Connexion
Far-left anti-Israel activists in Chicago demanding President Joe Biden end U.S. aid to Israel cheered and applauded a massive attack of hundreds of drones and missiles by the Islamic Republic of Iran on the Jewish state.
The post Far-Left Activists in Chicago Filmed Cheering Iran’s Major Attack on Israel: ‘The Radical Left Is Sick’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" that President Joe Biden telling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to respond to the attack "encourages Iran."
The post Marco Rubio: Biden Telling Israel Not to Respond ‘Encourages Iran’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte gave an interview to China’s state-run Global Times on Friday in which the erratic leader trashed the United States as “antagonistic and hostile” and advised his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., to adopt a more conciliatory posture toward China.
The post Philippine’s Duterte Returns to Trash ‘Antagonistic and Hostile’ U.S. in Chinese State Media appeared first on Breitbart.
President Joe Biden held a summit with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio.
The post Japan, Philippines Push Biden to Challenge Chinese Colonialism in South China Sea appeared first on Breitbart.
President Biden with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan at the White House on Thursday. “I want to be clear, the United States defense commitments to Japan and to the Philippines are ironclad,” Mr. Biden said.
Taiwan was hit by its strongest earthquake in 25 years during rush hour on Wednesday, with nine dead, 50 missing, and over 800 injuries reported.
The post Taiwan: 9 Dead, 50 Missing, over 800 Injured, Dozens Trapped in Tunnels After Massive Quake appeared first on Breitbart.
The United States needs an industrial policy that promotes the domestic industrial base, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) outlined Tuesday.
The post Marco Rubio Outlines Dire Need for American Industrial Policy to Counter Globalism, China appeared first on Breitbart.
Nigeria’s police chief on Thursday ordered around-the-clock enhanced security at public venues across the country throughout the Easter weekend, fearing religious violence in a country where Christians are under almost constant attack.
The post Nigeria, World’s Most Dangerous Place to Be Christian, Prepares for Easter appeared first on Breitbart.
President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany this past week at the chancellery in Berlin.
State of the Union: Sen. John Barrasso will not be running to replace Mitch McConnell as GOP leader.
In the shadow of Super Tuesday, another race is taking shape: the race to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
While only one candidate has declared their intent to replace McConnell, bids for the GOP leadership undercard are narrowing the field to replace McConnell.
Last week, McConnell announced he would not seek another term as the Republican party’s leader in the upper chamber come November 2024. While the Kentucky Senator is stepping down from leadership, McConnell said he intends to serve out the rest of his term, which ends in 2027. The surprise announcement, made just days before a (temporarily) averted government shutdown sent Capitol Hill into a frenzy. The spotlight turned to the three Johns of the GOP conference: Senate GOP WHIP John Thune, Senate Republican Conference Chair John Barrasso, and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who has long had ambitions for Senate GOP leader and jumped in the race the day after McConnell’s announcement. When Sen. J.D. Vance was asked who he’d support for leadership shortly after McConnell’s retirement, the Ohio Senator quipped, “I plan to support John.”
A few days later, Vance told the media that “John Barrasso is certainly one of the leadership candidates who cares a lot, I think, about where the broader conservative movement is.” Nevertheless, Vance added, “I don’t know that he actually wants to run.”
Barrasso has made his decision. The Wyoming Senator will be running for GOP WHIP come 2024, clearing the path for Thune if the number two Republican wanted to jump in. Nevertheless, there could be a spanner in the works for one of the Johns. Rumors continue to circulate that Sens. Steve Daines, Marco Rubio, or Rick Scott could throw their hat in the ring. One of the potential non-Johns, Sen. Tom Cotton, will be running to replace Barasso as conference chair.
If the field gets crowded, a coveted endorsement from former President Donald Trump could become the decisive factor.
The post Senate Leadership Update: One John Bows Out appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Trump rivals old and new are endorsing the former president.
In 2016, a young senator from Florida outperformed expectations in the Iowa Caucuses by placing a strong third.
When the results became known, headlines announced that Marco Rubio “roar[ed] to an impressive finish just behind Donald Trump” in the Hawkeye state, and, “though he lost to Ted Cruz,” “the Iowa caucus was a win for Marco Rubio.” Eight years later, Rubio is making a late impression on the Iowa Caucus by endorsing the former rival who spent four years living at the White House: former President Donald Trump.
Rubio announced his endorsement via Twitter on Sunday afternoon. “When Trump was in WH I achieved major policies I had worked on for years (like expanded Child Tax Credit & tough sanctions on regime in Cuba & Venezuela) because we had a President who didn’t cave to special interests or let bureaucrats block us,” Rubio’s tweet read.
“I support Trump because that kind of leadership is the ONLY way we will get the extraordinary actions needed to fix the disaster Biden has created,” Rubio continued. “It’s time to get on with the work of beating Biden & saving America!”
It’s a knife for Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis who is relying on a strong showing in Iowa to keep his campaign for the Republican nomination afloat. Both of Florida’s Republican senators, and many of the Sunshine State’s prominent representatives, have thrown their weight behind Trump. Yet it could be a bigger slight to former South Carolina Governor Nimarata “Nikki” Haley. Though Haley endorsed Rubio in the 2016 primary, Rubio was apparently unwilling to return the favor. Furthermore, others who have spoken to The American Conservative in recent days said that Haley’s hopes for Iowa are a performance akin to Rubio’s in 2016, given her campaign, like Rubio in 2016, has managed expectations on their results. Nevertheless, Haley has spent millions into the Hawkeye state to attack DeSantis late in the race. It appears Rubio, the man Haley is trying to emulate in Iowa, does not foresee that outcome for Haley on Monday night.
It’s not just Trump’s 2016 rivals lining up behind Trump; his 2024 rivals are falling in line, too. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a former contender for the 2024 nomination, endorsed Trump a mere hours before Rubio on Sunday.
Expect that consolidation behind Trump to continue if the former president has a strong showing in Iowa Monday evening.
The post What Late Trump Endorsements Say About the Iowa Caucus appeared first on The American Conservative.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, seated, at the presidential palace in Manila on Friday, where he met with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines.
State of the Union: Deporting a few errant visa holders will not be enough to stem extremism on our streets.
“Those who incite violence or endorse terrorist activity by supporting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and attacks against Jews are in violation of the terms of their visas and should no longer be welcomed as guests of America. It really is that simple,” writes Senator Marco Rubio. He is right. While visa holders are protected by free speech laws, this isn’t a question of the First Amendment, but rather of public order, and no great country should invite those determined to destroy the country from within.
But what about those who are already within? The threat that this country, and Europe, faces are from migrants who are often of the second and third generation.
The process goes something like this. The western nations allow the mass migration of those who follow their own customs and laws and values without assimilating. They are further taught in colleges and universities that their lives were shaped by forces of western colonialism and nothing is their fault, as they are the noble children of savages. When they reach a critical mass, they demand representation, vote as blocs, and elect people who only care about their interests. Look at the Somalis and Palestinians in the U.S., Pakistanis in the U.K., Turks in Germany, and so on. They riot, and, as seen in Europe, their protests and demands turn increasingly to a show of force. Eventually, they establish parallel societies, ironically similar to settler-colonialists.
Parts of Europe are lately waking up to that reality, as is much of the Western Jewish diaspora, which has been traditionally liberal and open to mass migration. Something has changed. Across Europe and America, those in the Jewish community are now rethinking their funding of universities and liberal political parties that they have supported for over half a century.
But simply deporting a few errant visa holders who break laws is not enough. Most will just learn to stay quiet, and then flood the bureaucracy and job market without any change of their views and values. It needs to go far beyond that.
Colleges and universities are well-known breeding grounds of extremism. The entire national security bureaucracy is targeted at five toothless (metaphorically, of course) white supremacists while ignoring the overwhelming threat of violence from the left. We simply do not have the apparatus to deal with the threat from inside. Euro-American “conservatives,” so traditionally opposed to government overreach and authority, are oblivious to it, wishing it would all just go away.
In an ironic way, the human rights norms and the managerial legal framework underwritten by the West post-1945 are the chains that currently bind it and are leading it to its own destruction from inside.
It is urgent for both Europe and the United States to overrule and rewrite those norms, and find the legal framework as well as enforcement capacity to circumvent international human rights laws, implementing mass deportation of those who fail or refuse to assimilate. It is crucial for the survival of the states in their current forms.
The post Half-Right Rubio appeared first on The American Conservative.
Senator Marco Rubio’s new report looks at how men lost their economic might—and how they can regain it.
We live in the world social science created. The social sciences are meant to describe our social realities, but since at least the Progressive Era, American politics has been defined by attempts to apply their expertise to the management of society and persons as objects of scientific control. Objects of quantifiable analysis must be made fit for measurement, framed or selected by the putatively objective observer. Thus the emergence and metastasis of what is now called the administrative state, and the legion of other managerial systems public and private that make up the environment of American life. A cycle of bureaucratic responses to technological and cultural disruption creates an apparent need for the intervention of more bureaucracy and technology. Social science makes itself useful.
In such a reality, the need is obvious for leaders who combine in themselves the personal responsibility of a political representative, acting on behalf of the people in the realm of prudence and justice, with the dispassionate understanding of the complex structures that order our daily affairs. Only with such governors can the human scale, the space needed for human flourishing, be protected.
The alternative to an administrative state is not, under present socio-economic conditions, no state at all, but a humbler federal structure staffed by this sort of champion, mediating between lived reality and global forces. An example of this combination of social scientist and public servant is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote his famous 1965 report on black poverty in America, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” while serving as assistant secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Moynihan went on to serve as an advisor to President Richard Nixon and to represent New York in the U.S. Senate.
Now another senator has set out to be this kind of leader and to make a comprehensive assessment of a concerning feature of American society. One hopes responses to Senator Marco Rubio’s new report will be more constructive than those Moynihan’s received. “The State of the Working (And Non-Working) Man” is a product of Rubio’s Project for Strong Labor Markets and National Development, which has previously published reports on China and industrial policy. In this latest publication, Rubio and his team seek to provide a coherent coast-to-coast account of the decline of male labor force participation and to suggest a series of efforts to ameliorate that fundamental reality and its many negative social consequences.
It is an ambitious piece of work, synthesizing many years of research and theory from figures across the political spectrum; it lays out the beginnings of a blueprint for setting the American man, and thus the country as a whole, back on two feet.
“Our core contention is that structural changes to the nature of the economy, the culture, and public institutions have conspired to offer men less pay, fewer job opportunities, and less respect for the work they perform,” the report argues. “Stripped of material and psychological motivation, many men naturally have opted out of productive life and turned to self-destructive behaviors.” The Rubio report proceeds to address an assortment of contributing factors: deindustrialization, mass immigration, changes to American education, welfare incentives, “and revolutionary changes in American culture and technology.”
To those paying attention either to the macroeconomic data or to their local communities, the basic reality of declining work prospects for American men is inescapable. As Rubio writes in the report’s introduction, “In 2022, there were seven million men in the prime of life missing from the labor force, and 10 million total without work. As the scholar Nicholas Eberstadt points out, this means the share of American men without work today is as large as it was during the Great Depression. Perhaps not coincidentally, four out of every five suicides last year were men.” And as American Compass’s Oren Cass set out in a Labor Day piece here at The American Conservative, among 1,000 workers he and his team surveyed, only 40 percent had “a secure job—defined as annual earnings of $40,000 or more, at least somewhat predictable future income, health benefits and paid time off, and satisfactory control over scheduling.” That falls to 30 percent for workers without a four-year college degree.
The consequences of this extend far beyond a record-breaking year for suicides or other deaths of despair, within a complex interplay of changing cultural and material conditions. Indeed, the Rubio report makes direct reference to its Moynihan precedent as it details the decline of American marriage—a vital psychological motivation and source of respect for menial employment—alongside that of breadwinner jobs and the rise of welfare dependence:
When Moynihan published his landmark Department of Labor report on the crisis of the black family in 1965, he noted alarming levels of welfare use, unemployment, and illegitimacy (25 percent of all black births, at a time when the comparable figure for all births was 8 percent). Those problems only worsened in the decades that followed. Today, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is 70 percent; the rate for the population as a whole is 40 percent, well above the rate that Moynihan identified as “catastrophic.”
In an argument no doubt familiar to many conservative readers, but that nowadays rarely gets the imprimatur of a U.S. senator, the Rubio report in part blames America’s leadership class for the cultural revolution’s conquest of America’s most vulnerable families. “The assault on the family had the most dramatic and immediate effect among those on the margins, in places like Appalachia, the rural South, and distressed inner cities,” the authors write. “The poor in those areas suffered from a pre-existing ‘tangle of pathologies,’ as Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it. Those pathologies worsened in the 1960s and 1970s because America’s political and cultural elites lost the moral conviction to fight them.”
While largely maintaining conventional family lives among themselves, America’s leaders undermined the social supports for marriage and family formation, belittling its importance in public and constructing a welfare system that penalizes the poor for marrying; the report gives the example of a typical working class couple receiving $6,684 more in Earned Income Tax Credit benefits if cohabiting rather than married filing jointly.
In material terms, the primary policy proposal of Rubio’s “The State of the Working (And Non-Working) Man” is an American industrial policy that aims to create the sort of secure jobs, to use Cass’s term, that would allow more men—left behind by a new economy that prioritizes education and female-coded interpersonal roles—to become marriageable, able to provide for families: “Deindustrialization was a key driver in the disappearance of well-paying jobs for men; reindustrialization, therefore, should be a top priority to get men back to work.” That is work for Congress, which means, more fundamentally than any of the detailed policy suggestions of the report, that the real beginning of getting America’s un- and under-employed men back on their feet is something of the spirit: a call for a certain kind of leader.
Will enough of our national elite, men like Rubio, take responsibility for the health of their fellow citizens and not condemn them to their self-destruction? Will they, like this report, take the long view and the broad view to protect the common man from the inhuman forces of global economic and technological disruption? There are signs of hope. In a Wednesday Washington Post opinion piece, Ohio’s Senator J.D. Vance condemned the Revlon doctrine and proposed congressional intervention in the sale of U.S. Steel; as Rubio might summarize his colleague, America’s men cannot afford America to auction off more of its industrial base.
The post Work for Men appeared first on The American Conservative.
New books by Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio propose new ways forward for men and the country.
Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, by Josh Hawley, Regnery Publishing, 256 pages
Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity, by Marco Rubio, HarperCollins Publishing, 256 pages
When senators write books, they are typically writing for one or multiple of three reasons. They are running for president, they intend to run for president, or they are writing the book they can only sell because they are in elected office, and the perch of power gives them the reach to say what is actually on their mind.
No one would be surprised if either Senator Marco Rubio of Florida or Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri ran for president in the coming years. But for now, both Republicans are playing the long game and are more than happy to bide their time in the U.S. Senate, building a legacy for themselves powered by their idiosyncratic worldviews. If you squint, these two senators can easily be mistaken for well-represented archetypes in American life, and the Republican Party. Hawley is the traditional, socially conservative youth pastor, who rails against social ills in a familiar preacherly register. Rubio could be confused with the rising political ingenue of any decade in American life, an appealing innocent with a non-traditional background, ready to sweep aside the tumbleweeds of party tradition.
There are reasons to make these comparisons, but both these senators use their new books to repudiate the scripts to which establishment politics and convention would lead them. Hawley’s Manhood is conventional as a call to a morally turbulent nation to embrace social orthodoxy, but it is also a subversion of conventional elite evangelical politics when it consistently offers America’s men much more than admonition—the right to an entire nation. And Rubio’s Decades of Decadence is even more forthright: a searing critique of the American political establishment, from the GOP’s once and future golden boy, whose reformist cries have real substance undergirding them.
It is easy to forget how inevitable Washington thought Marco Rubio’s rise would be. In 2015 the institutional Republican Party, assuming that branding was the only thing keeping it from electoral landslides, was convinced that the Florida senator was their answer to the phenomenon of Barack Obama. A young, telegenic, ethnic freshman senator had easily brushed aside the opposing party’s aged standard-bearer eight years before, and innumerable very smart people were convinced that Senator Rubio’s contrast to Hillary Clinton was an electoral slam-dunk.
History had other plans, namely Donald J. Trump, but in being the readiest answer at hand, Rubio got to see the most rarified parts of American elite life up close. “I spent a great deal of time during the campaign flying to private dinners and cocktail parties, where the elite megadonors of the Republican Party stood in judgement of candidates vying for the nation’s highest office,” he writes in his book.
His vignettes of these masters of the universe are stereotypical. The hedge fund manager who “wishes I wouldn’t talk about abortion as much,” or the bank executive who is “really worried about Trump’s rhetoric on immigration” and wished Rubio had followed through on his Gang of Eight immigration proposal from years prior. Again and again, Rubio contrasts the priorities of the “hyperwealthy financiers, journalists with the largest megaphones, celebrities who can sign the brightest spotlights, and the public intellectuals paid enormous sums to speak at Aspen or Davos,” with the “majority of working-class people in this country,” who “did not feel like members of either political party had much to offer them.”
It is the experience of talking to those everyday voters and the startling contrast those conversations had with the priorities of America’s ruling class that animate Rubio’s work today. Elsewhere in his book, he narrativizes his childhood and explains how it influenced his worldview in the manner you might expect from a politician’s memoir. What is striking, however, is that Rubio talks about the act of running for the highest office in the land as similarly formative to his core worldview, six years later. Rubio chronicles his most dogged domestic policy obsessions throughout the rest of the book, excoriating the mainstream consensus on financialization, trade, China, technology, and immigration.
That last issue, immigration, gets notable reflection. Rubio recasts his infamous Gang of Eight proposal as a prophylactic against what he saw as an increasingly radical Democratic Party. In his mind “the window for securing our border was rapidly closing” and a grand bargain then would have saved America significant consequences in the ensuing decades. That process too seems to have disenchanted the Florida senator. His subsequent commentary underlines what he sees as the absurdity of the mass immigration agenda, and even distinguishes modern immigrants from their more easily assimilated predecessors in Rubio’s parents’ generation.
Today, patriots hawkish about immigration are understandable skeptics of Senator Rubio. That skepticism may be worth reconsidering, given his comprehensive criticism in Decades of Decadence of our total immigration numbers, border security, migrant culture, asylum laws, and the utter unfitness of the modern Democratic Party as a good-faith negotiator on this issue. Again, Rubio’s record is instructive here. Not a month passes without Rubio’s Senate colleagues proposing some new insane proposal to dispossess the American people of their economy, culture, and homeland through mass amnesty, and the senator has not signed onto any of the modern grand bargains, instead electing to focus his attention on his domestic interests.
That domestic focus may well have saved the entire global economy, as Senator Rubio’s economic heterodoxy was put to the test during the early days of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. What was originally a wonkish proposal to use the Small Business Administration for softening China-originated supply chain shocks eventually became the lifeline of small and medium-sized businesses across the United States by financially incentivizing suddenly revenue-starved businesses to keep their employees on payroll. The Paycheck Protection Program was proof that Rubio could take his ideas out of the dusty basement where messaging bills and flowery speeches languish into the daylight of real policymaking, which may have prevented America from ending up with a dramatically more oligopolistic economy.
In foreign affairs, Rubio’s focus is China, and with his practical approach to economics, his overall policy agenda seems well suited to helping the U.S. decouple its economy from the Asian superpower. But Rubio makes it clear both in his book and his record that his foreign policy commitments are not singular. In his mind, “Russia will be a force that needs to be dealt with carefully on the world stage,” and he offers no explicit recognition of the trade-offs that our staggering commitment in Ukraine poses for any strategic competition with China.
Decades of Decadence is a book saturated with contrition, from a statesman who has learned much during his time in the U.S. Senate—the once heir apparent to a GOP he now understands better than ever. Perhaps the obviously reflective author of this book will even take a second look at our decadent elite foreign policy consensus when the dust settles on the conflict plaguing Eastern Europe.
If Senator Rubio’s book is a rage against the hollow establishment that offered him the world, Senator Hawley’s book is earnest recognition that he is among the luckiest men alive. In Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, Hawley isn’t wagging his fingers at young men telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. He is reflecting on a life suffused with decent men who made him who he is, and trying to reconstruct a grand bargain for the countless boys who didn’t have it so easy.
Go through the grueling work of becoming a man—and the world is yours. Most masculinity commentators in the West come in two flavors. On one side you have the people who believe that being male as such is outdated, and try to remake men for a feminized modern world. On the other side there is a thriving commercial industry built around modern “masculinity”. Buy some steaks, get on a beard oil subscription, and enjoy a glass of expensive whisky.
Going beyond the commercial grift, the 2010s featured the rise of men’s rights activists, who believe that men have been singularly exploited in Western life, from dating and marriage to economic life, education, and more. In the 2020s, the social media personality Andrew Tate has attained global stardom, a trend Hawley has little patience for: “Some men…embrace with glee the left’s claim that real masculinity is founded on exploitation. They revel in the idea.”
Hawley sees Tate as the other side of the coin of the “Epicurean Myth” that has beset American society. Surveying the works of the Greek philosopher, Hawley boils down his perspective on human behavior as “the trick was to arrange one’s life, and society, in such a way as to allow maximum choice for pursuing pleasure and personal satisfaction.”
Unlike his peers in elite Christian life, Hawley doesn’t make the mistake of spending 200 pages telling men all the things they are doing wrong, as if social decay happens in a vacuum. He makes it clear that for every time an individual man may fall short, there is often a policymaker in a hall of power who certainly hasn’t made virtue easy. “To the experts safely ensconced in their think tanks, I would just say this: Is it really too much to ask that our economy work for men as they are, rather than as the left wants them to be? … There is more to life, and to a successful economy, than learning to code.”
Hawley calls the state of our modern economy and the loss of high-paying blue-collar work a “catastrophe” in a chapter titled “Builder”—one of the many roles he believes that men must embody in civilization to keep darkness at bay. But Manhood is no pity parade. Hawley spends significant time laying out a cohesive vision for the responsibilities he believes men must take on if they are to be a full expression of the biblically informed vision of masculinity he prescribes.
Hawley likens a world without that responsibility to the choice in the Garden: “Adam’s Choice, like that of many men today, was less a form of initiative than the abandonment of it. The snake offered Adam something for nothing—self-promotion without duty, self-advancement without service or obedience—and Adam took it.” He believes that the world is chaos when men do not lead and that if there is chaos in the world, it is because a man has failed to prevent it.
Even the tectonic responsibilities of manhood can get commodified in the influencer age, however. For a certain corner of Twitter or X, as it’s now called, a kind of ornamental manhood is in vogue. Having children to “own the libs” is frequently a topic of discourse online, and this Hawley addresses through the most personal of stories.
After he and his wife Erin suffered a miscarriage during their first pregnancy, their doctors informed them that miscarriages tend to cause difficulties in conceiving in the future. Faced with the reality that a central expectation of his adult life was suddenly much less certain, he realized: “Fatherhood was not something I could control. And it was not an ornament to decorate my life. Not something to possess, but something that would possess me.”
Hawley frequently returns to this. To him, masculinity is not a paint-by-the-numbers script that one goes through the motions to repeat. Masculinity is an entire way of being, without which humanity is rudderless. His book is structured around the eternal roles he believes men must play for civilization to endure: Husband, Father, Warrior, Builder, Priest, and King.
He demands much from the men he speaks to, but in return, he offers them the world. Yes, he spends significant time insisting men master themselves—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In his chapter titled “King,” he doesn’t make that mastery an idol to be admired for its own sake—he sees it as preparation to rule. “Dominion is something every man wants and is meant to exercise… The invitation to rule is, from the Bible’s perspective, the very heart of liberty.”
It makes sense that Hawley would write a book on manhood, of all things, when you notice that he and Rubio are answering two aspects of the same question: How should we govern ourselves? The task of this century is to depose the decadent elite to which Rubio assigns the policy failures of the last half-century—and to replace them with leaders who have taken on the masculine responsibilities that Hawley lays out, so the West can be ruled with justice once more.
The post Ruling With Justice appeared first on The American Conservative.
Senator Marco Rubio’s new book takes leaders of both parties to task for selling out American workers.
Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity, Marco Rubio, Broadside Books, 212 pages.
In practice, the neoliberal order is alive and kicking: If you’re a wage-earner, your employer can minutely surveil your activities and subject you to coercion in a thousand unjust ways, and your job, wages, and benefits might all spell precarity. If you are the owner of a brick-and-mortar store on Main Street, your business is ever menaced by Amazon’s monopolistic tendencies. The social media company you use to access information and voice your views, meanwhile, wields an enormous amount of power over you, an unaccountable power you can’t challenge in court or at the ballot box. And the real-world downtown you grew up in may well be strewn with needles and lost to the blessings of free trade.
All this and more are the baleful effects of the neoliberal era that displaced the New Deal order beginning in the 1970s, and we are still a long, long way from a real turnaround. But at least in the realm of ideas, it is safe to say that neoliberal ideology is under severe pressure from left and right. Free-trade skepticism, once confined to the anti-globalization left and the paleocon right, is now the conventional wisdom on the editorial pages of the Financial Times. Many in the international shipping business believe that they will never get to restore the capillary supply chains that spanned the pre-Covid world. CEOs whine about the “end of globalization.” And no less important a figure than National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan proclaims that the Washington Consensus has failed at home and abroad.
The latest and most impressive sign comes courtesy of Marco Rubio, via his stunningly forthright new book, Decades of Decadence, in which the Florida senator takes on neoliberal elites of both parties, but especially his own, for pursuing the doctrine heedless of “the consequences that their actions might have.” The book reaffirms Rubio’s status as one of the brightest stars of the right’s new political-economy constellation, and a worthy champion of a latter-day American System for promoting a production-oriented economy that works for workers.
What struck me most reading Decades of Decadence was the author’s willingness to call out Republicans, and especially the Republican donor class, for their role in bringing about an economy in which it takes the median male worker “sixty-two weeks in a fifty-two-week year” to earn enough to pay for basic necessities, compared with 40 weeks in 1985; an American economy that had become so dependent on Chinese industry, it couldn’t produce masks and many medicine ingredients at the height of the pandemic; an economy in which the bottom half of the labor market hasn’t enjoyed any growth in real wages for the better part of two generations.
Rubio lays plenty of blame at the feet of neoliberal Democrats from the 1990s for all this, but he doesn’t spare Republicans. The reason the Republican Party has abandoned the working class, he argues, isn’t all that complicated. It is because of the GOP “donor class” and the way their beliefs are “treated as gospel” by most Republican lawmakers, even though those beliefs are “so often wrong for the country.” Attending donor meetings, he recalls, “one thing I rarely heard was that this Fortune 500 company CEO is really interested in moving supply chains back to America. Or that Wall Street guy is very concerned about China’s exploitation of our capital markets.” After all, “for these people, the economy is working just fine.”
Likewise, Rubio has no patience for conservative ideologues who preach virtue and self-improvement but pay no mind to how the material order removes these things from the reach of ordinary workers. “Cultural decline,” he writes, “isn’t an issue that is isolated from economic decline. Dignity comes from a job, and so a difficult economy is a drag on the dignity of workers in that economy. For a long time it has been impossible to acknowledge this inside America’s conservative movement.”
Another sign of the times: In addition to allies like the brilliant Oren Cass, Rubio approvingly cites the progressive Economic Policy Institute (which indeed does excellent work on issues like arbitration abuse in the workplace, unions and de-unionization, free speech in employment, and much more). And he heaps praise on Sen. Bernie Sanders and several other left-of-center figures for presciently warning about the consequences of neoliberal ideology years and sometimes decades earlier. These are all optimistic indicators that a post-neoliberal consensus may truly be around the corner. And it suggests that such a consensus can and must be forged in the middle, between left and right.
The post Rubio’s Reveille appeared first on The American Conservative.
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