Conservative provocateur Ann Coulter sure did make headlines with her provocative statement that she wouldn’t vote for former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy due to his being Indian.
I hate to be the guy that says “missing context,” but Coulter’s comment does come off differently if you watch more than a minute of the podcast. The context is that 1. Coulter and Ramaswamy were being edgy. 2. Coulter was indeed positing the idea that there is a WASP lineage of our country and its institutions, as discussed in Samuel Huntington’s Who We Are. While this is a controversial view of the country, we have to say it isn’t without some truth.
Partially chalk it up to the fact that they were being edgy. Ramaswamy started the podcast with a declaration:
”There’s an n-word that you’re not allowed to say anymore, but I’m going to say it.”
This leads to the anticlimactic revelation that he’s referring to the word “nationalism.” In this context, Coulter was just one-upping him in terms of edginess, with her “I wouldn’t vote for you” comment. Also, Ramaswamy qualified this shocking intro to clarify that he is not for ethno-nationalism, but rather civic nationalism, which places him well within the overton window of conservative thought.
Coulter rather flippantly said that she wouldn’t vote for Ramaswamy because he’s Indian because she was in a sense teasing out her thesis which she expounded upon later in the interview; her view is that ethnicity is indeed a part of nationalism. Coulter meant this more in the sense of “Protestant work ethic,” rather than something more sinister.
If this seems sensational, the argument is laid out rather clinically in Samuel Huntington’s tome. Of course a country changes when its ethnic composition changes. But as Coulter herself acknowledges in the podcast, many Whites stubbornly vote Democrat while other ethnic groups vote as a block. In that sense, we can really “blame” ourselves, if indeed there is blame to be apportioned.
Finally, Coulter found Ramaswamy so persuasive that she conceded later in the interview that she would actually vote for Ramaswamy after all, despite his Indian ethnicity. With this, I can only agree: Ramaswamy is a breath of fresh air.
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