Vivek Ramaswamy and Ross Perot

Remember Ross Perot? He ran for president as a third-party candidate in 1992. He won almost 19% of the national popular vote, taking most of his votes away from Bush the Elder, the late George Herbert Walker Bush. As a result, Bill Clinton, a previously unknown governor of Arkansas, became president.

I will go to my grave believing that Ralph Nader did much the same thing to Al Gore in 2000. Jill Stein may have done the same to Hillary Clinton in 2016, opening the door to the worst president in our history.

I’ve seen credible quantitative arguments that neither Nader’s nor Stein’s third-party candidacy actually made the difference. But there are no such arguments for Ross Perot. His near-19% following, drawn mostly from Republican voters, was far too big to admit any doubt.

So imagine my glee on watching this PBS News Hour segment, reporting that Vivek Ramaswamy is surging in polls of Republicans, sometimes surpassing Ron DeSantis. Of course polls are notoriously unreliable, let alone this early in the campaign cycle. But Republicans are self-evidently searching for anyone other than the Demagogue and DeSantis to attract voters not trapped in an anti-woke cult.

And that’s not all. Unlike Ron DeSantis and the Demagogue himself, Vivek Ramaswamy is actually smart. He sounds smart. He speaks in complete, articulate sentences. He has a positive message, though so far indistinct and abstract. He doesn’t base his candidacy on negativity, scorn, hate and prejudice.

And unlike the Demagogue, Ramaswamy is a self-made oligarch. He didn’t start with a silver spoon, and he didn’t get wealthy by screwing the little guy. Instead, he started successful biotech and other modern firms. You don’t have to listen to him for more than five minutes to know that he won’t have to hide his college grades and test scores.

What about political substance? There, we’ll have to wait and see. In his PBS interview, Ramaswamy basically promised to follow much the same policies as the Demagogue (without specifying which). He also promised to be smarter, nicer, less nasty, less-divisive and more optimistic—promises that should not be hard to keep. But he also intends to pardon the Demagogue, at least for some of his crimes.

Ross Perot was smart, too. Like Ramaswamy, he was a highly successful entrepreneur. He had made a bundle from the transition of routine business records to computer automation. But more to the point, Ross Perot was a political savant. He identified and emphasized the overweening economic/political issue of our time: the disastrous effect of globalization on America’s factories and manufacturing workers.

Perot started in late 1992, over thirty years ago. He predicted that Americans would hear a “giant sucking sound” as American jobs flowed to Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), then in the process of being ratified and implemented.

Never has a third-party candidate been so right about the wrongness of conventional wisdom. Never has conventional wisdom been so wrong. Global free trade does not make everybody better off. It has demonstrably hollowed out the manufacturing strength and resilience of the US and other developed nations, to the benefit of developing nations like China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and Mexico. It has caused some 60,000 US factories to be idled or literally shipped abroad. It has let longstanding factory towns dry up and blow away. And it has led to an epidemic of “deaths of despair” among people who once did well-paid, skilled work with their hands. It jump-started the Demagogue’s proto-fascist movement.

It exaggerates little to say that American pols’ wholesale and thoughtless adoption of the simplistic economic cant of globalized free trade had much the same effect on American workers as did the Weimar inflation and Allies-forced German reparations on German workers after World War I. Just as economic deprivation caused by poor and vindictive Allied economic policies led to the rise of Adolf Hitler, so did a bum’s rush toward globalization in manufacturing, heedless of its effect on workers and nations, lead to the rise of our own Demagogue, as well as others in Europe.

Ross Perot will go down as the Cassandra of American economic history. Clearly and starkly, he identified the single biggest conceptual problem of American and Republican economic policy. But nobody listened except a few voters. Bill Clinton jumped on the globalization and deregulatory bandwagon with both feet, thereby insuring (among other big problems) that the Democratic party would ultimately have trouble keeping its traditionally working-class base. Only today are political thinkers beginning to understand how globalization nearly cost us not just our industrial might and innovative leadership, but our democracy, which is still at risk.

To my knowledge, Ross Perot offered no specific solution for the disastrous effects of globalized free trade on our skilled workers and our industrial base. It took the next thirty years just to assess the extent of the damage.

Perot’s failure to offer solutions was hardly surprising. The big winners from globalized trade have always been the oligarchs who sold our plants abroad. They became GOP mega-donors. In naming the terrible consequences of globalization so starkly, Perot was challenging the Republican party’s own economic engine. So his campaign was doomed from the start.

It’s hard to see how any candidate who challenges GOP economic orthodoxy so strongly can avoid a similar fate. The oligarchs who now fund and control the Republican Party will never support a challenger to the wrongheaded policies that made them rich and, at the same time, maimed our skilled workers and hollowed out our nation’s industrial base.

So, as smart as he appears to be, Vivek Ramaswamy’s political ambitions seem to be doomed to failure, like Perot’s. He can be a spoiler, nothing more.

Yet in spoiling the Demagogue’s push to subvert our democracy and bring Mussolini-style fascism to America, Ramaswamy can perform an even greater service to America and humanity than did Perot. Every small-d democrat and patriot in America should give serious thought to voting for him in the Republican primaries. Capital-D Democrats should even consider switching their party registration to vote for him in Republican primaries. They also serve who only thwart would-be tyrants.


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