We’ve got an excellent video roundup for you today.
We open—where else?—with the midterms. Contributor Jonathan Casey, who will soon be joining our team full time, digs into the exit polls and finds that last week’s vote was, above all, a rejection of Trump and the MAGA agenda. (Don’t miss our post-election analysis package, in which Robert Tracinski expounds on that theme.)
Next is Cathy Young’s brilliant takedown of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Athens speech on Western civilization, adapted for video and narrated by Jacob Repkin. This speech is important because it got a ton of attention and many received it as a soft launch for a run to succeed Trump. Rubio holds up Caesar and other European conquerors as models for America, a strange choice for a republic founded in opposition to empire. What he’s offering, Young concludes, amounts to “a grotesque vision of Trumpism with an erudite face.”
Then we have a clip from Jonathan Rauch’s fascinating conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre for The UnPopulist. They discuss whether liberal values are enough, on their own, to build a life on. Rauch, drawing on the Founders, argues that liberalism has always leaned on religion and other outside sources for its moral grounding, while Lefebvre makes the case that it can carry us most of the way by itself. You’ll definitely want to check out the whole thing.
Finally, Francis Fukuyama tells Shikha Dalmia how his family lost nearly everything to Japanese internment, and why the MAGA right’s talk of “heritage Americans” strikes him as so toxic. You can already catch Part I of the convo—Part II is coming soon.