EMILY GILL

At the Munich Security Conference in February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that as inheritors of Western civilization, “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by 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.”

The second Trump administration has purported to represent a bulwark of Western civilization against waves of mass migration that threaten “the continuity of our culture and the future of our people.” The implication is that Europe and the United States are both threatened by these conditions.

Despite periods of restriction, however, the U.S. has historically sustained high levels of immigration. Its culture reflects this pluralism. Similarly, Europe encompasses a multitude of nations, cultures, and languages, as well as a history of ethnic and religious conflict. Europe itself is pluralistic.

Particulars

In a 2025 speech to the right-wing Claremont Institute, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” He was implying that international institutions and alliances threaten the distinctiveness of our national culture. The Trump administration’s conception of Western civilization, and especially of the U.S.’s participation in it, turns out to be narrow.

Columnist Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times has suggested that this conception entails a rejection of the equality of all as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Antebellum South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun stated that universal equality was “a hypothetical truism” and “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” American or Western civilization was apparently an inheritance only for those who are white.

Rubio’s “our people” encompasses only those of European descent, meaning mostly white. It is worth remarking that over the course of U.S. history, the meaning of whiteness and of whom it includes has changed. For some, it did not include Jews. In this context, I would add that with the rise of Christian nationalism, “our people” implies only those who are Christian.

Among equals

Unfortunately, it is not only the Trump administration and its allies who have held to a narrow conception of Western civilization (though this term was uncommon before the 20th century). On the interpretation of law professor Kermit Roosevelt III (no relation to Theodore Roosevelt or his son Kermit), the founders and the signers of the Declaration of Independence were thinking primarily of white Englishmen when signing that document. All may be equal in a state of nature, but that needn’t mean equal in the political society that the revolutionaries aimed to establish. The Declaration’s purpose overall was to renounce allegiance to Britain and to justify doing so. And the Confederacy’s advocates viewed the Declaration as justification for rebelling against the tyranny of the North. For Roosevelt, the contemporary understanding of the Declaration emphasized not individual liberty but national independence, an interpretation that was superceded in the light of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments and the civil rights movement.

We must resist the Trump administration’s crabbed view of Western civilization that is based on ethnic and religious nationalism. The revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote, “The independence of America considered merely as separation from England would have been a matter but of little importance had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments.” Even in the 1790s this capacious vision existed, and it is this vision that must be recovered.

— Emily Gill is Caterpillar Professor of Political Science Emerita, Bradley University