Austin Sarat ScheerPost
On October 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the occasion of a visit to Greece to deliver an elaborately staged speech about the virtues of and threats to Western Civilization. Sadly, many of the virtues he praised are under attack by the administration in which he serves.
HIs speech will be remembered as an example of Rubio’s craven hypocrisy or simple lack of self-awareness. It is a sad reminder of a legacy that the Trump Administration has worked hard to confine to the dustbin of history.
As the Guardian’s Ted Widmer puts it, “For long stretches, (Rubio’s speech) was an exercise in nostalgia, lamenting the decline of western civilization as if this were a seminar at Hillsdale College or the Claremont Institute. In fact, a freshman seminar would have been able to puncture most of the speech’s assumptions.”
“It’s true,” Widmer added, “that the founders read deeply in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, but they went there to justify their hope to build a democracy of equals – not a civilization of conquest.”
For all its flaws, I don’t think we should dismiss Rubio’s speech. Instead, we should treat it as a devastating reminder of the damage he and his colleagues have done during the time they have been in office.
Rubio gets off to a bad start when he argues that “The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. “ True.
But Rubio’s statement ignores the threat to that architecture posed by a president eager to turn Washington, DC into a monument to himself. What would the Greeks think about a leader who bulldozes buildings willy-nilly and adorns government buildings with images of himself?
The great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle labeled such a leader a tyrant and warned of the kind of ruler that Trump is eager to become.
In The Republic, Plato said that tyrants would rise when “The people have…some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness…This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground, he is a protector.”
And “having a mob entirely at his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen; by the favourite method of false accusation, he brings them into court and murders them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizens….”
Sound familiar?
Rubio continued his unselfconscious indictment of Trump when he praised “The men who founded my country” because they “were exceptionally well-read in history – they were vividly aware of their unique place in it – but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity.”
Rubio noted that “much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American Founders – and, for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history.”
Now, that may be true, but I’m not sure that the president would be among that group.
The journalist Jeet Heer observes, “Trump’s historical ignorance is vast.” Nevertheless, Heer explains that Trump frequently gives “’wacky history lessons…’”
Those lessons, Herr adds, “ are in fact a fascinating window into his mind because these are remarks about topics he is unfamiliar with, so he speaks about them in an unguarded way, almost with a childlike innocence.”
Heer is right to say that, “Presidents adrift without historical knowledge are dangerous.”
Or as the historian David Blight puts it, “Ever since Donald Trump became President I have believed his greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance – of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution.”
Moving on from his praise for those who know history, Rubio went on to note that “Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West:… An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.”
“What blossomed here in this place,” Rubio observed, “was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man….But, it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown canbe known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood – and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.”
From those remarks, you would never know that Rubio works for a president who has launched an unprecedented attack on science and the quest for knowledge itself. The president has cut funding for basic research, attacked universities, tried to discredit scientists, and cast doubt on the value of learning.
Writing in May 2025, the journalist Adam Serwer stated that “The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself. “ As Serwer explained, it “is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.”
“If this assault is successful,” Serwer continued, “it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, (members of the Trump Administration) believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power. “
And holding power seems, second only to using it for private enrichment, to be President Trump’s primary motivation.
Rubio told his audience in Athens: “It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.”
Faithful to duty? Bound by his word? Willing to go down with his ship?
Surely Rubio knows that none of that applies to the person for whom he works.
The Secretary of State told his audience that “Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.”
He may be right that Americans are ashamed and embarrassed. But what we are ashamed and embarrassed about is the cruel and crude way that the president conducts himself.
It is too bad that Rubio looks past all that.
His speech should be read not as praise for the times in which we live, but as a lament for all we have lost and as a searing indictment of the administration of which he is a part.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
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