Vivek Ramaswamy: ‘Woke capitalism is a cultural cancer’ – The Telegraph

Throughout his childhood, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Brahmin-caste parents, immigrants from Kerala to Cincinnati, Ohio, took Ramaswamy and his brother back to the family home in the village of Vadakkanchery, which – in the 1990s – still lacked air conditioning, indoor flush toilets or proper refrigeration. 

These trips were uncomfortable at first for an American kid, but proved vital. For it was in the caste-inflected India of his childhood that Ramaswamy, 36, “fell in love with capitalism”, a system that allocated respect and resources based not on birth but on merit. 

“Capitalism was the first ideal I really loved, the first time I’d ever loved a system. Capitalism brought people together; the caste system kept them apart,” he writes in Woke Inc, his whistleblowing New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, published last year. 

Ramaswamy’s argument – made through shocking examples and tight, hefty analysis – is that in their embrace of woke “religion” and the pursuit of trendy social agendas over simple shareholder satisfaction, business titans are increasingly dictating not just which goods and services rise to the top, but which social and political ideas do too. 

As he tells me cheerily over Zoom from Columbus, Ohio, businesses using “economic force as a bludgeon to implement political or social agendas” pose “a threat to democracy and free expression…so great that every citizen bears a civic duty to take a personal risk” in order to fight back; for some, this may mean being fired or walking away from their jobs if that’s the result of “actually express[ing] yourself openly”. For others, it means speaking up at your children’s school, or anywhere else where the right to critique ideas has become unacceptable.

‘My family gave me a deep-seated superiority over the ‘riff-raff kids’’

Ramaswamy – a biotech entrepreneur with an estimated wealth of £500m –  is one of those people you really only encounter in America: so overachieving it makes the ordinary Briton’s head spin, and dedicated, with total, optimistic earnestness and patriotism, to fixing his beloved, but broken, country. 

On graduating, both he and his brother achieved the highest marks at their Jesuit private high school; Ramaswamy was also a nationally-ranked junior tennis player before going on to Harvard, where he came top in biology, with a precis of his award-winning senior thesis on human-animal chimeras published in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. 

What, I ask, is the secret of people like him, people who have “come top in every class I’ve ever been in”? Was his mother a “tiger mom”, a term popularised by his friend Amy Chua in her bestseller of the same name? Not really, he says. But as immigrants, the family’s culture was utterly excellence-oriented. 

“There’s this paradoxical pairing of two qualities that [immigrant] parents instil in their children,” says Ramaswamy. On the one hand, his parents brought with them “a deep-seated insecurity” which led to “a hard work ethic…which is [about] defence first, protecting the family.” 

But as well as the insecurity and the anxiety about making ends meet, “there’s this other side of your brain that has a deep-seated superiority, to see these, average mediocre Joes running around you knowing that you’re destined to be so much better than them because you’re wired to work harder. [That sense that] we’re not just one of them who just goes home after school and goofs off.” There’s a word in Keralan vernacular for kids like that, he says, that means “riff raff kids”. 

“My parents were both quite academically accomplished in India,” he continues. “But I think that the idea of being the best in your class wasn’t something that they drove us to. It was just obvious… there was no other way.” 

Ramaswamy joined investment group QVT in 2007, and then – while a partner and manager of the firm’s biotech portfolio – became interested in the relationship between law and political philosophy, and so did a law degree at Yale on the side. In 2013, he founded Roivant, a biopharmaceutical company which worked on a drug for Alzheimer’s (which failed), before developing one, Relugolix, used for prostate cancer. In 2015, he took Roivant subsidiary Axovant public with the biggest IPO in biotech history, raising $315 million with a valuation of $2.8 billion. He was just 29.

But that was the old Ramaswamy. The new one – amazingly genial and relaxed-looking for a Monday morning (he meditates three times a week), and in tennis whites (he still plays competitively) – is a political philosopher and activist, with another book called Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence to be published this autumn.

Escaping the ‘cultural bubble’

A consummate entrepreneur, he also runs Strive, an asset management company he founded last year. Its seed money came from investors including pro-free speech billionaires Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale. Ramaswamy is now in the business of literally putting his money where his mouth is. Choosing to do it in Ohio rather than Manhattan or California is part of the picture – if unusual, especially given the size of his profile since the release of Woke Inc. But he and his wife, Apoorva, a throat specialist and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s medical centre, decided they didn’t want to raise a family (they have a three-year-old son) in a coastal “cultural bubble”. 

And Ramaswamy’s commitment to “writing about and serving as a voice for the everyday citizen” made central Ohio a better option. “You can go a 50-mile radius of where I’m talking to you from today and you have a cross-section of the entire US.” 

So how did “biotech’s boy wonder”, as Forbes described him, end up so involved in political questions that he abandoned the company he had founded? 

Ramaswamy tells me that he spent his first six years at Roivant “laser focused… exclusively on the business of developing drugs. I mean, I was a molecular biology undergrad. I was a biotech investor for seven years”.

However, by the start of last year, Ramaswamy found himself consumed by social, not just biomedical questions, and an “itch” to not “just describe the world as it is, but to describe the world as it should be. To offer a competing vision for the world as it should be. We developed a number of medicines [for cancer], but I grew more interested with what I saw as a cultural cancer that no medicine was going to address, one that would require a cultural and societal thoughtfulness that was lacking and that I felt I had something to add to. I quickly discovered that I couldn’t do both of those things at the same time”.

The sense that something had gone wrong in the intersection of capitalism and politics had been brewing for a while. 

Ramaswamy had watched with unease as the Government bailed out banks in 2008, and then as those banks, instructed to repay the taxpayer, actually ended up using “a sizeable chunk of the £11 billion earmarked for ‘consumer relief’” paying vast sums to “nonprofits picked from a list created by the federal government… a lot of them were liberal favourites [that] use their funds for liberal priorities like voter registration and lobbying state, local, and federal government”, he writes in Woke Inc. 

‘It’s easier to post a black square on your Instagram account than condemn China’

Ramaswamy writes about spine-chilling instances of corporate wokewashing to distract from serious questions about companies’ business practices. Examples include Unilever positioning itself as “the corporate leader in the fight to empower women” while facing a lawsuit from female Kenyan tea plantation workers “who claimed it had failed to protect them from rape”, or Nike pledging $40 million to “the black community” while flogging trainers to inner city black kids who “can’t afford to buy books from school”. 

He shows in his book how some of these companies, such as Airbnb, Disney, Marriott and Apple, snuggle up to dictatorships such as China and Saudi Arabia all while trying to indemnify themselves with virtue through the woke racket. To Ramaswamy, it’s a “scam”, plain and simple. “It’s easier to post a black square on your Instagram account [as users did to support the Black Lives Matter movement] than it is to condemn human rights abuses committed against, say, Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province. 

But when corporations speak out about ‘microaggressions’ in America while staying silent about true ‘macroaggressions’ in places like China, that creates a false moral equivalence and erodes our greatest asset of all – our moral standing on the global stage.” 

In the wake of the George Floyd murder, a tsunami of businesses, including Delta, Starbucks and Nike, amped up their diversity measures and political interventions. Coke’s post-Floyd edict made it sound “more like that of a Super PAC than a soft drink manufacturer”, he adds.

By 2021, the woke rubber had hit the business road with such velocity that Ramaswamy says it left him with no choice. Floyd’s murder made “demands on me as a CEO” to “say things that either were inauthentic… to say the thing that made everyone feel better, which is the carbon copy statement that every other CEO was making in late May or early June 2020”. 

Staff pressured him to “do more to address systemic racism” and the pressure to publicly support BLM “began to weigh on me”. His doubts only grew. “I joke that BLM stands for Big Lavish Mansions – since that’s apparently how the leadership of the organisation has been spending its money,” he tells me. “I favour ‘All Black Lives Matter’ – BLM’s concern for black lives ends when it comes to doing the actual things we need to do to empower black Americans, such as educational empowerment, advancing family stability, or curbing urban violence.” 

At the time, despite unease, he wrote a letter to staff urging them to seek support from the company in these difficult times, and caused even more offence, that he was “tone-deaf” and exhibiting his “privilege”. He began to suspect that maintaining his personal integrity was no longer compatible with doing what was best for the company. 

But “the thing that pushed me over the edge” was the reaction to an article he wrote in The Wall Street Journal, published a week after the Jan 6 2021 Capitol Hill riots, “that reflected some of my views as a citizen and legal scholar”. 

It argued that Silicon Valley technology companies “co-opted” by Congress to “do through the back door what the government cannot directly accomplish under the constitution” should be treated as state actors. As such, they violated the first amendment in banning certain forms of speech. “That caused three advisers to my company to resign within 48 hours of that piece being published, and to me that was my final wake-up call to make a choice, and so I made that choice.” He couldn’t speak out on issues he now felt were urgent while also doing right by his company. It was a case for his own argument: business and pleasure may mix; business and public politics do not.  

‘Corporations prey on the moral insecurities of an entire generation’

The Woke Inc argument, then, is a dual love letter, first to capitalism, and then to democracy, which, as he argues, needs to be protected from capitalism. This makes Ramaswamy’s position sophisticated – too sophisticated for that purist capitalism of the 1980s. 

Yet at a time when the Right seems to have abandoned any clear defence of the free market at all, I had hoped Ramaswamy might offer it. He does, but not in the old-fashioned way. “If you’re a free marketeer, reciting free market slogans without a willingness to take up that political cause, you are a relic, you are a dinosaur. You are irrelevant, in my view, which is what most of the free marketeer crowd is today. I believe in the free market, in the spirit of the market. That is different from our role as citizens in a democracy. This is the beautiful tension at the heart of the American identity… individualism and liberty, capitalism and democracy. America isn’t one of those things. It is both of those things at once.”

How to repair the breach between the two, yanking capitalism back from the heart of democracy? First we need an understanding of how we got here. Ramaswamy argues that in America – though the same can easily be said of Britain –  the passing of much-needed anti-discrimination laws following the 1960s civil rights movement led to a corporate “deep state”, or “deep corporate apparatus”, to make sure those laws were being followed. This entrenched a “managerial class, a sort of politburo, the human resources department and so on” and today, it’s this strata of the workforce that ensures that the mandates of the woke – a post-modern, post-civil rights doctrine – are not only followed but permeate throughout the company.

Ramaswamy also thinks that woke ideology emerged in part to serve the psychological needs of elite millennials, including many of his classmates at Harvard and Yale, who wanted to offset their guilt through pat explanations of privilege. In a post-religious, post-duty world, they were also searching for meaning. “I think a lot of corporations prey on the moral insecurities of an entire generation by telling them they could satisfy their moral hunger by going to [super woke] Ben & Jerry’s and ordering a cup of ice cream with a couple of morality sprinkles on top. But the satisfaction that you get from fast food starts to wear off quickly.”

And here he turns to solutions. First, to “smoke out lurking state action” and “the laws and legal frameworks that created the conditions for cultural totalitarianism. I think this is as true in the UK as it is in the United States, where many everyday workers, their experience of citizenship, is to have to choose between speaking their minds freely and putting food on the table”. Policy should also be tweaked to recognise political beliefs or expression as a “civil right”, he says.

On an individual level, those “everyday workers” need to do two things: bring lawsuits  – Ramaswamy has made numerous legal arguments against woke in the workplace, including arguing that woke counts as a religion and therefore it is illegal to sack those who don’t buy into it  – and “speak freely and without fear”.

His most far-out solution is the introduction of national service, rolled out as mandatory “civic service” for all high schoolers in their summer break, which he says would offer “a sense of shared purpose and experience” that will make “better citizens” and “less flimsy capitalists”. Getting pupils to use a portion of their summers teaching or working with charities, the police, fire service or army would, he thinks, bolster a sense of duty to higher things, helping to replace wokeness as a framework for meaningful action and morality.

With America riven by terrifying social and political fissures, especially since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade (“in technical terms, it’s clear that Roe v Wade was one of the most poorly reasoned constitutional law cases”), I ask Ramaswamy if he despairs of the country his parents came to 40 years ago. “I think the experience of looking back and saying this was not the country that my parents came to is in some ways… internal to the American experience. Nations don’t die the way that people do. They’re constantly reborn as something else. And we’re in one of those cycles of reincarnation now. The fact that we’re free and able to recognise that is actually part of what leaves me optimistic.”

Woke Inc: Inside the Social Justice Scam (Swift Press) is out now in paperback