Woke Swells Deconstructed — Marco Rubio Pins the Tail on the Elite Donkeys Destroying

Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity
By Marco Rubio
(Broadside Books, 223 pages, $32)

In 2010, a 39-year-old Marco Rubio (he looked even younger) scored a major electoral upset, unhorsing Florida’s popular (then) Republican Governor Charlie Crist for an open U.S. Senate seat. Rubio was then a former Speaker of the Florida House, barely known outside of his Miami-Dade County district. But he so outclassed Crist on the campaign trail that he drove him out of the Republican Party before that year’s primary. Rubio won the general against independent Crist and Democrat Kendrick Meek by a comfortable margin.

Crist was a formidable opponent in 2009 when Rubio began his upstart campaign. Rubio caught and surpassed Crist on the basis of a solid conservative message articulately, passionately, and convincingly delivered. I first saw Rubio the campaigner in the spring of ’09 at an informal seafood restaurant on a causeway connecting Tampa and St. Petersburg. He gave about a 10-minute talk that day outlining what he saw as Florida’s and the nation’s problems and how he would approach them if elected. I’d love to be able to say that I predicted that day that Rubio would upset Crist. I didn’t. But I was impressed and thought if he gets this message out, David stands a real chance against Goliath. (Since then Goliath has, to put it mildly, downsized.)

At that early campaign event I was seated at a table with three comely and chatty young women (by pure chance, of course). After the talk I asked the woman to my left what she thought. She replied, “I just want to take him home with me.” I’m not sure her interest in Marco was entirely political, but the rest of the room seemed to like what they’d heard.

During that campaign I covered a host of Rubio’s campaign events and was privileged to enjoy a fair amount of face time with him. I found him to have one of the widest bases of knowledge — at far deeper than the headline, Wikipedia, or talking point levels — of any politician I had encountered. (This would be a large number in my decades in and around politics.) He knew a lot and could relate what he knew to the issues of the day clearly and without having to resort to polls or focus groups.

Readers will find this acute analytical intelligence and passion at work in Decades of Decadence, a spot-on diagnosis of what has brought about America’s precipitous economic, moral, and political decline of the past three decades. He names names and pulls no punches. The book is a euphemism-free zone.

The nation destroyers in the piece are elites in corporate America, Wall Street, mainstream media, entertainment, universities, the teaching vocation, publishing, a dismaying percentage of the clergy, and the constellation of indignation groups that the enumerated villains cater to and in many cases fund. Most savvy conservatives understand that these are the bad guys (and gals). But Rubio gives us the history and the specifics, chapter and verse.

The current Democrat Party is a wholly owned subsidiary and the political arm of this evil deconstruction project that has brought low the most open, free, and affluent country in history. The party that continues to market itself as the friend and protector of American workers has colluded in the destruction of America’s formerly vast industrial capacity, exporting our manufacturing base and the well-paying jobs American workers have relied on for their livelihood and their dignity. Globalist corporate executives, many of whom no longer even think of themselves as Americans but as citizens of a borderless world, do this in the relentless pursuit of cheap labor and a fatter corporate bottom line.

Alas, too often Republicans have aided in toxic economic policies. This part of the problem is bipartisan. After the fall of the Soviet Union, too many on both sides of the aisle bought into the “end of history” delusion. This was the idea that leftism was now a spent force and that all the countries of the world soon be free-economy democracies like the United States, the world’s only remaining super-power in the 1990s. All we had to do was integrate their economies with those of the West and the entire planet would be rich, happy, and peaceful. These wrong-headed assumptions were believed by those who should know better, including just about everyone with an Ivy League degree and two presidents named Bush.

In pursuit of this utopian fantasy, the U.S. allowed China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 in the naive belief that free trade and prosperous economics would defang the world’s totalitarian nations, including China, which has benefitted enormously from the free-trade religion and now poses both an economic and a military threat to America. The CCP is at least as totalitarian now as it was in 2001.

Turns out the 1990s were not the end of history, just a brief vacation from it. Leftism and leftist thinkers are as ineradicable as the cucaracha (and about as attractive to sensible thinkers).

While Republicans share blame with Democrats for the economic train wreck that has cost Americans so much, the left social engineering, which has saddled a once sensible nation with so many bizarre notions from sex to race to climate, is totally a Democrat project. You don’t see elected Republicans insisting that America is a systemically racist country where whites are incurable oppressors. It isn’t and we aren’t. We don’t see Republicans insisting that giving an ugly guy hormone shots and putting him in a dress makes him a woman. It doesn’t. It’s rare to find a Republican insisting that the Earth will burn to a crisp if we don’t abandon fossil fuels. It won’t. And we don’t see Republicans insisting, as Democrats are required to, that our Southern border is secure. It isn’t. Unless, that is, Democrats mean it is secure for drug cartels, ruthless coyotes, spies, and a host of others the U.S. could well do without.

Large majorities of Americans want our borders to be secure while welcoming a reasonable number of vetted immigrants. They want our nation defended by a competent and kick-ass military trained in the arts of war rather than in the latest pronouns. They don’t want government schools to coopt parents in sensitive areas like sex, while failing to teach children how to read and write. But the elites that command all the cultural transmission belts punch well above their weight, and so far have been having their way with common sense Americans, the very people who, to coin a phrase, made America great in the first place. If the current elite rules of engagement continue, we’ll have a hell of a time hanging on to mediocre.

Decades is not a happy read. In certain places it’s hard not to tear-up at Rubio’s stark revelations of the economic, cultural, and moral treasure that has been lost. Deliberately destroyed. But it is a helpful primer for those many traditional and patriotic Americanos who find themselves asking: “How the hell did we get here?” The dismal history and the charges and specifications against the defendants are clearly and economically laid out in just 209 pages of text.

If the book has a weakness it’s in the “what do we do about it?” department. Much of our ills have to do with short-term thinking. Corporate CEOs who can’t think past their next quarterly report and how they’re going to explain their company’s performance to stock analysts. And politicians who can’t see past the next election. Exactly how we get short-term and totally self-interested thinkers to take the long view and respect and have some care for the nation that has given them so much is not revealed. Rubio’s diagnosis is accurate. But without effective treatment the prognosis is dismal. Perhaps this could be the subject of Rubio’s next book. But he’d better hurry before the last best hope of Earth has passed the point of no return.