New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie teaches Secretary of State Marco Rubio a history lesson in response to his speech about Western civilization, arguing that the values he claims to defend are the very ones the Trump administration is undermining.
In a video titled "Marco Rubio does not know a thing about 'Western civilization,'" Bouie took apart Rubio's October 7 speech in Greece, in which the secretary of state praised the ancient Greeks as the foundation of Western science, philosophy, religion, and political thought.
During the speech, Rubio complained that Western nations had become ashamed of their accomplishments, with the tearing down of monuments and nationalism becoming "a dirty word."
But Bouie argued that Rubio's version of history conveniently leaves out facts about how modern democratic values developed.
"The bigger point to make here is that Western civilization as a concept is incoherent," Bouie said.
He stated that the American founders did not consider ancient Athenian democracy to be a simple example that could be copied. On the contrary, political allies like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who helped author the Federalist Papers, were concerned about the risks of direct democracy and preferred a system of representative government.
Bouie also directly opposed Rubio's idea that the Western intellectual tradition had followed a direct line from ancient Greece to Christian Europe.
"There's a huge chunk of time where the center of classical learning, of the inheritance of the Greeks, of the Romans, passed to the Arab world, to the Muslim world, to the Caliphate," he said.
Bouie noted that much ancient scholarship survived through preservation and translation outside Europe, complicating the idea of a self-contained Western tradition.
He also questioned Rubio's complaints about the removal of monuments, giving the Confederate statues being taken down in Charlottesville, Virginia, as examples.
"Is that the Western civilization that Marco Rubio thinks we all have to be defending?" Bouie asked.
The columnist maintained that the principles usually associated with the modern West—such as individual liberty, religious tolerance, and democracy- arose as a result of long-standing political struggles rather than because of some fundamental cultural characteristic.
Bouie also directly opposed Rubio's idea that the Western intellectual traditions had followed a direct line from ancient Greece to Christian Europe.
"There's no essence that makes people outside of the West unable to appreciate values like liberty, freedom, democracy," he said.
For Bouie, the most troubling contradiction was political, not historical. He accused Rubio of celebrating democratic ideals while serving a president whose actions, in his view, contradict them.
"The irony of this speech is that Rubio is choosing to reject them," Bouie said, continuing: “He is rejecting the actual values that mark whatever it is that we want to call the West. The movement he is working on behalf of is rejecting those values. The man he works for is rejecting those values.”
"They're fetishizing the West and rejecting whatever it might be that makes that formation distinct," he continued.
Bouie ultimately rejected the idea that those principles belong exclusively to one civilization.
They "aren't a Western inheritance; they're a human inheritance, something that we all are entitled to," he said.