Marco Rubio: The Spirit That Created Western Civilization
Seldom does a politician deliver a speech with more historical and cultural breadth than Marco Rubio’s recent speech in Greece.
Richard Kirk | American Thinker | October 16, 2026
Seldom does a politician deliver a speech with more historical and cultural breadth than Marco Rubio’s recent speech in Greece, with the Acropolis standing appropriately in the background. Moving beyond the standard acknowledgment of Greek democracy, Rubio knitted together Plato and Aristotle with the theologically grounded philosophies of Augustine and Aquinas that form the intellectual and spiritual foundation for Western civilization.
But the term around which his entire talk revolved was the Greek word thumos, a concept Plato employs to speak about the spirited element of human nature that fuels, in Rubio’s words, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, [and] pride” that “is the heart of great civilizations.” Plato saw this function as allied with reason against appetite and as the source of achievements attained through competition and struggle, strivings formalized in the Greek agon which revealed excellence in various fields of endeavor. Rubio links this essential trait with the Western drive to explore, to invent, and to devote one’s efforts to a cause higher than self. This characteristic, the root of courage, has come under sustained attack both from within and from without the West.
Even during World War II, C.S. Lewis denounced philosophical schools and educational materials that viewed emotion-laden patriotic aphorisms as meaningless propaganda. In The Abolition of Man he noted that this didactic perspective was destined to create “men without chests” — “chests” being Lewis’s word for Plato’s thumos. Today’s critique of patriotism, by contrast, comes from highly emotional, one-sided, and irrational condemnations of a country no one could be proud of.
These portraits omit everything on the positive side of the national ledger and magnify everything negative. The Pilgrims with their biblical virtues and stoic perseverance in the face of death are transmogrified along with pioneer homesteaders (Giants in the Earth) into genocidal racists who butcher Disneyesque natives. The Founding Fathers who, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” signed the Declaration of Independence, are disparaged as old white men and slave owners. Visions of legal, material, and scientific progress are replaced by a Dorian Gray portrait of sexism, xenophobia, and capitalist oppression that waxes more contemptible with each retelling.
Beyond legacy media, university Marxists, and a K-12 education system crafted by leftist union leaders, popular culture’s incessant messaging tends to produce iPhone-obsessed couch potatoes for whom instant gratification is regularly touted as a “right” alongside abortion, health care, and gender-affirming mutilation — all provided by a government possessing a prolific money tree. In short, the “good life” is portrayed as one devoid of struggle where everyone gets a participation trophy and life’s highest goal is something akin to an eighty-five year “Life of Julia” vacation.
Of course, there are still millions of Americans who exhibit the courage, inventiveness, dedication, and selflessness fueled by the same character trait about which Plato and C.S. Lewis spoke. That trait is found most conspicuously in military service and law enforcement. Unfortunately, those professions have been debased by DEI politicization and vicious slander. Warriors became pawns in social experimentation where drag queens were featured to emphasize inclusiveness, the proper thumos reaction to which would be revulsion and shame — an emotional cocktail more difficult to swallow for disciples of Achilles than insults hurled by cowardly politicians at ICE and police officers.
The Trump Administration, to its credit, has attempted to reverse this anti-American, anti-Western sentiment first promulgated at the presidential level by Barack Obama’s “apology tour.” The Secretary of War has touted the martial virtues of unit cohesion, strength, and patriotism and has scrapped measures designed to produce inclusivity and equity. Trump has already reversed Woke erasures of Columbus Day and patriotic statuary, and now has his sights on the Smithsonian Institution’s pervasive hate-America leitmotif. Of course, Trump himself, with his brash aggressiveness and determination, stands as the personification of a warrior spirit that has overcome unprecedented conspiracies and media slander, plus a near-fatal assassination attempt, all for the sake of national revival. Lesser souls would have chosen a luxurious retirement.
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A poignant observation in Rubio’s speech was this statement: “We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.” The “we” in his sentence was directed not only to European allies, whose socialist secularism has long weakened their resolve, but also to Americans headed in the same direction. Nations no longer bolstered by love of country and love of God, populated by leaders incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or men from women, stand defenseless against passionate invaders disguised as immigrants and asylum seekers.
It’s possible that the feminization of America, as Helen Andrews notes in another recent speech, has passed the tipping point so that suicidal empathy will prevail on a national basis rather than the distinctively masculine virtues of courage and a willingness to fight for principle. (Among other statistics, Andrews notes that women now constitute the majority in law schools, medical schools, and college faculties. They receive the majority of B.A.s and Ph. Ds, and are over 50% of white-collar workers with degrees. The publishing industry is almost 80% female, and the discipline of psychology is becoming overwhelmingly female. The same trend toward majority status applies to the judiciary, where 63% of Joe Biden’s appointments were female.) As Andrews warns, “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”
In 1962, John F. Kennedy made this declaration that bristles with the quality Rubio praised:
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others too.
Today it’s a question whether the descendants of those who risked their lives and sacred honor to found this nation, who died in staggering numbers to free slaves and maintain the Union, who endured the Great Depression and defeated the twin evils of fascism and communism, will find an increase in the price of gasoline too great a burden to focus their gaze on opponents who are “fundamentally transforming” a nation once rooted in Judeo-Christian values. November 3rd will provide a provisional answer to that question.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. His book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge