Marco Rubio is failing his Western Civ course
By Jamelle Bouie / The New York Times
Americans of the revolutionary generation did not think of themselves as direct heirs to “Western civilization,” a term that wouldn’t come into vogue until the 20th century. If anything, they saw their new nation as a break with the European past: a new civilization rooted in popular sovereignty and republican self-government.
“The Independence of America considered merely as separation from England, would have been a matter but of little importance,” Thomas Paine observed in the early 1790s, “had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments.”
In 1793, Nathaniel Chipman, a Vermont jurist and veteran of the Revolutionary War, put it a little differently: “The government of the United States exhibits a new scene in the political history of the world,” he wrote.
Among the major founders, Thomas Jefferson — his infatuation with France notwithstanding — was perhaps the most emphatic about the “ocean of fire” between the Old World and the New. “America,” he wrote in an 1823 letter to James Monroe, “has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe. While the last is laboring to become the domicile of despotism, our endeavor should surely be to make our hemisphere that of freedom.”
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/bouie-marco-rubio-is-failing-his-western-civ-course/