ROGER KIMBALL: The West at a Crossroads: Excellence or Mediocrity?

Remember when, just a few years ago, our cultural commissars celebrated the career criminal George Floyd and The 1619 Project? The unhappy anti-American beneficiaries of America took to the streets to desecrate our monuments and defile our heritage. It was in this context, Rubio observed, that “‘nationalism’ became a dirty word. . . . [W]e taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.” At the same time, we began to outsource not only our industry but also our sovereignty, “transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.”

It is here that Rubio’s speech reaches its denouement. Both the United States and Europe are at a crossroads. Do we endeavor to recover the values we have inherited from the Greeks or do we go quietly into the not-so-good night of spiritual flaccidness? Rubio’s answer caused panic among the low-testosterone denizens of academia and the media. “Under President Trump,” he said, “the United States has made its choice.”

We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Much more like this please, it’s a polar opposite worldview to when then-President Obama cynically declared in 2009 that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”