The Left Goes After Marco Rubio

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 13,2026

 

When the Democratic Socialists of America aren’t praising Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Mao Zedong, agitating on behalf of communist policies, and resurfacing the forgotten wisdom imparted by self-described communists, they and their allies pretend to be deeply offended by the charge that they are, in fact, communists. Even if the rank-and-file DSA aren’t strict Marxist-Leninists, they and their fellow travelers festoon themselves with the aesthetic trappings of Marxian movements and ape their shibboleths. At the very least, they seem to enjoy participating in a nostalgic reenactment of the kind of political activism that was relevant when the hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin.

 

That explains the far-left activist class’s sudden burst of quaint enthusiasm for the Cuban model. It explains their sympathy for the theocrats in Tehran (where the old red-green alliance left behind a cult of Che Guevara that survives to this day inside the Islamic Republic). And it explains the zeal with which they’ve embraced and promulgated old Soviet narratives about the incompatibility of the “neocolonialist” Zionist scheme with proletarian civilization.

 

That’s how I initially read the New York Times analysis of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s role in the administration’s handling of Venezuela’s affairs following the raid that led to the capture of the Chavista strongman Nicolás Maduro. Rubio “has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela,” report Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev. He holds a level of “sway” over the country’s affairs with few historical parallels. The provisional coalition authority that briefly governed Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein is one. The colonial era is another, and it is arguably more similar. “The arrangement is deeply unusual,” the reporters continue, “unfolding 80 years after the United States relinquished its last sizable formal colony, the Philippines.”

 

So, what colonialist abuses is Rubio accused of overseeing? Well, his agency manages the Venezuelan oil revenues that now flow into U.S. Treasury–controlled escrow accounts, a condition to which Caracas agreed following the Maduro raid. The system provides Rubio with the ability “to stop Venezuela’s most egregious corruption schemes,” which doesn’t sound so terrible. But it’s also an infantilizing relationship “akin to parents handing out allowances to children,” even if the government in Venezuela doesn’t seem to mind. After all, the arrangement puts Washington between Caracas and its “numerous creditors seeking repayment of billions in unpaid debt.”

 

But it was the invocation of colonialism that triggered the socialist left. “We are literally back in the Dollar Diplomacy days of the 1910s when the United States invaded countries and took over their financial systems and ran them as effective colonies,” University of Connecticut historian Bradley Simpson declared. But if this is “imperialism,” it’s the only sort that troubles the left.

 

Venezuela has merely traded one set of foreign benefactors for another. Prior to the Maduro raid, Caracas was communist Cuba’s pet project, which has itself become a burden on its sponsors in the anti-American axis. Venezuela’s value to its partners abroad was less the substandard oil it produced than its proximity to the United States — its suitability as an outpost for spies and foreign military hardware. Venezuela was already a colonial enterprise before January 3. It was just a colony managed by America’s enemies, which did not trouble the socialist left.

 

Moreover, the Times report leaves the reader wondering why Rubio took on such an outsized role as the story’s black hat. Venezuela’s post-Maduro evolution is, after all, a whole-of-government initiative in which the U.S. Treasury, Interior, and Justice Departments are significantly involved. The report clears up any lingering questions about its authors’ motives when it closes with a nasty jab at Rubio that is also a complete non sequitur. “For now, the question of when an election would be held is not in her hands,” the paper wrote of Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez. “It is in Mr. Rubio’s.” Perhaps that’s due to the fact that Rodríguez was until a handful of months ago a socialist apparatchik within an illegitimate junta that has never had any use for free and fair elections.

 

The article has two obvious objectives. First, enliven the most passionate elements on the left by reinforcing their Cold War–era priors. Second, redirect their attention to the man who may be the foremost threat to the socialist project in America.

 

Politico urged its readers to make a similar logical leap in a deeply confused piece published on Sunday about the American right’s sordid attempt to claim 1990s nostalgia for itself. You see, Rubio has made a habit of slipping ’90s-era Easter eggs into his public comments — quoting lyrics from rappers such as Ice Cube and groups such as Cypress Hill and Public Enemy. To hear Politico’s sources tell it, Rubio isn’t just appropriating a culture that isn’t his own; he’s adulterating it.

 

“When it comes to hip-hop, it’s being recontextualized in a way that’s kind of neutering it,” said documentarian Raquel Cepeda. “People like Rubio are ‘looking at it as if they’re being subversive, they’re being cool, they’re being anti-establishment, they’re being anti-RINO, and they’re being anti-swamp-ish, when they are, by very definition, the swamp.’” The American Conservative’s Curt Mills seemed similarly repulsed by Rubio’s appreciation for rap music and its contributions to American culture. “Republicans purloining cultural motifs and memories is always, I think, kind of precarious ground,” he mused.

 

In this vein, it’s worth revisiting a spate of recent reporting that accused Rubio of fumbling a Trump administration effort to enlist Europe in a crackdown on violent left-wing elements on the continent. Rather than question the veracity of the contention on offer from Europeans — that they do not, in fact, have a left-wing violence problem (they most certainly do) — those reports implied that Rubio had embarked on a quixotic crusade against an imaginary adversary. Fortunately, Salon contributor Heather Digby Parton read through the subtext of these reports and said the quiet part out loud. “Some might find it odd that Rubio, allegedly the last grown-up standing in the Trump administration, would jump on this bandwagon,” she wrote. “The fact that Rubio is leading the charge here says very clearly that when Donald Trump is finally shuffled off the stage, his insane brand of politics isn’t going anywhere.”

 

The common thread through all this isn’t Venezuela’s status, the State Department’s intelligence-sharing initiatives, or even the cultural cachet of gangster rap. It’s Rubio and the all-consuming need the left suddenly feels to define him in negative terms before he can define himself.