The recent dust-up in MAGA world created by Vivek Ramaswamy’s throwing blame on America’s supposed cultural problem is a glaring misunderstanding of the sources of American success, according to conservative columnist David Brooks.
Perhaps Ramaswamy, the tech billionaire tapped by the incoming president to slash government spending, “doesn’t understand what makes America great,” Brooks wrote Monday in a stinging takedown of Ramaswamy for the Atlantic.
He also isn’t quite right about everything he preached, the columnist added.
“For example, he describes a nation awash in lazy mediocrity, yet America has the strongest economy in the world,” Brooks told readers. “American workers are among the most productive, and over the past few years American productivity has been surging.”
Brooks continued to make the case against Ramaswamy’s theory by suggesting that American culture isn’t as hostile to “nerdy kids” as he implies.
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“This is a culture that puts The Big Bang Theory on our TV screens and The Social Network in the movie theaters,” Brooks said. “Haven’t we spent many years lionizing Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman?”
Brooks also questioned whether Ramaswamy understands “what thinking is.”
“He seems to believe that the only kind of thinking that matters is solving math problem sets. But one of the reasons we evolved these big brains of ours is so we can live in groups and navigate social landscapes,” he wrote.
Brooks added that the COVID-19 pandemic showed that the country may not be a master of compliance and rule-following, "but we have a flair for dynamism, creativity, and innovation."
He concluded his piece by reminding Ramaswamy that Donald Trump was propelled back into office in large part by “non–college graduates whose highest abilities manifest in largely nonacademic ways.”
He also thinks Ramaswamy is on the wrong side of how to fix American culture, and opined that the entrepreneur used Trump's reelection "as an occasion to tiger-mom the hell out of us."
