by Stephen Soukup
America alone carries the torch of Western civilization, tasked with defending the principles that Europe has long abandoned.
In the two-plus weeks since Marco Rubio delivered his address to the Munich Security Conference, the Trump administration’s jack of all trades has been widely praised by conservatives and independents. This is rightly so. Rubio was compelling, knowledgeable, vigorous, and reconciliatory, all at the same time. He provided one of the most cogent and comprehensible accounts of the West and its global leadership by an American diplomat in a long, long time. The praise is well deserved.
All of that notwithstanding, Rubio did make one very serious but very common mistake in his address, a mistake that blurs the distinctions among factions in the West and that, in large part, explains why the fate of our civilization rests on the actions and attitudes of America alone. He put it this way:
That is what we are defending—a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.
It was here, in Europe, where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born. It was here, in Europe. . . which gave the world the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution.
The primary error here is treating the West and its intellectual awakening—i.e., the Enlightenment—as a monolith. In truth, the Enlightenment can be divided into four segments: the English Enlightenment, led by men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton; the French Enlightenment, which featured Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau; the Scottish Enlightenment, highlighting Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Dugald Stewart; and the German Enlightenment, the irresistible force of which was Immanuel Kant.
All segments of the Enlightenment shared certain characteristics—a break (of varying extremities) from the moral foundations of civilizational history up to that point, a preoccupation with reason as a guiding moral and intellectual force, and a belief in the authority of carefully ordered empiricism. Beyond this, however, the respective national/ethnic Enlightenments were very different. The English and the Scottish Enlightenments focused on reform, gradualism, and the advancement of existing institutions. The French Enlightenment and the Kantian-led German Enlightenment, by contrast, were radical, focused on universalism, and on the destruction rather than the reform of institutions. In many important ways, the various Enlightenments were far more different from one another than they were the same.
This is relevant, both in micro- and macro-analyses of Rubio’s address. In the micro sense, Rubio was additionally mistaken about Europe being the site where “the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.” Those ideas were, in fact, born thousands of years previously, not in Europe, but in ancient Israel. The English and the Scottish Enlightenments, which influenced many aspects of the American Revolution and its founding documents, did not break entirely from these historical influences. They updated them and modified their language, adding additional flair, but they nevertheless maintained the moral and political ideas that had animated the West for millennia. For example, one can draw a fairly straight line from Jeremiah 1:5—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you”—through Sophocles’s Antigone to Cicero’s De Legibus; through Augustine’s De Trinitate to Aquinas’s Summa; through Locke’s Two Treatises of Government to Jefferson’s declaration that it is self-evident “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The seeds of liberty that changed the world, in short, were not planted in Europe. They were planted in the ancient Middle East, cultivated in the Mediterranean, harvested in Britain, and shipped to the nascent United States. This sequence of moral and intellectual stewardship matters immeasurably.
Meanwhile, in “Europe” proper—which is to say, on the Continent—that stewardship was lost, and the idea-seeds planted there reflect this loss.
The principal philosophical and political influence on the continental branch of Western civilization was and is inarguably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of “the Left” and, in my estimation, the designer of the “modern world.” It goes without saying, I suppose, that all of this is far more nuanced and complicated than I can convey here, and far smarter people have done so elsewhere, but in brief: Rousseau offered “the West” a social contract that was almost entirely opposite to that synthesized by Locke and favored by the American Founders. Rousseau’s Social Contract rests on the idea that the state exists to guarantee the liberty of the individual, and that this liberty can only be expressed and understood within the context of something called the “general will” of the people. He put it this way:
As long as several men in assembly regard themselves as a single body, they have only a single will, which is concerned with their common preservation and general well-being. In this case, all the springs of the State are vigorous and simple, and its rules clear and luminous; there are no embroilments or conflicts of interests; the common good is everywhere clearly apparent, and only good sense is needed to perceive it.
As preposterous as this sounds, it has been the guiding belief of leftist leaders for the last quarter-millennium, from the Jacobins onward. It empowers small and radical factions to govern as if they represent the will of the entire people, as if the “general will” and nothing more guides their actions. Additionally—and, perhaps, more importantly—it allows them to do whatever they want in defense of this general will, as Rousseau himself recommended:
There is, therefore, a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them—it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.
When French president Emmanuel Macron declares that “free speech is pure bullsh*t,” he is articulating, in his own puerile way, the Rousseauian influence on the continental understanding of freedom. Similarly, German law mandates Sozialpflichtigkeit (that property ownership be tempered by a social obligation), which is Rousseau’s “general will” and disdain for private property, filtered through Hegel and historicist economists like Gustav von Schmoller. And most tragically, when Keir Starmer’s government arrests grannies for tweeting unacceptable memes, it is demonstrating Britain’s loss of faith in its intellectual traditions and its acceptance of continental influences in their stead.
To put it bluntly, on the matters to which Marco Rubio was referring in his Munich speech, historical unity between Europe and the United States is tenuous at best, while a contemporary common vision is almost entirely nonexistent. While reconciliation with Europe is a laudable goal, it must be on America’s terms, not Europe’s. We are not the same, despite considerable common cultural characteristics. Indeed, in the race to preserve what remains of the foundational principles of “Western civilization,” America stands alone.
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/03/02/marco-rubio-and-america-alone/
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