![]() ![]() is based on a pair of seemingly contradictory ideas: that attempts by companies to address societal problems are cynical and ineffective, and that those attempts also pose an existential threat to the democratic process. Private-sector attempts to address climate change are not only laughably insincere, he argued they’re encroaching on work that should be done by the government-and only if the citizens agree. “It’s not a right-leaning issue, it’s not a left-leaning issue,” he said. And the stocks that the firms control give them extraordinary influence over almost every public company in the world. The three top asset-management firms collectively hold more than twenty trillion dollars in retirement funds and other capital, about the same as the national gross domestic product. E.S.G., he told his audience, lets the private sector “do through the back door what our government couldn’t directly get done through the front door.” He calls this kind of socially conscious investing-not political corruption or dark money, not election denialism, not disinformation-the gravest danger that American democracy faces today. investing at asset-management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street at the center of what ails American life. But Ramaswamy’s twist on the familiar critique, which he laid out last year in a book entitled “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” is to place E.S.G. That corporations are given to hypocrisy is hardly a novel observation. Many such companies, he intimated to the audience, were building tacit alliances with the Democratic élite. quarterback Colin Kaepernick while exploiting workers in Asia. Nike produces advertisements with the civil-rights activist and former N.F.L. Amazon donates to organizations that aid Black communities while firing workers trying to unionize. ![]() To Ramaswamy, such corporate do-gooderism-and especially environmental, social, and governance investing, known as E.S.G.-is a smoke screen designed to distract from the less virtuous things that companies do to make money. The Walt Disney Company was self-righteously protesting Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law after cutting deals with the repressive Chinese government to film footage for “Mulan” in Xinjiang. C.E.O.s were recruiting “token” people of color for their boards in the name of diversity while refusing to seek out diverse points of view. “Let’s muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change as you fly on a private jet to Davos,” he said, to laughter from the nearly all-white crowd. Corporate virtue-signalling and hypocrisy are everywhere, he told the audience. One of the opinions he wished to air to those assembled was that “woke-ism”-a belief system that Ramaswamy sees as an insidious secular creed-has overtaken religious faith, patriotism, and the work ethic as a key American value. It was “the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think, in public.” The true test of the strength of a democracy was not, he argued, how many people voted. He enjoyed forums like this, “where there’s no agenda, there’s no objective, other than to create spaces for open conversation, for people to be free to say, and feel free to say, the kinds of things that they might have wanted to say behind closed doors,” he said, smiling brightly. At the front of the auditorium, perched on a stool, he spoke into his microphone with a showman’s brio, as if addressing a far larger crowd. Out on the sidewalk, he’d hastily replaced his flip-flops with sneakers, in a nod to formality. Ramaswamy has perfect-looking teeth, a high forehead, and a thick shock of hair that rises into a swirl at his crown. All the flame-throwing had established him, in the words of one anchor, as the network’s “woke and cancel-culture guru.” In the past year, he had cast aspersions on Black Lives Matter and “the death of merit” mask mandates and U.S.-border protection public-school curricula and the actor Jussie Smollett. Now, thanks to dozens of appearances on Fox News to criticize “cultural totalitarianism” enforced by liberal élites, he was closing in on fame as a conservative pundit. Vivek Ramaswamy, a thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur, had settled in the area with his wife and toddler son after making a large fortune as the founder of a biotech company. In June, as the sun set on Dublin, Ohio, a well-to-do suburb of Columbus, several dozen people dressed in golf shirts and floral shifts filed into a small auditorium to listen to a talk by a new neighbor. ![]()
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