It’s really hard to take Secretary of State Marco Rubio seriously. He is a child of immigrants who cynically sold his political soul to the most anti-immigrant administration in modern American history, led by Rubio, who endured insulting abuse during his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. But Rubio fully supports Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Last week he was On the world stage in Athens, Greece, At the sixth U.S.-Greece Strategic Dialogue, he tried to put a good spin on what he called the Trump administration’s “unapologetic pursuit of national strength.”
The hollowness and hypocrisy of this boast is obvious: When Rubio warns that this pursuit of power is justified because “war breaks out again,” it’s impossible not to think about the administration’s needless choice of war against Iran and its disastrous impact on the global economy. So did his attempt to celebrate Trump’s investment in the “new frontier” of “superintelligence,” the president’s favorite term for the highly unpopular products of the artificial intelligence industry that have disastrous effects on the environment and the economy. It would be laughable that Rubio goes to such lengths to praise this administration’s unpopular policies if they hadn’t caused so much harm around the world.
There’s a time-honored and finely tuned template for trying to make the ideas that define a government’s worldview seem respectable, natural, and desirable: Connect those ideas to a period of history that you believe most audiences have been taught to admire and take seriously.
Where do senior representatives of a failed administration turn when they encounter an impossible rhetorical situation like Rubio’s? As I said in “White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate,“ There’s a time-honored and finely tuned template for trying to make the ideas that define a government’s worldview seem respectable, natural, and desirable: Connect those ideas to a period of history that you believe most audiences have been taught to admire and take seriously. one speech Pnyx, where Athenians once gathered for popular rallies that gave birth to democracy, provides a perfect opportunity to connect America First to ancient Greek statecraft. With the Acropolis as his backdrop, Rubio threw out a host of age-old slogans, claiming that lofty ideals such as “heroism,” “honor,” “duty,” “virtue” and “courage” characterize “Western” culture and, by extension, what the Trump administration calls a renaissance “not just for our country, but for our entire civilization.”
But the history Rubio cites only scratches the surface, and these ideals seem as worthy of celebration as building a new data center in your hometown or paying $6 a gallon for diesel.
The Secretary of State cited the Spartans of Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates as examples of Western heroism, both of whom, he said, exemplified “the West’s” willingness to “pay any price for a cause worthy of loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio admired so much came to define the city-state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all of their national resources to maintaining an army large enough to suppress the rebellion of the vast numbers of enslaved fellow Greeks on whom the Spartan economy depended. The most reasonable explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he was the ideological mentor of several violent and authoritarian military junta who ruled Athens after the Peloponnesian War. Plato, a student of Socrates, used his talents to purify his political reputation by portraying his teacher as a brave free thinker.
Rubio cited Plato’s influence as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence on the framers of the American Constitution was primarily to legitimize their conception of the new nation as an unequal nation in which only those they deemed worthy could gain political power.
Yes, as Rubio says, Socrates taught and Plato wrote in the shadow of the Parthenon. But when the ancient Greeks saw the temple, they saw not a monument to democracy but the wealth and power that Athens had amassed for itself through its coercive, imperialist treatment of its fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was financed by an unbalanced and extortionate alliance, with Athens bullying other city-states under the pretense of providing protection to prevent the defeated Persians from coming back and enslaving the Greeks. Rubio seems to know this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West…succumbs to a future of atrophy, servitude, and decline.”
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Oppressing and exploiting marginalized groups, promoting dictatorship, imperial rule and plundering wealth; these are not aspects of “Western civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or rather he is, because these traditional aspects are closest to the Trump administration’s worldview.
In fact, the secretary’s speech was very direct about this. When Rubio decried Trump’s previous “we have torn down our monuments; we have condemned our own history,” he was referring only to the removal of Confederate statues that celebrated white supremacy. His grandiose description of pre-European America as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great renaissance of Western imagination and ambition” erases the role of genocide and Native American displacement in this process.
But why would anyone be surprised that a Trump administration official would say something so shocking and shameful? This is the history that Trump is trying to suppress in museums. including the Smithsonian Institutionand National Parks Nationwide.
You can sense a desire for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice of speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the Parthenon would bring cachet to his case. You can feel it in his praise of “Western civilization,” as if repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times could cover up the corruption scandal surrounding Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece. These visual and rhetorical platitudes are designed to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the administration’s deep weaknesses. They can’t point to any truly positive achievements. Entering the midterm elections, Trump and his party have no foothold. So we get this speech – a clumsy appeal to the die-hard MAGA base who actually want to live in an authoritarian, corrupt police state and lie to themselves about history.
but poll Indicates that the group is getting smaller and smaller every day. Americans are not fooled anymore.
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