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Many have commented favorably on the speech that Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave recently at a security conference in Munich. What they seemed to admire most was his willingness to look beyond some of the particular political and economic matters that preoccupy policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic — the Ukraine War, climate change, immigration, etc. — and to consider the cultural convictions that both Europe and America share.
Secretary Rubio lyrically invoked Dante, the Cologne Cathedral, Shakespeare, the democratic form of government, the university system — even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — as representations of that common vision. But then he took a further step that especially caught my attention. Very much in the spirit of both Pope Benedict XVI and the church historian Christopher Dawson, he observed that culture is tightly linked to cult, that is to say, to religion. In a word, all the things that we value stand in relation to that which we value most highly. And therefore, Secretary Rubio was not afraid to identify the Judeo-Christian faith as the deepest and most abiding source of what is best in Western culture. Only, he concluded, when both Europe and America re-discover together the wellsprings of their common culture will they find the cohesiveness they both long for.
It was heartening to me to see that this clarion call was met with a sustained standing ovation. I believe that even that rather jaundiced and secularized audience sensed the real spirituality that lay behind Rubio’s rhetoric.
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But not everyone was happy with his speech. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who happened to be in Europe at the same time as Rubio, mocked the Secretary of State for being preoccupied with Western culture, which she characterized as “thin.” All cultures, she averred, are ephemeral, passing, unstable; therefore, social analysts should concentrate not on wispy cultural achievements but on the “material” elements of a society which manifest themselves in the class struggle.
I would first observe that it is simply breathtaking to maintain that the culture that produced the university system, affirmed the rights and prerogatives of the individual, and gave rise to democratic rule of law is “thin.” But secondly, I would draw attention to the unnervingly Marxist quality of AOC’s formulation. All serious students of a political economy, Karl Marx held, ought to focus their attention on the class conflict between those who have power and those who do not. He also held that the various expressions of culture — art, literature, science, entertainment, and especially religion — are but epiphenomenal superstructural features, whose entire purpose is to protect the economic substructure. So the responsible intellectual should at best acknowledge the culture but should by no means become preoccupied with it — precisely the recommendation that AOC was making in her airy dismissal of the ideological underpinnings of the West.
Something that is becoming increasingly a concern of mine is the prevalence of explicit Marxism in the rhetoric and practice of certain leaders on the Left in America. Just recently, we heard Mayor Mamdani of New York extolling the “warmth of collectivism” and one of his top aides insisting that the people of our largest city should get accustomed to the idea that government can and should confiscate private property and seize the means of production.
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Again, the Marxism is not implied or subtle; it is right out in the open, unapologetically on display. And this should alarm every American. I might strongly encourage the followers of Mamdani and AOC to speak to those who fled the Marxist tyrannies of Russia and Eastern Europe or those today who labor under Communist oppression in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or China. I sincerely doubt that any of them would gratefully acknowledge the “warmth of collectivism.”
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I speak against this radicalism not simply as a concerned American, but also as a bishop of the Catholic Church. Marx said that the first critique is the critique of religion. He meant that before we even get to an assessment of a capitalist political economy, and certainly before we engage in revolutionary praxis, we must throw off religion, which functions, as he famously put it, as “opium for the masses.” We must shake off our addiction to the drug of supernatural faith, which has dulled our sensitivity to our own suffering and which has provided cover for the oppressive class. It is important to note that the political adepts of Marxism followed their master closely in this regard. Watch the strategies of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot, just to name some of the most notorious examples. Their opening move was invariably to attack the churches.
Some might find the Marxism touted by certain radical politicians today trendy and refreshing, something to be bandied about at Upper East Side cocktail parties. Given the historical record, I find it chilling.
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