How Far We Have Fallen

There is no daylight between the JD Vance's and Marco Rubio's of the world

Sometimes the weakest men are pose the most danger [Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla]

According to Anne Applebaum, a journalist for The Atlantic, Marco Rubio’s performance at the Munich Security Conference was less belligerent than JD Vance’s, a reminder that even mild-mannered Nazis are still Nazis. Lack of volume and belligerence notwithstanding, Rubio’s speech on February 14 should be deeply alarming to anybody who cares about the post–World War II Western liberal democratic order.

It’s been a long time coming, but with Vance’s hostile, anti-European remarks at the same event last year, Donald’s deranged anti-NATO speech at Davos last month, and Rubio’s White Christian Nationalist rhetoric three days ago, we have come, as a headline in The Nation put it, to “the end of the US-led order.” The United States, as has become increasingly clear, is no longer a country any of our allies can or should trust, and much of Rubio’s rhetoric underscores why.

The most obvious reason, of course, is the tens of millions of Americans who chose to put back into power those most interested in upending the post–World War II order and weakening NATO; those determined to undermine our alliances and our allies to the make common cause with the dictators and autocrats those alliances were formed to protect us from; those who neither understand nor believe in statecraft and diplomacy; who believe that might makes right; who are hellbent on reversing all of the progress we and our allies together have made in the last 80 years; and, those who seek to dismantle what has been, up until now, perhaps the greatest alliance in human history.

But there is also Rubio’s rhetoric:

To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else, not just to power their economies but to use as leverage against our own.

The problem, according to Rubio, is relying on the conclusive findings of the scientific community that climate change is real and it is caused by human activity to shape policy. Those of us who acknowledge the climate crisis and believe the international community should join to do everything we can to stop, or at least slow, the negative effects of climate change, are, according to Rubio and his handlers, members of a dangerous cult. It is we, not the oil and gas corporations, that are impoverishing our people.

Rubio’s remarks came two days after the Environmental Protection Agency repealed the 2009 scientific determination known as the Endangerment Finding that served as the backbone of emissions standards for vehicles, industrial pollution limits, and enforcement actions aimed at reducing the gases driving climate instability. The Trump regime’s EPA, in other words, will no longer do anything to protect our environment, and it will do nothing to stop, or even impede, the worsening climate crisis because it has arbitrarily concluded that such a crisis does not exist.

Then Rubio moved onto immigration:

In a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.

We 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 for which we have fallen heir.

It was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. . . . They testify not just to the greatness of our past or to a faith in God that inspired these marvels. They foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future, but only if we are unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance.

Despite being the son of Cuban immigrants, there is a strain of white supremacy throughout Rubio’s speech. Each of his exemplars of Western culture is a white man from Western Europe. Their inspiration, he tells us, is Christianity (although I imagine almost all the artists he names would beg to differ). Our shared heritage, he tells us, is the heritage of white Christianity.

During his speech, as Applebaum points out, Rubio

did not mention the war [in Ukraine] or imply that America would help Europe win it. He did not express the belief that Russia can be defeated. He did not refer to the democratic values and the shared belief in freedom that once motivated the NATO alliance, and that still motivate its European members.

He did not mention any of these things because his overlords do not care about any of them. They are interested in shifting the balance of power and establishing a new hegemony under which our allies become subservient to a new world order that rejects the values that have bound the west for almost eight decades.

Shortly after his speech, Rubio flew to Budapest, where he assured authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, that Donald is “deeply committed to his success.” Yes, Donald—a wannabe dictator himself—is deeply committed to the success of a man who rigs elections in his favor, stacks the judiciary, and almost destroyed an independent press.

Just six short years ago, though, Rubio wrote a letter to Donald in which he denounced the “democratic erosion” Orbán was spear-heading in Hungary. What could possibly have happened in those six short years to turn Rubio into a cheerleader for the kind of autocratic overreach he now champions?

Although temperamentally very different from JD Vance, who is loud and violent and obviously bloodthirsty, Marco Rubio is just as much of a fascist. Even weak men can embrace the most vicious ideologies if it feeds their pathetic, grasping need for proximity to power, no matter the cost.

How far we have we fallen. Indeed.