America Is the West

Is Europe?

“We are part of one civilization—Western civilization,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio to a gathering of European leaders at the recent Munich Security Conference. It has become one of the Trump Administration’s running themes that the Western tradition binds America to Europe by way of, as Rubio put it, “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.”

In The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie objects that the term “Western civilization” is a recent coinage which the American Founders would have probably rejected out of hand. “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,” Bouie writes. “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.”

He eventually lapses into silly mumbling about how “clear, if not obvious” it is that linking America to medieval Europe is a rhetorical strategy Trump owes to antebellum slaveholders (you know who else liked Western culture??!!). But somewhere along the way, Bouie actually raises an interesting point. The founding generation labored to disentangle themselves, not just from England, but from the whole logic of throne and altar that had stood unjustly in the way of human liberty—at least according to one typical Enlightenment account. Does this mean America is not, after all, a nation of the West?

“Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation,” said George Washington in his Farewell Address. “Long before the Declaration of Independence,” said John Quincy Adams a generation later, “the great mass of the People of America and of the People of Britain, had become total strangers to each other.” Jealous to protect their new sovereignty, the first Americans insisted they had made a clean break from the old world. They were proud of it.

What they were proud of, though, was their fidelity to Western ideals. Bouie is right that they hadn’t yet learned to put it in those terms. But their guiding thought was that America represented a true inheritor of the spirit that fired Athens and Jerusalem, the spirit that built Christendom. The lights of reason and revelation had been heinously obscured by corruption on the continent, said John Quincy Adams. Nevertheless, “the incompressible energies of the human intellect, bound and crippled as it was by the double cords of ecclesiastical imposture and political oppression,” had still driven Western man forward in pursuit of his true rights and obedience to his true duties.

America was the realization of a dream that Christians had long been laboring to achieve, “an improvement in the intercourse of man with his Creator.” The relationship between God and man had been developing for centuries, gradually and often painfully, in Europe. “If to this step of human advancement Germany likewise lays claim in the person of Martin Luther, or in the earlier but ineffectual martyrdom of John Huss, England may point to her Wicliffe as a yet more primitive vindicator of the same righteous cause, and may insist on the glory of having contributed her share to the improvement of the moral condition of man.”

Now that America had put the principles of the reformation into full and glorious practice, the argument went, other nations would have to catch up or fall short forevermore of the new standard. Quoting Shakespeare, Adams foretold that the drama of America’s revolution would be “acted o’er / In states unborn, and accents yet unknown[.]” In modern terms, it’s not that America was cutting itself off from the West. It’s that Americans were taking up the mantle of the true West, claiming to embody the best of its heritage more fully than any people had done before.

In their monumental two-volume history of Western civilization, The Golden Thread, James Hankins and Allen Guelzo point out that, although “the expression ‘Western Civilization’ was hardly used before the twentieth century,” nevertheless “the thing denoted by the term ‘Western civilization’ was, emphatically, no invention.” The American revolution was indisputably connected, by links of both history and thought, to the traditions that produced Socrates and St. Augustine. When his soldiers were huddled in frozen misery at Valley Forge, George Washington roused them with a performance of Joseph Addison’s play Cato, about a Roman Stoic dying in the name of liberty. The nation they were fighting for hadn’t yet been born. The dream of it, though, was ancient. It was the dream of the West.

Rubio, like J.D. Vance before him, isn’t saying America needs to be more European. He’s saying Europe is no longer Western enough. Censorship, self-hatred, and civilizational apathy have eroded its borders and thinned its faith. “And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” said Rubio. It’s because we believe the future of the West rests with us.

The snide and the half-sophisticated among us are in the habit of insisting that this whole notion is a mirage, or a cultural construction. They like to say that “Western history” is only a story we tell ourselves when it’s convenient. It’s a story alright, but it’s never convenient. It’s just true. America represents not a break with Western history but a new era of it, a new flower atop a tree with deep roots.

Reflecting on this American phenomenon, Alfred, Lord Tennyson told his fellow Englishmen to “Be proud of those strong sons of thine” who, having been schooled in the ways of liberty, “Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught, / And in thy spirit with thee fought.” If we’re fighting with our old allies now, it’s in that same spirit. America is the West, and has been since its earliest beginnings. We must hope that Europe is still the West too.