On the second day of Christmas, Vivek Ramaswamy gave to America a diagnosis: We have a culture problem. “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” Ramaswamy wrote on X. We need “More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”
Ramaswamy, who will lead the new Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk, was also making a point about the—already roiling—debate over H-1B visas. If Americans don’t revere hard work enough, then immigrants do. They value hard work; they honor the math Olympiad and the spelling bee; they wisely prevent their children from participating in mass American culture. And so those children “become wildly successful STEM graduates.”
It’s the proverbial tale of nerd versus jock. The nerd’s extracurricular activities pay off in the end—and contribute more to society. Our nerd deficit means that, ultimately, corporations have to import such people instead.
But should we always prefer nerds to jocks? Athletic excellence requires the virtue of discipline and the cultivation of scaffolded goal attainment, which transfers well to other environments. This is also why elite sports or military service are often a proxy for a solid work ethic and strong character. Someone who knows how to do gruelingly difficult things, to endure physical pain, to obey a coach, to coordinate with a team, can apply that skill to other fields of life. There is something gnostic about an ideal of American excellence limited to our mental activities.
If Ramaswamy has misunderstood the body, he has even more deeply misunderstood the body politic—the nation. America is not a corporation seeking to maximize its returns to its shareholders, nor an individual seeking to maximize his net worth. The whole concept of a nation is that there will be solidarity between citizens not because of their merit, but because they’re ours. It would be inhuman to argue that you should get rid of your children if better children can be found, or that you should replace your wife when a newer model becomes available. It is already distasteful, as any small business owner or mid-level manager knows, to lay off employees, or at least to do so without a human sense of the seriousness of the situation. It is even more untoward to argue that, through an expansive visa system, the potential workforce of one’s country should be replaced with foreigners—yes, even if those foreign workers are more efficient or productive (which is debatable).
Ramaswamy, a successful entrepreneur, rightly values efficiency. And as with merit, we should celebrate efficiency wherever we find it. But efficiency for what? Your dishwasher saves you time—it is efficient—so that you can spend more time reading, or watching TV, or playing with your kids. But do you want your relationships with those kids efficiently optimized? The question itself is silly. Humans aspire to leisure.
Ramaswamy lionizes immigrants—but perhaps he should take their aspirations more seriously. They come to the U.S. for a better life—and that life involves things like well-tended yards and vegetable gardens, tool sheds and hobbies, family dinners where children are taught how to interact as ladies and gentlemen over a home-cooked meal, competitive sports where honors can be won by the best athletes in the city.
The principles of efficiency are helpful in pursuit of the good life until they attempt to optimize that life itself. Then they turn tyrannical. The good life of the American dream is the sort of goal that makes people want to have kids, and which gives kids a sense that their lives are worth living—that they have a hope and a future here in their homeland. It is more than the vision of the Department of Government Efficiency, which is seeking “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
Children need a stable home and families need a stable homeland. The good American life must recognize the highest principles of all. One of them is the day of Sabbath rest which we are to honor and keep holy. This is not “efficient” in the sense in which we normally use that word. But it is good, and fittingly human, and all-important. And it is American. There is a reason we were all at home online over Christmas break and free to argue on X over a glass of eggnog, instead of helping our kids prep for the SAT.
To give Ramaswamy credit, he has provoked an actual public conversation of the sort many, particularly on the left, have grown unaccustomed to seeing. Perhaps we are seeing the end of stage-managed politics focused on indirect confrontation and consensus leadership, and the beginning of the sort of hard-nosed politics one finds in a tech startup or on a labor union picket line. Amid it all, the new right coalition is trying to work out a sensible compromise between its different impulses. For me it must be one that keeps in mind the distinctives of the American people and the American way of life, as a goal for generations to come.
Colin Redemer is managing director at Beck & Stone.
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