Why America is selling what Vivek is buying.
EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:
It is Christmastime, which means it’s once again time for Vivek Ramaswamy to say some insultingly silly and self-serving nonsense about why he is entitled to what your ancestors built.
Perhaps he was swirlied as a child by blond kids in Christmas pajamas, inflamed to pogrom after a Boy Meets World marathon. Perhaps he was simply never meant to be this cold.
In any case, Andrew Torba’s response is eloquent and comprehensive — you should go listen to it, I don’t need to recapitulate it. Bottom line:
“The Founders created a nation for their posterity. They said so. They wrote it into the Constitution. They enacted it into law. They maintained it for generations. The idea that America was always a rootless proposition, open to the world, welcoming anyone who affirms the right ideas—this is a lie. It is a lie told by those who benefit from it.”
There’s really no disputing this, as a matter of history.
The problem: the average Republican voter in Ohio basically agrees with Vivek.
They don’t actually care what the Founding Fathers thought about Indians. In fact, the question of whether “dead people get a vote” is the central contention.
Put another way: the mainstream Republican position is that living Americans should get “neither credit nor blame” for what their ancestors did.
This is purely a position of convenience, of course — a way to avoid disputing the contemporary liberal judgment of your ancestors, while getting out from under that moral opprobrium yourself.
In order to thread that rhetorical needle, you have to reject the idea of patrimony as such: the idea that fathers have a right to build things that their children have a right to inherit.
In the Boomer Reaganite moral universe, everyone is a pure Platonic blank slate: deserving nothing from their ancestors and owing nothing to their descendants — entitled only to what they personally build and accumulate.
(This is an incredibly convenient position for the generation that somehow managed to spend down the mythic treasure of five hundred years of global conquest.)
It’s an explicit defiance of the warning at the close of the Old Testament:
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
(Malachi 4:5-6)
It’s also totally incoherent, both morally and historically.
It tees up the (obviously correct) leftist critique that white Americans are, in fact, the beneficiaries of their ancestors’ choices.
This is one sense in which the “woke are more correct that the mainstream” — and it is what people like Vivek mean when they call us “Woke Right”.
We accept, like celebrated political theorist Kamala Harris, that we did not simply fall out of the coconut tree — we exist in the context of what came before us.
(She was lampooned for saying this because she’s a ridiculous person and said it with her trademark unwarranted cackling, but it’s a truism.)
Your wealth, your opportunities, your possibilities, are, in fact, a product of who your ancestors were and what they did. Obviously the wealth and property they passed along, but also:
The culture they transmitted
Whether and where they planted roots
The communities and polities they built
The connections they established
Who they married (nobody wants to touch this one)
Every parent understands this with perfect clarity regarding their own children.
It’s the central load-bearing pillar of parental psychology; the one thing that, above all else, justifies the sleepless nights: the idea that you can build a better life for your children (and that you have a right to do so.)
The reciprocal love and mutual obligation between parent and child, extending beyond the veil of death, is the only reason people build anything really lasting at scale, whether a cathedral or a stable system of government. It’s the psychic bedrock of civilization: the reason people buy in.
The failure of that mutual obligation is the reason that all public and commercial buildings are now utilitarian rectangles of exposed-aggregate concrete: in keeping with blank-slate individualist moral assumptions, Western countries have made the collective ownership and control of property illegal.
The only property over which you have the basic rights of exclusion and disposition is your personal domicile, so we minimize investments in what we are not allowed to own and control (our common physical environment) so that we can extract the maximum of what we are allowed to own and control (US dollars).
The American state has been converted into an extractive, utilitarian economic zone under the same principles. Americans have been told that they no longer have any special right to it, and no power to bequeath it to their own children — so it no longer inspires allegiance and willing obedience.
Of course, this process of draining and dilution can’t go on forever: with no incentive for productive people to preserve the common-wealth beyond the time horizon of their own death, the common-wealth is rapidly collapsing — including, finally, the economic infrastructure underpinning even the most liquid and abstract unit of value: the dollar itself.
The hearts of the fathers have turned away from their children, and the children have rejected their fathers, and the earth has been smitten with a curse.
Human civilization is itself an extension and abstraction of the reciprocal bonds of kinship: especially the love and loyalty between father and son. Civilization cannot exist without a recognition of the debt owed both to one’s ancestors and one’s descendants.
Our parents and grandparents were persuaded by people like Vivek to cut that binding thread, because the alternative was a confrontation with their Privilege — the admission that they do, in fact, owe much of their wealth and comfort to the legacy of conquerors.
If they were forced to admit that, they would have basically two choices:
embrace that legacy, and accept that they have squandered the most titanic inheritance of all time, betraying the blood of generations in both directions
reject their inheritance as ill-gotten, and give it all away as reparations to the people their ancestors conquered.
Obviously they’re not going to do either of these things.
Vivek offers the Boomers a way out:
He tells them that history is meaningless — they earned their wealth as individual economic units, through grit and gumption. No one is entitled to anything they did not personally earn — that’s a handout! That’s socialism! That’s playing Woke Identity Politics!
Vivek tells them that it’s not only acceptable, but actually righteous to abandon their duty to their ancestors and descendants. In the boomercon moral universe, loyalty is a vice — at the personal level, it’s “nepotism” (or simply “corruption”). At scale, it’s “bigotry”.
You’re not supposed to have friends (or children) whom you care more about than other people — group identities, if they exist at all, must be fully ideologized and moralized. Your children and countrymen are only connected to you through an “accident of birth”. Vivek Ramaswamy is your ally on the much truer and deeper grounds that he loves Ronald Reagan.
This allows the Boomer to conceive of his life as a great jubilee, in which he can be a hero for selling his birthright to its truest and most deserving heirs (whoever will pay him the most for it).
Needless to say, we have no message to compete with this.
There is no rhetorical incantation that will persuade the Boomers, as a class, to confront the enormity of our situation.
It doesn’t matter that Vivek’s vision of America is morally and historically asinine: they benefit too much from believing it. There will be some miracles of deathbed repentance — but probably not at scale.
Between the Boomers, and the mass of foreigners with voting privileges who benefit from this arrangement more directly, we are approaching the inevitable terminus of mass democracy.
There is value in rebuking Vivek and his messaging with a spoiler vote in Ohio, but the political incentive gradient overwhelmingly favors his message. Globalization is amplifying failure modes of democracy that have been well-understood for centuries.
It is just too easy to print new citizens and incentivize them to loot the American commons — both directly, as Somalis do, through welfare fraud, and indirectly, as Vivek et al. do, through the dilution and sale of Americans’ political rights.
If you are concerned with sovereignty and the preservation of your inheritance, the Westphalian state is the wrong dimension of analysis.
There is no cooperative equilibrium, no common feeling among the descendants of America’s founding stock — as evidenced by the fact that the conservative, “nationalist” wing of American politics is largely buying what Vivek is selling (or, more accurately, selling what he’s buying).
The replacement of the state, as the primary locus of identity, with highly decentralized tribal diasporas, is already well underway. Peoples who never underwent the ordeal of adopting liberal managerial virtues are at a huge advantage.
In the death throes of managerial democracy, cohesion is so profoundly adaptive that Somalis and Chinese and Afghans and Israelis and Indians are effortlessly outmaneuvering peoples and states like ours, who actively discourage loyalty as a vice.
All of our broad, colossal abstractions of identity are in the process of collapse.
The people you can trust in the coming volatility will not be any group numbered in the tens of millions — they will be people with names and faces, people with whom you have a personal history.
The place to start rebuilding cohesion and peoplehood is much closer to the wellspring of civilization, where the instincts of human connection are the purest, where we can expect the irrational loyalty of blood to be reciprocated, and where peoples always begin: with interconnected groups of strong families.
So we are surrounding ourselves with the most admirable and excellent people we can find, and building the shared history that will carry us through what comes next.
You can learn more about our approach here, or join us at exitgroup.us.
EXIT News
Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:
Last week (12/15) we will have a Q&A with Stormy Waters, a VC and good poaster whom we last heard from almost two years ago.
This week (12/23) we’ll have a pre-Christmas conversation about decentralized networking — especially, the synthesis of IRL and digital networking.
Next week (12/30) we will discuss EXIT’s Year in Review — what we’ve accomplished in 2025, and what we will build in the new year.
Other Calls:
Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.
Meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.
12/20: Utah Valley Christmas Party was a huge success — a full house with a great spread and dozens of kids. Big thanks to Matt for hosting.
1/31: New York City.
2/7: Washington, DC.
EXIT cocktail hours for New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.
