The Realignment: Iraq War Series, the 2024 Republican Primary, and Is "Anti-Wokeness" Enough?
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Paid Subscriber Series: 20th Anniversary of the Iraq War
Apologies for delaying the paid post on the topic (you’ll hear about the reason on Monday). Next week will kick off the preparation for next month’s Substack subscriber virtual event on the Iraq War. No worries if you don’t have time to keep up with the reading. I see this as an opportunity to help our most engaged listeners actually delve into these topics beyond the superficial level they are discussed in the media.
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The 2024 Republican Primary Kicks Off
The 2024 Republican Primary kicked off this week with former South Carolina Governor and Trump administration UN Ambassador Nikki Haley launching her campaign. Closer to home, previous Realignment guest Vivek Ramaswamy launched a trial ballon with a big Politico piece on his visit to Iowa to test the waters for a campaign.
The ‘CEO of Anti-Woke Inc.’ Has His Eye on the Presidency Politico
Ramaswamy doesn’t necessarily want to run on his businessman track record. Instead he is planning to launch an ideas-based campaign focused on revitalizing the American spirit and bringing back a culture of merit into society.
“I believe that I’ve developed a vision for American national identity that I have deep conviction for and is the product of my own journey of having lived the gifts that this country has afforded me,” Ramaswamy said as he munched on veggie enchiladas at a Mexican restaurant in an Iowa strip mall. “And the combination of both doing it intellectually and having personally experienced that vision of our nation makes me well suited to articulate that and deliver on it.”
Below you’ll find the audio and video from our 2021 episode.
147 | Vivek Ramaswamy: Does Politics Have a Place in Corporate America?
There is a less than zero percent chance that Nikki Haley ever joins The Realignment, but I’d like to bring Vivek back on the show.
Saagar and I discussed Vivek and the primary on Wednesday. I’ll set aside the critiques of Vivek’s inexperience and the like for another time and place. We are in the post-Buttigieg era, and given the hunger in both parties for young, fresh faces, its clear that the reward for an audacious presidential run isn’t only a cable news show. I can see a world where Vivek does well on stage and receives a cabinet appointment.
The real thing I’m curious about is the centrality of “anti-wokeness” to his candidacy’s theory-of-the-case.
The 2008, 2016, and 2020 presidential campaigns are the elections I am most familiar with. In each case, the winning candidate was distinguished by his ability to understand a central opportunity or a key advantage over the competition. In 2008, Obama saw his contrast with Bush and the undercurrent of Clinton fatigue that made Hillary Clinton vulnerable in the primary. In 2016, Donald Trump understood the “change” narrative that Obama seized upon in 2008 was his for the taking. In 2020, Biden understood that despite what Twitter and various publications with their heads in the clouds said, voters actually just wanted “normalcy.”
With this in mind, I don’t see the case for believing the 2024 campaign will revolve around wokeness. The tied clearly shifted against social justice movements/discourse, especially within the institutional Democratic Party, the Biden White House, and the press. That does not mean that there won’t be debates and culture war incidents, just that the country isn’t going to return to the way things were in 2020-2021. Even ESG, the “woke” phenomena that Vivek has focused his career around was clearly a low interest rate event. Who is going to be seriously talking about it in two years?
Going one level deeper, framing oneself as “anti-woke” is a commodity product in the GOP these days. Literally everyone, left of center would describe themselves as opposed to woke excess. Like him or not, Ron Desantis clearly owns that lane with his various moves and fights against Disney, the state’s university system, and the College Board. If Vivek goes on stage and talks about wokeness and identity, Desantis can just say “Talk is cheap, I’ve actually done things in my state. Fox News hits don’t matter.” It is barely worth noting that Trump himself will own a prohibitively large percentage of voters who put anti-wokeness at the center of their politics.
This podcast/newsletter has been very critical of Pete Buttigieg, but his 2020 candidacy easily passed the theory-of-the-case test. Buttigieg clearly saw that there was a large percentage of the Democratic Party’s base who was looking for an Obama-esque candidate: young, bright, contrasting with Trump’s boorishness, etc…The Democratic Party has a long history going from Obama to Bill Clinton to JFK of selecting young, aspirational candidates over their more experienced peers. It is unclear that the Republican Party has the same dynamic.
If Vivek is going to succeed either at the presidential level or the cabinet appointment level, he is going to find a central but differentiated issue or notice a void in the current set of candidates.
This Week’s Paid Episode
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This Week’s Free Episodes
344 | Inside the Nuclear Energy Renaissance with Bret Kugelmass
343 | The Realignment x The Good Time Show: ChatGPT and the Rise of AI, Media Critiques, Searching for Crypto's "Facebook Moment," and the Future of Social Media with Aarthi Ramamurthy & Sriram Krishnan
342 | Trump's Last Defense Secretary on Cutting the Pentagon Budget, Base Closures, Forever War Accountability, and New Threats with Christopher C. Miller
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The Realignment: Iraq War Series, the 2024 Republican Primary, and Is "Anti-Wokeness" Enough?
Hi Marshall, I am a life term member on Supercast, will you please read that across to here.
'Woke' is just a nomenclature used to conceal the truth about the Jews and the Frankfurt School.