Marco Rubio gives Europe the message that the US is no longer a democracy, no longer a beacon to the world. We’re a white Christian nationalist autocracy-in-the-making, full stop. Extended quote from Heather Cox Richardson:
In his speech to the conference yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was less confrontational than Vance was last year, but the message was the same. He attacked all three of the pillars on which the U.S. has previously stood in foreign affairs. Global trade has ruined the U.S. economy, he said, while international institutions have undermined sovereignty, and “a climate cult” has imposed energy policies that are “impoverishing our people.”
He focused, though, on “mass migration,” which he claimed “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” He called for Europe to join with the U.S. in rejecting the tenets of the post–World War II vision, claiming that “[w]e are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
His description of that shared heritage reflected the Trump administration’s fantasy past. It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly “American” identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.
Rubio’s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S., and even though he called out the Rolling Stones, who built their body of work on that of Black American blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as part of “western civilization.” Rubio even ignored his own family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.
Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. He said the U.S. had “no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline” and urged Europe to work with the U.S. for a return to western “dominance.”
I despise everything about Donny Convict’s administration. This is just one more example. We may never recover from the damage done by this gang of thugs – certainly not in my lifetime.