Marco Rubio begins at the end of history.
“Decades of Decadence,” the senator’s latest book, opens with an epigraph from Edward Gibbon. “Their personal valor remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command,” wrote Gibbon in the first volume of his famed “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Then: Fukuyama. Rubio’s introduction recalls the “The End Of History” hitting shelves right before he headed off to college in 1989. “Within a few years, the sense that history was over came to change the way US policymakers thought about our place in the world,” he argues. “Rather than working to assure that the United States would maintain its internal strength and its position as the world’s dominant superpower, our leaders enacted policies that put this country on a road of slow, inevitable decline.”
Rubio takes readers on a tour of this decline, making thoughtful stops at some familiar locations. NAFTA and WTO are given due attention. Rubio reflects on the Great Recession, the Ferguson riots, and Obergefell. There’s talk of BlackRock and Apple, and citations of Michael Lind, Irving Kristol, and Wesley Yang. (The senator explores Yang’s concept of “successor ideology.”)
All that is to say, “Decades of Decadence” knits together familiar arguments from the last half-decade of realignment politics, rightfully evaluating our culture, economics, and foreign policy to build a comprehensive analysis of
