Rubio’s Chesterton Moment

By Skylar Safriet

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

“A ring of anarchists is engaged in a purely intellectual conspiracy to bring about the end of civilization,” wrote G. K. Chesterton in his 1908 novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. This was certainly Secretary Marco Rubio’s perspective on the current threat of left-wing violence, as shown 118 years later in his recent speech on the issue.

 

 

What reminded me of Chesterton’s novel is how Rubio stripped the issue down to its philosophical studs. The engine of his speech was an attempt to define the worldview that drives the devout left into acts of terrorism in the first place.

 

Left-wing revolutionary violence, whatever its name, is motivated by, as Rubio puts it, “hatred for civilization itself . . . perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can,” in addition to what they build.

 

The communist vision for which Marxist revolutionaries throw bombs is “small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul . . . a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without — a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.”

 

A framework that intentionally stifles any unequal distribution of success will never allow for the exaltation of greatness as a virtue. The only virtue is for there to be no virtue. This is what brings it all back to Chesterton: “The world communism envisions is a world without God.”

 

This is the ultimate goal of the anarchists in Chesterton’s story: They fanatically seek to “abolish God!” because they “wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery. . . . The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.”