The GOP Primary Debate Proves One Thing: They’re All Shades of Ramaswamy

As it happens, I published my first-ever essay in The Nation—about Vivek Ramaswamy and GOP foreign policy—on the same day that the whole GOP clan had their televised primary debate.

There was much idiocy and hate on display during the debate—confirmation of everything you fear about the new post-liberal Republican Party. I’m not going to break down all that was said—you can get that from everywhere else.

Instead, I want to pull some threads from my piece in The Nation that echoed across every candidate on that stage tonight/last night (depending when you see this).

The way I size up Ramaswamy, he’s a self-serious buffoon engaging in shock-value politics—what I called “edgelord foreign policy.” My thesis was basically this:

[Ramaswamy’s] one of the only reactionary politicians around to try to assemble what might pass for a consistent foreign-policy logic out of the building blocks of white grievance, wealth grievance, QAnon dog whistles, and Trump rhetoric. We can see the future of Republicans’ ruling-class foreign policy in Ramaswamy’s babble…and it sucks.

I recognized in all the hot-take nonsense that Ramaswamy was spewing—last week and during the primary debate tonight—that he wasn’t saying anything new. He has a way of packaging things so that they seem ruthlessly logical, but it’s all just toxic-stew bullshit appeasing white nationalists and conspiracy theorists in a lexicon that you might see in the New York Times.

Accordingly, we can glean from Ramaswamy what form reactionary foreign policy is likely to take regardless which of these hate-mongers wins the primary.

To put it differently, in Ramaswamy, we see the most coherent, distilled version of all the “serious” candidates on that debate stage:

Ramaswamy doesn’t want to end the militarized, imperialistic aspects of American liberal hegemony—he simply wants to end even the semblance of the obligations to the international order that have historically come with it and redirect those violent forces closer to home.

This is true of all the GOP candidates. They’re critiquing a status quo they made—whether they call it liberal hegemony, globalism, or neoconservatism—and then portraying it as simultaneously weak and for suckers. Their answer—uniformly across candidates—is militarism and oppression in one form or another.

China is the ultimate threat, and is being melded with conspiracy theories and a greater focus on the Western Hemisphere. DeSantis has been the most outspoken about bombing Mexico, but everyone—including Ramaswamy—affirms that position.

Most of the candidates also want to bromance with Putin, and not for reasons of high strategy, but rather because:

Putin’s Russia has become a cultural beacon for the global far right and enjoys a weird amount of popularity in Republican politics. Ramaswamy could be suggesting how to bend foreign policy to reflect his party’s discomfiting admiration of white Christian nationalism.

And as Stephen Wertheim noted:

One of many contradictions spurting out of the GOP’s reactionary mind palace. We can grasp the trajectory of GOP foreign policy—including its contradictions—by reading the idiot’s Rosetta Stone that is Ramaswamy.

It’s edgelord foreign policy all the way down.