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 revolution in the principles and practice of governments.”

In 1793, Nathaniel Chipman, a Vermont jurist and veteran of the Revolutionary War, put it a little differently. “The government of the United States exhibits a new scene in the political history of the world,” he wrote.

Among the major founders, Thomas Jefferson — his infatuation with France notwithstanding — was perhaps the most emphatic about the “ocean of fire” between the Old World and the New. “America,” he wrote in an 1823 letter to James Monroe, “has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe. While the last is laboring to become the domicile of despotism, our endeavor should surely be to make our hemisphere that of freedom.”

Decades later, Abraham Lincoln — who claimed Jefferson as an intellectual forefather and often honored him for his foresight — made this distinction in more abstract form in the Gettysburg Address, elevating the United States as the one place where humanity would learn whether “a new nation, conceived in liberty” could “long endure” or whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” would “perish from the earth.”

In his second term, President Trump has held himself and his administration out as a bulwark in defense of Western civilization — the last, best hope for the grand heritage of the West against lawless incursion from foreign others.

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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.

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