Secretary of State Marco Rubio travelled to Munich this month and articulated a possible foundation for a deeper trans-Atlantic friendship.

Rubio invoked ancient bonds that would connect the United States to Europe “not just economically” but “spiritually” and “culturally.” He said America’s roots in Europe constituted “a sacred inheritance,” made of “memories, and traditions, and the Christian faith of our ancestors.”

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Western civilization, the true bond between Europe and the U.S., according to Rubio, includes ideas such as individual freedom and liberal democracy, and it also includes Shakespeare, Mozart, and Judeo-Christian values.

The New York Times would have none of this outmoded talk.

Rubio, scolded the New York Times’s correspondent in Munich, “tried to soothe a year of friction between the United States and its trans-Atlantic allies …. but wrapped it in historical and cultural ties that seemingly exclude large sections of the current European population.”

You see, Europe is increasingly secular, and the immigrants are non-Western and non-Christian. Thanks to this secularization and mass immigration, Western civilization needs to take a back seat, we are told.

To a reader of even slightly conservative bent, that seems like a big strike against free migration, against multinationalism, against secularization, and against multiculturalism.

Vice President JD Vance, shortly after winning the election in 2024, approvingly quoted the villain from a Cormac McCarthy novel, who asked a victim right before murdering him, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

If your agenda of openness and pluralism has made Mozart and Christianity obsolete, maybe the openness wasn’t so good. The New York Times’s Munich report struck an inadvertent blow in favor of postliberalism.

Postliberalism is an attitude, maybe a philosophy, on the ascent for the past decade. Conservative professor Patrick Deneen wrote Why Liberalism Failed in 2016, and Vance has associated........

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