No One Left to Blame

Vivek Ramaswamy had just finished sixth grade when he became conservative. His father, Jack Welch, General Electric CEO, is the man he blames for his actions.

Ramaswamy’s father was an engineer at GE and, thanks to Welch’s famous penchant for ruthless cost-cutting, Ramaswamy explains, “the threat of layoffs hung over our head.” Insecurity caused his father to enroll in night classes to obtain a law diploma. His mother, who was a geriatric psychiatrist and worked overtime, was also his father’s. Ramaswamy used to accompany his mother to the nursing home, where he would play the piano for the residents. Sitting in the back of his father’s law classes, he took an interest in the ideas of Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, mostly because they seemed to be the two men that wound his liberal dad up the most.

“So I became a conservative because I was a bratty kid taking Scalia’s side against my dad,” writes Ramaswamy. “That’s the cute little story I give in interviews, at least. There’s a kernel of truth to it. But looking back on it, the financial insecurity my family faced and watching my parents do whatever they could to fight it played as big a role as those Scalia opinions. A bigshot CEO had casually made us live under the constant threat of layoffs, but those nights watching my dad take on law school … convinced me that our destiny was in our own hands, that our fate wasn’t intimately up to other people.”

In other words, Ramaswamy’s immigrant parents chose agency over victimhood. Ramaswamy also did the same, describing his conservatism with an astonishing openness. “a psychological defense mechanism against being victimized myself at a vulnerable time.” Ramaswamy’s résumé matches his bootstrapping ethos: By his early 30s he had made hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to Roivant, a drug development company he founded in 2014. And though he is still in his 30s, he is now a rising conservative star—a fixture on Fox News characterized in a generally unsympathetic recent New Yorker Profil As “the CEO of anti-Woke, Inc.” Ramaswamy enjoys the role, though it is not one that many New Yorkers would want.

In Nation of Victims, Ramaswamy argues that America today is increasingly characterized by exactly the kind of victimhood he has always resisted—and that is anathema to the values that