Rubio’s Faux Conservatism on Display

Sen. Marco Rubio, not exactly the country’s most doctrinaire conservative, earned a rousing reception on Saturday at the nation’s largest conservative gathering. The Florida senator warned there is little future for the GOP “if the movement is hijacked by someone who isn’t a conservative.”

The crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C., which seemed to be dominated by young, pro-Rubio Establishment-leaning Republicans, went wild for the senator’s digs against Donald Trump. That was especially true when Rubio told CNN’s Dana Bash that the American dream “is not about how many buildings have your name on it.”

But despite the enthusiastic response of the moderate 20-somethings to Rubio’s Trump attacks and his simple stock definition of conservatism as the belief in limited government, free enterprise, and a strong national defense, Rubio seemed to offer more of the same business as usual that gave rise to Trump in the first place.

[lz_third_party includes=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKhgumtM3Zo”]

“Free enterprise is the best economic system in the history of the world,” said Rubio. But he didn’t even touch on the devastation that free trade agreements have wrought on the American middle class. Despite wide skepticism over the wisdom of foreign entanglements spreading throughout the conservative movement, Rubio said the U.S. military “should always be the most powerful on earth.”

In the span of five minutes he made the astonishing assertion that all real conservatives stand always by the state of Israel, and described ISIS as the greatest terrorist threat in the world. But defeating the radical Sunnis in ISIS will be nigh impossible without the aid of Shias, represented by Iran, Israel’s biggest enemy.

For all Rubio’s promise of a “New American Century,” the sound bites he offered up sounded like they would have been right at home during the old George W. Bush years. “Conservatism is based on a set of ideals,” Rubio said.

And despite his welcome observation that “if there is no God, then where do our rights come from,” Rubio offered no concrete plan or policy — nor even committed — to protect the rights of Christians and encourage and support social conservative values.

Indeed, “free enterprise” was Rubio’s solution for solving racial tension in America.

The tone of Rubio’s speech, and the enthusiastic response of the legion of moderate young Republicans who showed up to hear it, suggests that while the GOP Establishment is not ignoring Trump, it is willfully ignoring the reasons for his success, and risking alienating permanently large swathes of the American public.