Elites Like Vivek Will Never Represent Fellow Cincinnatians Like Me

On a small hill just north of the Cincinnati city limits sits a sprawling academic campus that, at first glance, you could be forgiven for mistaking for a small college. St. Xavier High School is one of the oldest high schools in the country and one of the largest private high schools in Ohio.

With its series of yellow brick buildings on the north side of North Bend Road, the campus has evolved as its size has grown, incorporating everything from a fully equipped theatrical program to its own natatorium. The all-boys school is Catholic and Jesuit and has been attracting the sons of Cincinnatians for more than 150 years. The student body ranges from the scions of the wealthy elite to the working poor, provided with tuition assistance and scholarships. It’s the sort of place that generations of men from local families pride themselves in being a part of.

When I had the privilege of attending the school nearly a quarter-century ago, Vivek Ramaswamy was two years my junior.

Any discussion of Vivek needs to acknowledge his legitimate genius. It was evident back when he was a star tennis player and valedictorian who would openly challenge people to stump him on world trivia questions. Every trait he exhibits now, including his charismatic ability to seemingly talk to anyone about anything, was just as evident when we were teenagers. Even at an elite place like St. X, Vivek stood out as a cut above. His later success — Harvard, Yale, and his vast fortune — did not surprise anyone who knew him.

However, something else would make Vivek stand out that a normal observer wouldn’t detect: He wasn’t from Cincinnati and never seemed to care for it.

It’s not what you might think. My alma mater had always had a small contingent of non-Catholic and non-Christian students. Everyone was welcome, though Scripture class and church were still mandatory. The non-Christian students were usually the sons of local Indian immigrant families, and there was a strong alliance between the local Catholic aristocracy and the Brahmin caste professionals that came into the region. The school was for Cincinnati’s working elite; religious differences were suborned to practicality. Vivek was one of several sons of immigrants I got to know.

However, Cincinnati is a very parochial place in both definitions of the word. The city was predominantly Catholic for most of my life. While the city was founded in the post-Revolutionary War westward lurch, it was truly made by the arrival of German Catholic immigrants in the early- to mid-1800s. These immigrants brought a very Bavarian feel to the Ohio River valley, filling its factories and slaughterhouses with industrious workers.

As Cincinnati boomed, families such as my own laid deep roots. In one of the city’s oldest cemeteries, St. Joseph’s on West 8th Street, there is a headstone with my last name visible from the road. Dozens of my earliest ancestors have been buried there since the 1850s. My own home is minutes away from the one my great-grandparents raised my grandparents in. Nearly everyone in my genetic lineage has been born, lived, worked, and died in this city ever since. 

It’s also a place that cares very little about what happens outside it. The Ohio River combined with the seven hills that ring the city basin feel like a kind of ethereal armor, keeping out the rest of the world’s affairs. There is a famous quote dubiously attributed to Mark Twain about Cincinnati being “20 years behind the times,” but most people here see the truth in the statement as a blessing. It’s why Cincinnati is a place where a Jesuit high school can boast lineages of attendance that go back six or seven generations; ours is a city with the luxury of separation from the ever-shifting urgency of the current day. 

All this tends to inspire loyalty in others as they find themselves here. The newer immigrant families that have come to Cincinnati since the 1960s have adopted the place in much the same way my ancestors did. No race or creed has ownership of this place. This home belongs to all those who treasure it.

For all his talent, Vivek Ramaswamy never made this place his home. He’s a rootless elite, someone whose wealth led him to see the globe as his residence. My former schoolmate resembles another man in this way: Pete Buttigieg.

The erstwhile inhabitant of South Bend couldn’t decamp to Michigan fast enough in his quest to achieve the next rung of political power, not because he has any loyalty to the people of the state but because he is a McKinsey-trained technocrat who wants to put his ideas about Michigan — and the country — just being a factory for economic output into practice.

Vivek has all but promised the same, dreaming of remaking Ohio into the new Silicon Valley, even if it means flooding it with infinite H-1B visa recipients and remaking it in a globalist image. In the end, Cincinnati was a way station for Vivek, and he sees Ohio as nothing more than an economic resource to exploit.

Rootless elites like Ramaswamy or Buttigieg will never understand people like me and most of my fellow Cincinnatians. This is our home. If Vivek’s toying with it to generate higher GDP creates bad outcomes, what are we supposed to do? We have no next redoubt, no fallback position, and nowhere else to go if things go badly.

We don’t want the best, smartest technocrat in charge; we want the man who would abhor our city’s exploitation and seek to preserve it for those who have lived, worked, bled, and died to make it what it is.

Perhaps that lesson is a consequence of being from a city named after the man who embodied the legendary ideal of political servant-leadership. It’s a shame Vivek Ramaswamy never made this place his home. He might have learned the same thing. 

Joseph Schuster graduated from Saint Xavier High School and lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Follow him on X @internofdoom.