Americans of the revolutionary generation did not think of themselves as direct heirs to “Western civilization,” a term that wouldn’t come into vogue until the 20th century. If anything, they saw their new nation as a break with the European past — a new civilization rooted in popular sovereignty and republican self-government.
“The Independence of America considered merely as separation from England, would have been a matter but of little importance,” Thomas Paine observed in the early 1790s, “had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments.”
In 1793, Nathaniel Chipman, a Vermont jurist and veteran of the Revolutionary War, put it a little differently: “The government of the United States exhibits a new scene in the political history of the world,” he wrote.
Jefferson, Lincoln and the difference
Among the major founders, Thomas Jefferson — his infatuation with France notwithstanding — was perhaps the most emphatic about the “ocean of fire” between the Old World and the New. “America,” he wrote in an 1823 letter to James Monroe, “has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe. While the last is laboring to become the domicile of despotism, our endeavor should surely be to make our hemisphere that of freedom.”
Decades later, Abraham Lincoln — who claimed Jefferson as an intellectual forefather and often honored him for his foresight — would make this distinction in more abstract form in the Gettysburg Address, elevating the United States as the one place where humanity would learn whether “a new nation, conceived in liberty” could “long endure” or whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” would “perish from the earth.”
In his second term, President Donald Trump has held both himself and his administration out as a bulwark in defense of Western civilization — the last, best hope for the grand heritage of the West against lawless incursion from foreign others.
“We cannot rebuild Western civilization, we cannot rebuild the United States of America or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted illegal migrants come into our country,” Vice President JD Vance declared last February. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration program, warned that reelecting Joe Biden would represent the “assisted suicide of Western civilization.” And in his eulogy for Charlie Kirk in September, Miller declared that the “legacy and lineage” of the MAGA movement “hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello.”
And this Western civilization, Marco Rubio explained in his address to the Munich Security Conference last week, rests on a pillar built on both ethnic and religious nationalism and a rigid sovereignty backed by hard borders and a jealous contempt for international cooperation. In his speech, the secretary of state decried “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people.”
Inapt claims about the U.S., and Europe, especially
It should be said that this formulation makes no particular sense for the United States, a pluralistic, polyglot nation that has throughout its history sustained profound levels of immigration from countries around the world. In fact, Rubio’s formulation only begins to make real sense when you see that his idea of “our people” is narrow and exclusive. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share,” Rubio said, “forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
This, again, is a strange claim to make of either the United States or, especially, Europe, a region that’s home to dozens of cultures and languages, whose history is practically defined by centuries of catastrophic ethnic and religious conflict — whose divisions produced two of the most destructive wars in human history — and whose national and linguistic identities are relatively modern inventions dating back to the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Nothing in Rubio’s account bears any relationship to the exceptional qualities emphasized by either the revolutionary generation of Americans or the Civil War generation or even those Americans who, during and after World War I, developed and deployed the idea of the study of “Western Civ” as part of an effort to improve “the citizenship, the intelligence, and the moral and spiritual life of the nation.”
But this vision of a singular Western heritage extending to the American present — of a civilization defined by a common tongue, shared belief and hierarchy of value — does bear an interesting relationship to the imagined feudal Europe that shaped the political imagination of Southern slave owners in the decades before the Civil War.
As political theorist Keidrick Roy shows in “American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism,” antebellum Southern ideologues saw their society as an extension of an idealized medieval past. Both politicians and prominent public intellectuals “preached the importance of slavery and racial hierarchy vis-à-vis thin notions of feudal societies,” Roy writes. In publications like DeBow’s Review, they contended that their society “retains the genius of the medieval civilization, but rises superior to it by making ethnology the basis of social science” — which is to say, by defining inclusion and exclusion on the basis of race. For this class of slaveholders, Roy concludes, “the South positively reanimated the Old World feudal order on American soil.”
Rejecting the Declaration
Part of what this entailed, ideologically, was a rejection of the Declaration of Independence, both as a statement of equality and as a decisive break with the past.
John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman who served briefly as secretary of state under John Tyler and was a pro-slavery political theorist, condemned Jefferson’s proposition that “all men are created equal” as a “hypothetical truism” and, in practice, “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” The truth as he saw it was that American civilization extended out from the Old World, an inheritance reserved for those who could claim the mantle of whiteness.
It is here, in this antipathy toward the egalitarian and universalist elements of the American founding — which is to say those parts of our national heritage that we owe to the liberal values of the Enlightenment — that the connection between the antebellum feudal obsession and the Trump administration’s vision of sovereignty and Western civilization becomes clear, if not obvious.
Both are tied to a racial (and religious) conception of culture and bound up in notions of human hierarchy. The “one people” threatened by migrants in the United States and Europe, by Rubio and Trump’s account, are people of direct European descent, shorn of their particular histories and presented as a single, imagined whole. In other words, as white, first and foremost.
Attacking what’s best in the American tradition
And for the larger MAGA right, as it was for the slaveholder radicals, the Declaration of Independence and its powerful vision of human equality stands as one of the chief obstacles to its effort to consummate its vision of domination and exclusion.
Writing in 1859, Lincoln commented on those in his time who disparaged Jefferson’s words, accusing them of “supplanting the principles of free government” and restoring those of “classification” and “caste.” Today, we have a movement that sees as its aim the destruction of what is best in the American tradition — a movement that, as Lincoln put it, “would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people.”
Jamelle Bouie writes a column for the New York Times.
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