe that left-wing obsession with racial equity over the course of the last 20 years in this country. And so when you take something away from someone based on their skin color, and that’s what correcting for prior injustice was supposed to do, the left-wing view is you have to correct for prior injustice by saying that whether you’re a white, straight, cis, man, you have certain privileges that you have to actually correct for. When you take something away from somebody based on their genetics, you actually foster greater animus towards other groups around you. And so the problem with that philosophy is that it creates several problems with it, but the most significant problem that I think everybody can agree we want to avoid is to actually fan the flames of the very divisions that you supposedly wanted to heal. I see that in our context of our immigration policy as well. You think about even what’s going on in, I’m from Ohio, I was born and raised in Ohio and I live there today, the controversy in Springfield, Ohio. I personally don’t blame really any of the people who are in Springfield, either the native people born and raised in Springfield or even the Haitians who have been moved to Springfield. But it ends up becoming a divide and conquer strategy and outcome where if you put 20,000 people in a community where, 50,000 people, where the 20,000 are coming in don’t know the language, are unable to follow the traffic laws, are unable to assimilate, you know there’s going to be a reactionary backlash. And so even though that began perhaps with some type of charitable instinct, some type of sympathy for people who went through the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti and achieved temporary protective status in the United States, what began with sympathy, what began with earnest intentions actually creates the very division and reactionary response that supposedly we say we wanted to avoid. So that’s my number one criticism of that left-wing worldview. what began with earnest intentions actually creates the very division and reactionary response that supposedly we say we wanted to avoid. So that’s my number one criticism of that left-wing worldview. Number two is I do believe that merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can’t have both. And the reason why is no two people, and I think it’s the beautiful things, true between you and I, between you, I and all of our friends or family or strangers or neighbors or colleagues, no two people have the same skillsets. We’re each endowed by different gifts. We’re each endowed with different talents. And that’s the beauty of human diversity. And a true meritocracy is a system in which you’re able to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential without anybody standing in your way. But that means necessarily there’s going to be differences in outcomes in a wide range of parameters, not just financial, not just money, not just fame or currency or whatever it is. There’s just going to be different outcomes for different people in different spheres of lives. And that’s what meritocracy demands. It’s what it requires. And so the left’s vision of group equity necessarily comes at the cost of meritocracy. And so those would be my two reasons for opposing the view is one is it’s not meritocratic, but number two is it often even has the effect of hurting the very people they claimed to have wanted to help. And I think that’s part of what we’re seeing in modern America.…

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