What would Vivek Ramaswamy have said to George Bailey to keep him from the suicide jump?
RED OAK, Iowa —
Besieged by shame and economic catastrophe Jimmy Stewart's 1946 fictional George Bailey isn't a relic of history. The "It's A Wonderful Life" character who debates suicide on the icy Bedford Falls bridge is relevant in modern America as economic dislocation and the Big Tech-gobbling of jobs, businesses and optimism itself, is in full-color life.
So had presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy been in the role of Clarence of The Angel on that bridge, what would he have said to George Bailey — the Americans today who find themselves driven to existential ends by the economy — to keep them from jumping?
Days before Christmas, hours until Christmas Eve, in fact, Ramaswamy, a fountain of ideas and provocative positions, barnstormed the state of Iowa. I spent parts of several days with him, and in interviews aboard his bus, and outside of the Buck Snort restaurant and bar in Red Oak, I asked him that "It's A Wonderful Life" question — what would he have said to George Bailey (the fictional and real ones) to keep them from killing themselves?
"I would say, 'I understand while you feel that way,'" Ramaswamy said. "And while I would love to give you a fake ode to hope, I can't do that with my words alone. I think it's going to require actual action. The American dream is not alive and well — it is alive and hanging on for life support. That is where we are. But it can be well again."
The problems for the economically troubled in the United States are 'man-made," Ramaswamy said.
"These are not problems of nature," he said. "These are man-made problems. The solutions can be man-made, too. I genuinely believe that."
The nation does not have to be in a decline, said the 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur and author.
"It's incumbent on the leaders of this country who have fallen short to step up and offer a vision of what we can be, not what we have been," Ramaswamy said.
Ramaswamy said a vision of “Jacksonian” “self-sufficiency” should buoy rural Americans who are placed in challenged economic straits, by a rigged system.
“I think that part of it is we have put rural areas at a disadvantage because cities actually get more help from the government, so that’s not real capitalism at work,” Ramaswamy said. “It’s a kind of crony capitalism that’s the product of lobbying. That’s the answer. So roll that back. I think that people should see the attraction of rural life. I certainly do. I think that we make it harder to do that when the federal government offers more subsidies to cities than they do to rural communities.”
Ramaswamy calls for boosting the economy by allowing oil and gas companies to pull more domestic energy from beneath the land.
And he would reduce federal spending by taking a "mass, indiscriminate chainsaw" to the federal bureaucracy, cutting the ranks of the federal workforce by 75 percent, he said in multiple campaign stops. Federal Department of Education — gone. Centers For Disease Control — gone. For starters.
What's more, he would end foreign aid to national whose debt-to-person ratio is greater than that in the United States.
Ramaswamy said he would also have Trump at his side.
In campaign stops in Iowa, Ramaswamy has said Trump was the right president at the right time and would be his top advisor. What kind of a role would he have for Trump if elected?
"I would like to understand the historical backdrop," Ramaswamy said. "I haven't run the federal government before and understanding what some of the difficulties were. in attempting to drain the swamp that he went in there to drain?"
But Ramaswamy is quick to tell voters he is better positioned than Trump "to lead from the front."
"In many cases I think I will go further than Donald Trump did with the America first agenda," Ramaswamy said.
What's at the root of much decline in the nation is the cold, hard, fact that the United States is in a ''cold cultural civil war,” he said.
I asked Ramaswamy about this. How is this cold war manifesting? What's causing it? And the big question: what flash points could turn it hot?
"I see this manifesting in ideologies that are mutually incompatible with one and other," Ramaswamy said. "Merit versus group quotas. Censorship versus free speech. American exceptionalism versus American apologism. Yes, these are mutually incompatible worldviews, and when one side of that starts to resort to force, rather than open debate, or resorting to the ballot box as the mechanism for sorting that out, that's the beginning of what I would call the beginning of a war-time state — not in a hot-war, physical sense, but in the sense of ideologically, that there are mutually incompatible ideologies that have resorted to the use of force — and I don't mean physical force, but say judicial or police or financial force to accomplish what they could not sort out through open debate."
(Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. He is based in Carroll, Iowa, where he continues to contribute to the Carroll Times Herald, a newspaper his family owned for 93 years. He also writes the Political Mercury column for Des Moines Cityview. Burns is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation.)
I guess Vivek never heard about corporate farming subsidies and their impact on the rural economy and the decimation of family farms nor subsidies to oil companies both headquartered in big cities.
I assume the Burns voice recorder has provided us verbatim quotes, perhaps filtered for significance but otherwise unedited, unvarnished and free of partisan rebuttal--like real 1950's journalism--leaving us to ponder their meaning and worth without guardrails. Thank you, thank you for that!