Indian Summer

Kamala Harris’ fabulous career has of course benefited extraordinarily from her being roughly one-quarter black, but few have offered much of an opinion on her being one-half Tamil Brahmin (besides her fellow South Asians, of course), other than it reduces her despised white component.

And yet, the rise of South Asians to positions of immense power across the Anglosphere is one of the big stories of the 21st century.

But few Americans have much of an opinion on Kamala’s Indianness, because Americans don’t traditionally think much about South Asians, who have minimal history in this country.

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In contrast, even East Asians played a vastly larger role in American historical mythology, whether as coolies building the transcontinental railroad, as a hated but formidable enemy in World War II, or as an ambiguous friend/foe during the Korean War.

Hence, many Republicans have gleefully taken to speculating over why Walz spent an entire year in China in his mid-20s. Surely, this is proof that he’s part of a 35-year old Manchurian Candidate-style plot by the Red Chinese to infiltrate the Nebraska National Guard. {snip}

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In contrast, although nobody constructs a conspiracy theory about it, South Asians actually do seem to be taking over the Anglosphere. Kamala might be elected president of the United States in November, and Rishi Sunak was recently prime minister of the United Kingdom.

The vociferously anti-Scottish Pakistani Humza Yousaf was First Minister of Scotland in 2023–2024, while the gay half-Indian Leo Varadkar has served two terms as top dog in Ireland. As baseball catcher Yogi Berra exclaimed when informed that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish: “Only in America!”

While most of the rest of the world is more resistant to Indian charms than the English-speaking heartland, the half-Goan António Costa was prime minister of Portugal, an ancient ally of England, from 2015 until a 2023 police raid on his home in a corruption probe.

Although Indian-Americans are intensely Democratic (an October 2020 poll found them favoring Biden over Trump by 72–22), in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race, Nikki Haley (of Sikh descent) beat Trump in two primaries (which is two more than the competent Florida governor Ron DeSantis managed), while practicing Hindu self-promoter Vivek Ramaswamy also overperformed. The GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is married to Hindu Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Similarly, while South Asians haven’t founded all that many ultra-successful start-ups compared with East Asians (e.g., Jensen Huang, founder of shooting star Nvidia, is a Taiwanese immigrant), much less whites, they’ve done well at climbing the corporate ranks to CEO of existing American corporations, such as Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Google) and Satya Nadella, who has made a colossal amount of money for Microsoft shareholders. Why? My best guess is that East Asians tend to be shape-rotators, while South Asians tend to be verbally facile wordcels. So, Chinese on average make better engineers, but Indians make better executives.

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