In 2020, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang successfully established himself as a minor cult figure with a pitch that was superficially heterodox but fundamentally banal. A few years on from Yang’s quixotic effort, Republican primary contender Vivek Ramaswamy now looks to be replicating a version of the same thing from the Right.

Possessing an Ivy League education and filthy rich to the tune of over a billion dollars from his work in the biopharmaceutical industry, Ramaswamy is only an “outsider” in the narrowest of senses: he’s a wealthy millennial moneyman who has launched a long-shot presidential bid and has no prior political experience. In most other respects, much about Ramaswamy’s campaign is thoroughly conventional.

He has deep ties to fellow billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and thinks (alongside the vast majority of self-identified Republicans) that Trump’s current legal woes are politically motivated persecution. Just like his Republican colleagues, he wants to invade Mexico and has declared war on the scourge of “woke capital” as well. Ramaswamy has published three books since 2021, all of them having roughly the flavor of the first, entitled Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.