At NatCon, Vivek Ramaswamy Takes On the Protectionists

T he National Conservatives are protectionists. That’s certainly what you would think if you attended this week’s conference, “NatCon 4,” in Washington. Speaking on the results of the post–Cold War economic consensus on the right, Senator Josh Hawley put it bluntly: “Workers were left to fend for themselves.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, criticized those “libertarians who helped Ronald Reagan rescue the U.S. economy, then descended into hyper individualism, materialism and globalism that has rendered them a political irrelevancy.” By the end of the conference, this framing — in which Republican elites sold out the working class for the sake of Wall Street — became close to orthodoxy. I say “close” because there was, in fact, one prominent speaker who unexpectedly challenged the NatCon crowd and their framing of the economic picture: Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy presented what I thought was the most interesting speech of the conference. It wasn’t thumping or overly flowery — he noted that this wasn’t his usual “campaign style” oration. Titled “National Libertarians and National Protectionists,” Ramaswamy’s presentation politely but forcefully challenged the NatCon majority view. In his telling, “national protectionists” were right to reject the post–Cold War “neoliberal consensus” which resulted in American dependence on China in industries vital to national security and vitality — Ramaswamy points out that 95 percent of our Ibuprofen comes from China — but wrong in their desire to adopt broad protectionist trade policies with our non-China allies.

“Here’s the rub,” he proclaimed, “if we’re really serious about decoupling from China in those critical sectors, from pharmaceuticals to our military-industrial base, that actually means more, not less, trade with allies like Japan, South Korea, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico, and other countries around the world.”

Ramaswamy joined the “national protectionists” in challenging the “neoliberal consensus” on immigration, which he characterized as having degraded the American national identity. But contrary to the protectionists, his ideal immigration policy, that of the “national libertarians,” would not be tailored first and foremost to protect American workers from foreign competition, but to “protect national security, preserve national identity, and promote economic growth, in that order.”

Finally, Ramaswamy flatly rejected the notion that conservatives can somehow guide a large administrative state toward conservative ends. He adopted an indisputably libertarian solution instead: “Shut it down.” He explained that it was improper to replace a “left-wing nanny state” with a “right-wing nanny state.”

Ramaswamy painted his “national libertarianism” as within the scope of the National Conservative movement. But in this instance, as in others, Ramaswamy’s rhetoric sounded closer to the pre-Trump Tea Party than the “America first” outlook that many NatCon speakers described as having emerged with the election of Donald Trump and designed to explicitly protect American manufacturers and laborers from foreign competition.

Ramaswamy presented himself as initiating a “disagreement among friends.” Yet it seems to me that the disagreement, if among friends, is not necessarily among ideological friends. It is far more foundational. Ramaswamy might very well reject the “neoliberal consensus,” but nothing in his speech suggested he disagreed with neoliberal economics per se. Whereas someone like J. D. Vance would claim that certain aspects of traditional right-wing free-market economics are incorrect as a matter of principle, Ramaswamy’s claim was essentially that the Right failed to properly balance economic goals with other, legitimate ends of public policy. This might sound like splitting hairs, but it’s not. Ramaswamy thinks that free-trade policies are preferable except in cases in which they present a threat to national security or other vital interest. The protectionists think the free-trade economics of the “establishment” GOP are flawed to the core. This is not a debate on emphasis, but principle.

As much as Ramaswamy might include himself in the National Conservative camp, it seems obvious that he would be troubled by large parts of the economic worldview presented by most speakers at NatCon. Similarly, there is no way to describe the gap between him and proponents of a conservative administrative state as minor. Some NatCons believe in instituting an administrative state capable of achieving conservative ends. Ramaswamy does not. That’s a disagreement about the fundamental role and capabilities of government.

Ramaswamy believes that these differences are going to have to be settled at some point in the future. Though he would likely not admit this, his speech at NatCon placed him in opposition to Trump, who has for years advocated broad protectionist measures to protect American manufacturing. But though Ramaswamy represented a minority at the conference, he argues that Republican voters are less confident about the protectionist vision than the intellectual elites at NatCon. He says that when interacting with Republican voters, he observes something resembling an even split between the “national protectionists” and “national libertarians,” even among those who support Trump. And in a later conversation, Ramaswamy told me that he’s enthusiastic about the prospects for a national libertarian victory if the vision is presented properly to GOP voters.

But for Ramaswamy’s economic vision to win out, alternative visions must lose, and one of those alternatives is the apparent vision of Donald Trump and the majority of those Beltway intellectuals who style themselves “NatCons.” If Ramaswamy gets his way, it’s not hard to see how he — who loudly aligned himself with Trump throughout his presidential-primary campaign — could become the target of NatCon speakers in the years to come.