In his first book, Woke, Inc., Vivek Ramaswamy, a first-generation American, Yale Law graduate, and immensely successful biotech entrepreneur with political ambitions, identified corporate political activism — in the form of restrictive speech-policing at the workplace, censorship by tech companies that control the means of communication, and investment firms’ growing interest in goals other than financial returns — as a major source of our political dysfunction. He argued that such advocacy jeopardized democracy as companies took power to settle contested political questions away from the people. To fight back, he founded an investment firm that pressures companies to prioritize the bottom line. Now he diagnoses another problem: that our political morality has been corrupted by a false narrative of victimhood. This time, though, the solution is harder to discern.
Ramaswamy finds victim narratives everywhere. Whereas Americans once took pride in their ability to overcome long odds, now they tell and believe stories about “what they can’t do,” from racial minorities living in immiserated towns to southerners lamenting the lost Confederacy to aspiring college students eagerly workshopping sob stories with admissions counselors. Declaring oneself a victim might seem disempowering, but people keep doing it, perhaps because victim status confers advantages on those who can gain official recognition.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the National Review (paywall)
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Theodore Kupfer is an associate editor of City Journal.
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