Marco Rubio Is Failing Western Civ

Americans of the Revolutionary generation did not think of themselves as direct heirs to Western civilization, a term that wouldn’t come into vogue until the 20th century. If anything, they saw their new nation as a break with the European past — a new civilization rooted in popular sovereignty and republican self-government.

“The independence of America considered merely as separation from England would have been a matter but of little importance,” Thomas Paine observed in the early 1790s, “had it not been accompanied by a........

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