Why We Fight by William Kristol on Marco Rubio's Munich speech

[applegrove]

Why We Fight
by William Kristol

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/american-values-vs-maga-nihilism-rubio-munich-minnesota-ice-trump-declaration-independence-lincoln

Last weekend, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state of the United States, spoke at the annual Munich Security Conference. He didn’t deign to discuss in his prepared remarks actual security challenges to the United States from, say, Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. Instead, he lectured world leaders about the Trump administration’s general view of the nature of politics, war, and patriotism. One of Rubio’s most striking statements was that “armies do not fight for abstractions.”

Rubio made this statement in the year in which we’ll celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That Declaration was also a declaration of war. The war for independence that the Continental Army fought was in defense of and on behalf of certain principles. You might even call them “abstractions.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

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Jefferson was able “to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth.” The administration in which Rubio serves pretends to celebrate that revolution, but hates the abstract truth which animated that revolution and which elevates it above merely another mundane struggle for power or profit. The Trump administration hates that fact because it is a reminder that there is more to life than power and profit. And it hates that truth precisely because it remains a stumbling block to tyranny and oppression.