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Pushback

Marco Rubio is reportedly the new conservative hero of the hour after his keynote address to CPAC. This was partly because he told the story of his family and his upbringing, which was sure to please the crowd, but it was mostly because he launched into a tedious lecture about American exceptionalism and because he […]

Marco Rubio is reportedly the new conservative hero of the hour after his keynote address to CPAC. This was partly because he told the story of his family and his upbringing, which was sure to please the crowd, but it was mostly because he launched into a tedious lecture about American exceptionalism and because he made some pretty wild claims about the significance of the upcoming election. Let’s take the second point first. Rubio said that we were seeing the “single greatest political pushback in American history.” There is a greater pushback today than there was with secession, Unionism, prohibitionism, anti-prohibitionism, the civil rights movement and the backlash against civil rights? That is quite remarkable. He must know something the rest of us don’t.

Rubio seems very fond of incredible exaggerations. He offered up another one when he said that “2010 is not just a choice between Democrat and Republican…2010 is referendum on the very identity of our nation.” So what does that mean? If Republicans gain half of what they need to retake both houses, the “identity of our nation” as he understands it will have been half-preserved and half-lost? Or does it mean that anything short of Republican majorities is an endorsement of all the things Rubio is railing against? If there is a referendum on the identity of our nation, presumably that means that one result will confirm one identity and another result will confirm the other. If the referendum comes out the wrong way, will Rubio appeal it to the Supreme Court and try to have the result overturned? Of course, I’m joking, but Rubio certainly is not.

Fortunately, national identity is not something for Marco Rubio to stake in the election, but it is an extraordinary thing to say. How sad and false it is to think that national identity hinges on the outcome of something as genuinely trivial as Congressional elections. How fragile and weak is the exceptionalism Rubio praises that it can be undone by one election? I have no idea whether Rubio really believes this, but politicians use this kind of language to generate panic and fear when they have little else to offer. This is one more in a long line of alarmist claims that Republicans trot out every election year to scare their voters into turning out. In presidential election years, it is always the old “the Supreme Court hangs in the balance!” argument that they throw out to mobilize disaffected social conservatives, and in the last decade they have relied on the specter of terrorism to do a lot of the work for them. Remember that it was just two years ago when Romney dropped out of the primary race at CPAC because he said he didn’t want to facilitate a Democratic win and thus aid the victory of terrorists. That was yesterday’s demagoguery. Apparently the fate of national identity itself is at stake this time. This claim should be embarrasing to anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute.

I called Rubio’s exceptionalist rhetoric tedious because so much of it is obviously an exaggeration of reality. Rubio’s speech reminded me of Fred Thompson’s claim that Americans shed more blood for the freedom of other nations than any other people in the world. This was demonstrably untrue, but it pleased the crowd and so he kept saying it. There’s nothing quite like denigrating the rest of the world, including our allies, and chanting, “We’re Number 1!” to get this kind of audience fired up. Rubio’s speech was filled with overblown claims about the uniqueness of the economic opportunity possible in America. America has the “the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed against rich people in the marketplace and competition” and it is “the only place in the world where a company that started as an idea drawn out on the back of a cocktail napkin can one day be publicly traded on Wall Street.” This gave David Frum an easy opening to observe:

The sad fact is that as best we can measure, present-day America offers less upward mobility than many other advanced countries, including Denmark, Germany, Canada and Australia.

Having overstated America’s uniqueness on this score, Rubio naturally divides the world into a stark contrast between a free America and the slavish other nations:

Almost every other country in the world chose to have the government run the economy. They chose to allow government to decide which companies survive and fail.

I wonder how many fit into that “almost” loophole, since there are dozens and dozens of countries where the government does not “run the economy.” Other governments do consume a larger share of GDP than ours, but a great many of them are a long way from anything remotely like a command economy. It is revealing that Rubio’s American exceptionalism leans so heavily on the denial of the existence of real capitalist economies in the rest of the world. Normally Americans make excessive claims in the other direction by claiming far more influence on the economic practices adopted in other countries than we probably deserve credit for, but at least that would seem to be much more consistent with an excessive Americanism than what Rubio was saying.

Granted, this is a red-meat speech for an audience of activists and true believers. Even-tempered, accurate statements are naturally going to be few and far between. Even so, it is stunning how factually wrong and misinformed Rubio was in the most high-profile speech of his career in the keynote address at the main conservative political conference of the year.

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