Vivek Ramaswamy: belief

Transcript context

…Can you steel man the case for progressivism and left- wing ideas? Yeah, so look, I think the strongest case, particularly for left-wing ideas in the United States, so in the American context, is that the country has been imperfect in living up to its ideals. So even though our founding fathers preached the importance of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and freedom, they didn’t practice those values in terms of many of our founding fathers being slave owners, inequalities with respect to women and other disempowered such that they say that that created a power structure in this country that continues to last to this day. The vestiges of what happened even in 1860 in the course of human history isn’t that long ago and that we need to do everything in our power to correct for those imbalances in power in the United States. That’s the core view of the modern left. I’m not criticizing it right now, I’m steel manning it, I’m trying to give you I think a good of why the left believes they have a compelling case for the government stepping into correct for historical or present inequalities. I can give you my counter rebuttal of that, but the best statement of the left, I think that it’s the fact that we’ve been imperfect in living up to those ideals. In order to fix that, we’re going to have to take steps that are severe steps if needed to correct for those historical inequalities before we actually have true equality of opportunity in this country. That’s the case for the left-wing view in modern America. So what’s your criticism of that?…

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