When Barack Obama went to Athens in mid-November, 2016, on his last state visit as President, he celebrated democracy. The speech he delivered in the Greek capital, at a ritzy opera hall perched next to the Saronic Gulf, came only eight days after Hillary Clinton lost the Presidential election to Donald Trump; Obama, an era-defining leader, now mulled the likely unravelling of his legacy. His remarks evoked a world on edge, beset by growing social and economic divides and the uneven effects of globalization. But he clung to an optimistic theme, hailing the “rocky hills” of Athens as the birthplace of democracy, the incubator of such concepts as citizenship and equality before the law. He acknowledged that democracy in the Athens of antiquity was “far from perfect,” not unlike that of his own nation at its founding, but said that democracy was a “flame first lit here” that had “never died.” And, he insisted, the yearning for democracy reflected a universal dream. “We’ve been told that these are Western ideals,” Obama said. “We’ve been told that some cultures are not equipped for democratic governance and actually prefer authoritarian rule.” But, he said, his travels around the world during eight years in office showed him that that was not the case, that the “basic longing to live with dignity, the fundamental desire to have control of our lives and our future . . . burn in every human heart.”

When Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, went to Athens last week and gave a speech, he mentioned the word “democracy” just twice in almost thirty minutes. Instead, standing upon the Pnyx, a hilly outcrop that overlooks the Acropolis, he tub-thumped for the West. He declared ancient Greek city-states as“the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world,” the font not of universal value but of an exceptional cultural legacy that belonged to Europe and the United States—and not many others. Rubio turned to Plato and invoked the ancient idea of thymos—“the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride,” as he put it, that gives life to a civilization—and placed the Greek hoplites who resisted the advances of the Persian empire at Thermopylae (never mind that they were Spartans, not Athenians) in a line of great men that included Christian martyrs and the defiant Texans who perished at the Alamo. Their bravery, sacrifice, and loyalty to a greater cause, Rubio argued, were distinctly Western characteristics, rooted in an ennobling spirit that he claimed was under threat from those who have made nationalism “a dirty word” and taught children to be “ashamed” of their countries. “Now we take the West’s conception of these things—heroism, honor, duty—we take these things for granted,” he said, before offering a riposte to Obama’s idealism of a decade before. “We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not.” In his telling, European nations, gripped by mass migration and the torpor of liberalism, faced a civilizational “inflection point” and had to “awaken” from their “long slumber”; the West had to maintain“its place “at the head of the world” and resist a “future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”

In all this, Rubio is doing his best to inhabit the Zeitgeist of right-wing politics in the United States. He no longer has time for the neoconservative internationalism of John McCain or George W. Bush, and instead walks a path paved by conservatives such as by James Burnham, who in the nineteen-sixties saw liberal élites as complicit in the “suicide of the West,” and Pat Buchanan, who wrote, in the twilight of his career, at the beginning of this century, of “the death of the West” by immigration and demographic replacement. Of course, the West itself is a nebulous concept, one that was wholly absent from the ancient Greek and Roman luminaries who ground its canon. It entered political parlance in the nineteenth century, as Europeans sought ways to create distance between themselves and Russians, while also gesturing to bonds across the Atlantic. It took a more concrete geopolitical form in the Cold War, undergirded by the NATO military alliance. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the West, for a time, became more capacious, linked to principles of liberal democracy that could take root anywhere.