The ‘Trumpian’ elements of the new world view proclaimed by Marco Rubio, on Pnice

Marco Rubio is relatively young, aged 55; he was born in Florida and is of Cuban descent. His full name is Marco Antonio – a harbinger of orientalist infatuations and political ‘Asianism’ (Cleopatra of Egypt’s dream of domination, shattered by Caesar at Actium). By profession, Rubio is Secretary of State in Washington; he survived Trump’s tumultuous rise to power – a man he detested, a sentiment that was reciprocated – by dutifully conforming to the party line and the cult of the leader, and by drawing on some mysterious delegation of power and influence that the President of the United States and leader of the MAGA movement had identified in his background and deemed useful to incorporate into his staff in place of the honourable, capable and competent services of a Mike Pompeo.

The Secretary of State’s second political role is to prepare the race for the White House succession alongside J. D. Vance, the Vice-President and protégé of the currently fashionable prophet of technovisionary imbecility known as Peter Thiel—the classic embodiment of the successful man whose success has gone to his head. In Munich, in early 2025, Vance demonstrated his Spenglerian credentials with a hard-hitting speech on the decline of the old world, the ‘decline of the West’ and so on, denouncing the weakness of a Europe without sovereignty or nationality, destined to sink into impotent globalist bureaucracy and be overwhelmed by migratory replacement unless the völkisch spirit of the AfD comes to the rescue with its rediscovered, National Socialist-tinged memory of ethnic identity.

A year or so later, Rubio went to the Pnyx – the esplanade where, in the fifth century BC, the first democratic parliament in history used to meet, in front of the Acropolis in Athens – and, having chosen a rather ambitious text from his speechwriters’ archives, he too launched an attack on Europe’s decline with a historical and philosophical speech lasting about twenty minutes. But to set himself apart from his rival, instead of disparaging the European spirit in its fatal decline, he made Greek and classical antiquity – the source and origin of the Roman, imperial, Christian, medieval, Renaissance, and later modern and American West – the salad base for an ideological dressing that was heroic and virtuous, aristocratic, all honour and pursuit of glory – which nourishes the hopes of a ‘low-imperial’ presidency already in decline, like Alcibiades after the catastrophic expedition to Sicily.

The new reactionaries who have taken the place of the honest neoconservatives of the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney era call themselves Straussians, or at least allow others to think so. For they too, following in the footsteps of a great Jewish thinker on crisis such as Strauss, turn to the Greeks on the assumption that the ancient world’s answers regarding knowledge and social theory might be the right ones. But they do not mean Socrates or Plato, who combined doubt, a liberal education, dialectical reason, political philosophy, natural law and biblical revelation; no, they are referring to the aristocratic virtues and the heroic, individualistic impulses à la Carlyle, which they rehash into a rather confused form of Nietzscheanism, a banally banal ‘superman’ ideology – for this, in the end, aside from the Westernist postcard rhetoric, is Rubio’s battle against European decline as viewed from the hill of the moderate MAGAs, disguised as the Pnyx. Life, liberty, equality and the right to the pursuit of happiness are ingredients of undoubted excellence, albeit with the fatal interpolation of slavery in the Declaration of Independence that founded the United States. The new American century as liberal imperialism was the neocons’ programme; the hero and the superman are Trumpian innovations.