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The West has lost faith in itself, embracing an ideology of mediocrity rather than its God-given inheritance of self-government, prosperity, and excellence.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a clarion call for the West to re-embrace its heritage, amid a backdrop of the Parthenon in Athens on Wednesday, he simultaneously indicted the universities, activist nonprofits, bureaucracies, and cultural institutions that have spent decades teaching Western nations to be ashamed of their own history, borders, faith, and achievements.
Rubio did not name these institutions directly, but he condemned the underlying assumptions they have promoted throughout America and the West.
The Woke Malaise
Rubio contrasted the ancient Greek “thumos”—the “fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” that helps civilizations succeed—with the current malaise often associated with the “woke” movement.
“Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional,” he warned, noting the tearing down of monuments. “We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.”
Rubio warned that modern ideologies seem to aim at “a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat.” He lamented that such an approach leads the West to “design our standards to ensure that no one will lose,” and ultimately “hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.”
It was an excellent condemnation of the ideology behind “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Rubio wasn’t just rejecting the mentality that says we must count every university applicant or every member of a corporate boardroom by race, sex, and sexual orientation; he was condemning the underlying assumption that America is inherently biased against certain groups and that we must atone for this national sin by elevating them.
This critical race theory isn’t cloistered away in some isolated ivory tower. It recently held sway in the commanding heights of American culture, and its institutional framework persists even today.
The Architecture of ‘Woke’
The West didn’t lose faith in its own good heritage organically. A powerful network of universities, foundations, activist nonprofits, teachers unions, corporate DEI offices, media organizations, and government bureaucracies have championed these corrosive ideas, establishing them as the new bedrock for a competing belief system.
These institutions taught young Westerners that patriotism is suspicious, borders are unjust, Christianity is oppressive, merit is privilege, and national sovereignty is an obstacle to progress.
These ideas eventually found their way into corporate America through ESG initiatives and into government through activist nonprofits and bureaucracies. Together, these institutions constructed the framework that enabled the “Great Awokening” after George Floyd’s death in 2020.
The constellation of ideologies I define as “woke”—critical race theory, transgender ideology, climate alarmism, and a preference for technocratic government—took hold in the administration of President Joe Biden.
President Trump signed executive orders opposing DEI, but the ideology persists in some corporations and influential nonprofits. Should another left-leaning president take residence in the White House in 2029, I have little doubt this ideology will come roaring back into federal policy.
Immigration, Bureaucracy, and Christianity
Rubio’s comments on migration point to another institutional failure—the ideology that fails to distinguish between legal immigrants who seek to honor our civilization and illegal immigrants who disobey our country’s laws.
Under Biden, a system of immigration nonprofits, many of which received millions in taxpayer dollars, settled migrants across the country, seemingly without care for their legal status. This Immigration Industrial Complex represents a threat to America’s good heritage, and taxpayers unwittingly footed the bill for much of it.
Rubio also rightly warned about the West outsourcing its sovereignty to “global bureaucracies.”
This impulse became visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, when unelected experts often insisted that their own scientific authority should override democratic debate, revealing a preference for technocratic government “by experts” rather than the self-government that shapes the West’s character.
Rubio didn’t just defend the nation-state, however. He defended the civilizational roots of the West’s understanding of human dignity, liberty, and self-government. He proved himself unapologetic about the Christian roots of Western civilization, rejecting the fashionable tendency to treat Christianity as merely another private preference rather than a foundation for the development of liberty, natural law, and self-government.
Rubio’s speech also identified the source of the West’s crisis.
Our civilization did not spontaneously decide that its history was shameful, its borders unjust, its religion oppressive, and its achievements suspect. Marxism’s long march through the institutions did that.
If the West is to recover its confidence, dismantling the policies of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already branded “Woke 1.0” won’t be enough. We must confront the institutional architecture that produced them in the first place.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
