The denigration of America as an “idea” continues apace in some circles on the “Right”, it is a mental poison that many are compelled to, themselves, parrot. Recently, Secretary of State (and meme holder of all other jobs) Marco Rubio said “Armies do not fight for abstractions. They fight for a people, a nation, and a way of life. That is what we are defending”… all of which are in their own ways “abstracts”. Others have pointed out this irony and aptly savaged it, so your humble author will not duplicate the effort.
However, there is a defense of Rubio that goes beyond what Rubio said, or even actually believes, to a post hoc self-justification, all while besmirching Edmund Burke.
And so, below, is a fisking.
“The dominant philosophy in Rubio’s worldview is Burkean conservatism. Most Americans outside of think tanks have never heard of Edmund Burke, and frankly too much of the modern American right bears little resemblance to his thought. But Burke is the 18th century Irish statesman who is the intellectual forefather of conservatism as we know it. His core insights animate this speech: civilization is a sacred inheritance and our identity is something received rather than invented. When Rubio talks about settlers carrying ‘the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors,’ that’s Burke on a diplomatic stage. The idea that society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn runs throughout his address and it’s as Burkean as it gets.”
If one is going to fabricate a new heritage, an actual solid base is the most effective way of doing it. While Burke did not wax poetic about the nature of English, and which became later American, civilization (as separate and distinct from the continental European civilization, even then), he did speak of the many underpinnings and pillars. It was the fundamentals he was concerned with. But one must remember that Burke was, as he described himself, an Old Whig, as opposed to the more Rousseau-esque New Whigs. It is that which lays the groundwork that Mr. Sopo diverges, in particular, the very Anglocentric ideas that he seeks to dismiss as mere flights of intellectual fancy.
“The rejection of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” as a “dangerous delusion” is the speech’s polemical anchor. Rubio argues that what should replace it isn’t amoral great-power competition, but a vision of the West as a particular civilization with a particular inheritance worth defending. Not because it embodies universal truths, but because it’s ours.”
But that inheritance is the universality of the truths from which that English society sprang in contrast to the continental European inheritance. Our heritage is not of some broader concept of “the West”, but specifically of the Anglophere, which conflicts with continental Europe, and is practically alien to anything European today which has developed since our disconnection a quarter of a millennium ago.
“Rubio’s remarks also reflect a deep Catholic sensibility that has gone largely unnoticed. His invocation of Christianity, the Sistine Chapel, Cologne Cathedral, and Columbus bringing faith to the Americas is doing serious intellectual and spiritual work. And when he dismisses ‘dogmatic free and unfettered trade’ that deindustrialized Western societies, he’s directly channeling Catholic social teaching. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, to be exact, in diplomatic language.”
And here we see a rather self-serving example of this conflation of “the West” and our Anglo-American heritage… to the detriment of that heritage. Our heritage was shaped by Christians, but more specifically in the case of America, by Protestants. Indeed, Catholicism has been uniquely rejected amongst Americans through most of America’s history. In this day and age non-Protestants can and are as American as Protestants, but let us not delude ourselves into thinking that “Papism” is somehow more sacred to America than other, far more historically tolerated beliefs including Judaism. Note also, that Mr. Sopo praises a 19th Century Italian as a civilizational bedrock of America, despite being a foreigner from a foreign people and a foreign land without appreciable shared history.
“There is no Locke in this speech. No social contract. No universal rights language. That an American Secretary of State defended Western civilization without once invoking the Enlightenment framework that has grounded American diplomacy since Truman is noteworthy, and I’m not sure it has a precedent.”
And here we get to where up becomes down, where our actual heritage is dismissed as a flight of fancy to be replaced with foreign “abstracts” alien to us. Locke did not create his ideas ex niliho in vacuo. They were a distillation of the English Civilization that was self-evident to the English and to the Americans whose heritage came therefrom. The great and wonderful revelation was that that English heritage and the American way of life was not limited by “people”, “nations”, or other such pseudo-arbitrary grouping, but indeed universal.
Indeed the Founding Fathers recognized that their cultural inheritance is, was, and always would be universal, that they held rights that came not from some collective of people or a collective national will, but which were inalienable, from “Nature’s God”.
Do note the great insinuation here: The invocation of the mythical “Post Wat Consensus” which is the great conspiracy invented by the post-American “Right” who claim that they are simply reclaiming the true Western (though not specifically American) Civilization from insidious inventors of “abstractions”. What he dismisses does have precedent, that precedent being American Civilization (and English before that).
“Some on the right have pushed back against Rubio’s skepticism of abstractions, interpreting it as a rejection of the American founding. I think that’s a misreading. First, it’s textbook Burke, so it should be intimately familiar to conservatives. Second, Rubio is obviously not against liberty. He’s arguing that its defense should be rooted in the national interest and in the cultural inheritance of a people. Yes, many have died throughout history defending Christianity, but Rubio would argue that faith is not an abstraction. It is the spiritual and moral inheritance of a civilization, and defending it is fundamentally different than dying for a regulatory framework from Brussels. Also, none of this is isolationism. It’s foreign policy grounded in national and civilizational interests, rather than the defense of liberalism for liberalism’s sake.”
Note that “liberty”, in his view, is somehow dependent on the abstraction of a “national interest” and a “cultural inheritance” that outsiders do not own and thus are not deserving of the “liberty” that springs therefrom.
And then he does what so many others dishonestly try to do, even if they don’t consciously recognize it. What is the difference between “civilization” or “faith” and mere “abstractions”? Clearly it’s whether Mr. Sopo agrees with it or not!
Burke wrote of the underpinnings and fundamentals; Locke of the distilled flowering from that well tended soil. They are two parts of the same cultural and civilizational coin—of the Anglospheric vein from which American has proved the greatest defender, and staunchest embracer of. Yes, they conflict with continental Europeans, be they those of a faith historically at odds with Americans, or from true inventors of abstractions which Mr. Sopo’s writings embody, either intentionally or not.
Inalienable rights, limited government, and the rule of law are our civilization and our inheritance. They are the very pillars of American society upon which everything else is built. There is no submission to some vague abstraction of “national interest” or to some sprachbund of a broader West as some faux urheimat.
Classical liberalism was the distillation of the civilization whose fundamentals Burke defended.
“None of these ideas are separately new to American politics. What is novel in the post-Cold War era is their synthesis into a single coherent foreign policy vision. Burke, Huntington, Catholic social thought, and foreign policy realism don’t naturally sit together and they do have some internal tensions, but Rubio resolves this by making Western civilization the intellectual framework that holds them all in place. The postwar alliance remains, but on sovereigntist rather than post-national liberal terms. That’s the real pivot, and it’s why this speech matters far beyond the moment.”
Novel synthesis? Indeed, this entire encapsulated worldview is not only “novel”, but the pure distillation of what an abstraction actually it. It is a post hoc invention to justify by both faux historical and pseudo-oracular means an invented abstraction whose origin lies not in American (and Anglopheric, more broadly) civilization, but in the delapidatory carcass of modern Europe, and the more recent degradations of Rousseau, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, and all other disparate divergent civilizational societal evolutions that has left them to be inferior to our separate and distinct—and superior—American civilization.
Individuals such as this wish to replace our civilization and inheritance with a fantasy of their own devising… to replace the American fundamental with their mere abstractions.
