Over the past decade or so I’ve noticed an increasing number of Indian-American characters on TV for whom their background was not significant. It came up, but it wasn’t central to their identity. Think of Aziz Ansari on Parks and Rec or Mindy Kaling in general.
(Decades earlier, I noticed the same about Jewish characters.)
We’ve also seen major politicians, from both parties, with South Asian roots. And of course, Indian Americans are found throughout the fields of finance, tech, and science.
One of the remarkable things over the past half-century is how American Jews have effectively become white. Anti-Semitism still exists, but the entrance of American Jews into virtually every corner of U.S. society, including its elites is exceptional. Indian Americans may be on a similar trajectory—or at least they believed themselves to be.
This trajectory includes Indian-Americans entering the orbit of Donald Trump and MAGA-verse. DOGE-igarch/shadow veep Vivek Ramaswamy is one example, putative FBI chief Kash Patel is another.
The recent social media imbroglio over H1B visas shows that Indian Americans may not be having such a smooth entrance into MAGA-verse. I won’t do a full recap, just note that Ramaswamy tweeted that we need H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants because Americans are too lazy for demanding high-tech jobs. MAGA-types led by the odious Laura Loomer responded this was all an elitist plan to rob real Americans of jobs and replace them with cheaper foreign-born labor. Elon Musk weighed in, supporting Ramaswamy, and removed Loomer’s verified status on Twitter. In deep MAGA-world it got racist real fast.
For more read these terrific descriptions and analyses from my truly brilliant friends Jen Golbeck (including a guide on how to use this to exploit the ideological fractures of MAGA) and Paul Musgrave. You should really follow both of them!
While I generally support expanded immigration, Ramaswamy’s argument is odious. In particular he writes:
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
This trope is not new. Conservatives love to complain about popular culture rotting our minds. They may have gotten way into Gramsci and the cultural hegemony. They love to go on about TV, but they don’t want to properly fund public education and universities or reduce the financial precarity that reduces the resources they have available for parenting.
Ramaswamy, by the way, is not exactly a hard-scrabble immigrant story. His dad was an engineer and patent attorney, his mom was a geriatric psychiatrist. Ramaswamy is a brilliant guy, but he started in the American upper middle class and took off from there. This is part of the interesting dynamic about the rise of Indian Americans. Many of them come from India’s professional classes and thus have an easier shift into comparable positions here. This is not just economic, well-to-do Indian immigrants also bring with them fluency in English. While there are still cultural differences to be navigated (Jhumpa Lahiri, among others, describe this eloquently), being fluent in English makes it far easier to accumulate social capital.
I hate all the “Tiger-Mom” shit and the relentless achievement that comes with it, but for MAGA-types Indian American immigrants and their offspring may appear to jumping the line for the American dream.
Implications for Vance
This is a newsletter about vice presidents, and this conflict has real implications for JD Vance. The nature of political coalitions is that they smooth over their internal contradictions… until they can’t.
Vance literally personifies these contradictions. He himself is the MAGA-golden boy—rising from the working class with roots in rural America, serving in the military, and making good. But, with his success he joined the world of techbros and their odd worldviews. Ramaswamy and Mush are among the avatars of these ideas. Vance also married an Indian-American. (Vance and his wife were friends with Ramaswamy at Yale Law School.)
Vance also has links to other streams of the MAGA coalition. He was a never-Trumper who ended up throwing in with Trump, not unlike Marco Rubio. Vance has also converted to Catholicism and has links to the devout Catholics committed to advancing their brand of morality in the public sphere and who have spearheaded GOP efforts to remake the judicial branch.
I’m not evaluating these different worldviews (at least not in this post), rather I’m noting that they don’t all sit nicely with one another. The Silicon Valley types, with their fear of stasis will advance their various ideas of optimization which would include high-skilled immigration, new financial mechanisms, and automation. We’ve already seen the MAGA responses to immigration, not sure these two groups will find commonalities. Both groups share an Apocalyptic worldview but have very different responses.
Vance will need to navigate this conflict. He obviously has his eye on 2028, but how best can he protect himself and his future? Trump, revered by all the factions and sub-factions, may be able to play both sides. Vance does not have the same reservoir of trust. When Trump tacks towards Silicon Valley and finance, will MAGA accuse Vance of being a closet globalist exercising undue influence? (Sadly, this criticism will also include racist misogyny directed towards his wife, Usha.) When crypto crashes and it potentially cascades into a broader economic crisis, will Vance be among those blamed?
The obvious strategy for Vance is to publicly tack towards MAGA, while privately reassuring Silicon Valley. This could have worked in the past. But now, the lords of tech and finance are public facing and enjoy being the main characters on X. Just look at the Visa imbroglio—here are billionaires Ramaswamy and Musk arguing with people on social media. Hell, Musk spent unbelievable sums of money to purchase a social media platform just so he could always be a main character. So that strategy may not work.
Finally, Vance is dependent on Trump. What Trump does, Vance must defend and advance. That’s the gig. If Trump is in thrall to the billionaires and tacks towards them, Vance must try to spin it in MAGA-friendly ways. But he may not have the skill for that legerdemain. If Trump tacks towards MAGA, Vance will have to prepare himself for the fallout from his old friends. Being VP under any circumstance is tough. But under Trump 2, it will be near impossible.