Everyone agrees that Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Friday was remarkable.
I do not mean that everyone liked it.
For example, Boris Pistorius, the German Defense Minister, sniffed—or perhaps “smoldered” would be a more accurate term—that Vance’s remarks were “not acceptable.”
And then there is Bill Kristol, a sort of Greta Thunberg of the rancid former right, who thundered that Vance’s speech was “a humiliation for the U.S. and a confirmation that this administration isn’t on the side of the democracies.”
“The democracies.” What do you suppose Kristol means by that?
While you ponder that question, note that other people thought rather well of Vance’s speech. I thought it was excellent myself, but forget about my opinion. Jonathan Turley said that Vance’s speech was “perhaps the greatest single declaration uttered since ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” It was, Turley wrote elsewhere, “truly Churchillian—no less than the famous Iron Curtain speech in which Churchill dared the West to confront the existential dangers of communism.”
How can we explain the discrepancy: the outraged Pistorius/Kristol reaction and what I will call the Kimball/Turley reaction (though many people besides me applauded Vance’s speech)?
I think it comes down to how one understands that overdetermined, familiar yet often only half-understood word “democracy.”
Kristol said that Vance’s speech showed that the Trump administration was not “on the side of the democracies.”
What do you think of that claim?
I think poorly of it because I believe that a democracy is a political arrangement in which the people are sovereign.
I suspect that Kristol and European bureaucrats of all descriptions believe that it is a form of government in which only the right people, i.e, themselves, are sovereign.
Vance’s speech argued for the former. It also contained several admonitions about what he thought were threats to democracy. For the balance of this column, I’ll gather a little chrestomathy of his observations and let you decide who was right.
Vance began by echoing a point that Donald Trump made many times during his first term. “It’s important,” Vance said, “for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense.” Defense against what? Russia? China? No, the fundamental threat facing Europe is not any external entity but a “threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
You could see the audience stiffening up at that. Like what values? Well, what about the former European commissioner who sounded “delighted” that the Romanian government had “just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too.”
Vance didn’t say it out loud, but he didn’t have to. Should the AfD win, it is likely they will not be seated. Something like that happened in France last summer. Marine Le Pen stunned the establishment in the French election last summer, but the elites who actually run the country closed ranks and declared that she could not possibly be seen to have won because “the Republic” had to be preserved.
The elites in America tried to do the same thing to Donald Trump, but the people mounted a challenge that was “too big to rig.” The fate of elections, Vance sees, is tightly bound up with values that were once held to be fundamental to democracy—values like, for example, free speech. That was an important issue in the Cold War: on the one side, you had countries committed to individual liberty, a virtue that prominently includes the liberty to express one’s opinions, on the other you, had a society in which the individual was subordinated to the collective.
Unfortunately, Vance said, “when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, ‘hateful content.’”
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. As the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I’m quoting, ‘a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.’
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends in the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.
Adam was in due course found guilty and ordered to pay thousands of pounds in legal fees. These episodes have already been reported and commented on. But here they were repeated by the vice president of the United States who was reflecting the concern of the Trump administration.
Vance went on to note that the organizers of the conference in Munich banned certain lawmakers. He had the AfD, among others, in mind. But isn’t it important to maintain an open dialogue with all parties that represent an important block of voters? In one of his sharpest barbs, Vance noted that
…to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or even worse, win an election.
By this point, you could almost see the steam wafting up from the shocked heads of the assembled bureaucrats and military leaders. Vance was offering no sops in his speech. He was puzzled, he said, about “what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for.”
What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.
Vance ended by warning about the dangers of mass migration to the security and civilization integrity of Europe. “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” Vance said. “But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit, and agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration.”
So what about democracy? “It is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box,” Vance said.
I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process, protects nothing. In fact, it is the most sure-fire way to destroy democracy.And speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential. And trust me, I say this with all humor, if American Democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
You can see why many of the attendees of the Munich Security Conference were aghast at Vance’s comments. He held up a mirror to their deficiencies and hypocrisies. It cannot have been pleasant. But in my view, Vance was right: “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”
I wonder what Bill Kristol would say about that?
No one likes being told they are wrong-----especially when that someone is part of the government. More especially when that government forgets who the real boss is.
Power, when taken from the people is rarely given back. Often, it must be taken back.
J.D. Vance’s Munich speech woke up more than Europe. He identified himself in a manner never seen on his campaign trail and in any debate with Tim Walz. The positive impressions I had of him as the right choice made by Donald Trump were logarithmically advanced after that speech. He gets it (Democracy) which is something that appears to be as elusive to the Europeans as it was to the Greeks when Socrates tried to explain to them how their version of democracy was not quite as virtuous as they believed it to be. Socrates was right and eventually, thousands of years later, John Locke figured out what was wrong and how to fix it. Jefferson made things clear and understandable in the Declaration of Independence.
If men were Angels Democracy would have no purpose. They would all think similarly. And they would all speak similarly. After all free speech is about political speech which is often more than dissimilar; it is often the view held by the minority which may, sometimes, be a minority of only one (1). Currently Europe is just a touch short of burning heretics at the stake. They have a lot in common with modern American progressives.
A simple democracy, or rule by a majority, could be far more sophisticated than rule by an emotional mob but is it really much different? How many cultures approved of slavery. America once did. Do fifty-one percent of a population have the right to enslave forty-nine percent or even one percent? And do they have the right to determine and enforce what a minority speaks about? What can be the deciding factors that make a Democracy work?
Theoretically some of us once figured out how to make fire and use it and create a wheel and use it. Civilization advanced as a result. Similarly Lock, Hume, Burke and others figured out that all men were created equally by Nature’s God and endowed with the right to Life and the Liberty to pursue happiness (property). There is no such thing as a democracy worth striving for unless those rights are not violated, not for the majority but for everyone right down to each and every individual. There is no such thing as negative rights for some and positive rights for others provided by a government for some of the people but not all of the people.
It was America’s Founders that fashioned a contract to prevent the Federal Government from trespassing on the rights of any individual. That was understood by all of them. Those rights are few but they clearly encompass, by inference, the concept of individual liberty. The Founders knew that Government and theocracies (most) were the greatest threat to individual liberty. They had just fought and won a war which emancipated them from the tyranny imposed by a king. They ratified a Constitution and a year afterward amended it and doubled down with ten amendments designed to make certain that there would be no uncertainty regarding restrictions by government on the liberty granted, as a birthright, to every individual. The Bill of Rights belongs to all of us. It does not belong to the government. It was designed to put chains around the government and restrict any attempts to restrict liberty.
To understand how unmoored from the Constitution (original intentions) America has become people only need to look at the prior Administration and consider how much of the Bill of Rights was ignored by the Fourth Branch of government, the unelected branch. We don’t need a grotesquely modified democracy touted by the women of the Squad or the outspoken socialist representative Bernie Saunders along with the rest of the Democratic Party and their RINO sympathizers. We need the Constitution as was originally drafted, ratified and amended. All the working parts are there. We only ask that our representatives, who took an oath to support it, read it, understand it and govern by it.
J.D. Vance used Europe as a sounding board but his words echoed around the world. Ask not for who he meant his words to be heard by. It was meant for Americans as well and especially for the Democratic progressives. We are in a domestic war. He heralded a war cry and it is about far more than the will of a majority. It is about a Democracy which cherishes and protects Individual Liberty.
VP Vance has, at every turn and in all situations to date, impressed me & given me hope for the days beyond PDJT. The best, clearest expressions of what we who love this country and its founding principles are fighting for have come from our vice-president. His address in Munich was no exception.
Western Europe’s thrones have, for the most part, collapsed by gentle erosion; all of them that remain are constitutional monarchies with kings or queens who are, generally speaking, glorified public servants with over-the-top government-provided housing & security details and job security for life. As far as I am aware, only the US and France fought definitive wars to gain the right of self-rule and those two events share little in common beyond a time frame and a few ideological roots.
The point of my digression is that I have to speculate if the differences in the evolution of European and American democracy is one of the reasons why we are seeing such a spectacular collapse of democracy in Europe. What we are seeing here is an attempt to re-found this country and I don’t know that Europe has a cultural context for such an event. Creeping socialism( by any name), globalism, multiculturalism have erased any semblance of democratic rule and they have moved on to the active suppression of both the speech & rights of their native citizens; no country can survive that.
Bottom line…without the US to be their perennial security force, Europe is on a crash course to destroy itself. Decades of fecklessness are finally coming due. If the anger simmering amongst my British friends is any indication, I think we could see a civil war break out there within the next decade; France has been in the same state for a couple of decades and Germany is rapidly reaching the boiling point.
Bingo! The US came close to such a scenario last November and many, including me, sincerely believed the Ruling Class would not allow Trump to be re-elected. Fortunately, I was wrong and the elites concluded it would be better to lose that battle, than threaten a war they would surely lose.
But Europe’s arrogant elite do not possess such circumspection. For West European elites, the expression, “you will own nothing and be happy”, is a maxim they intend to enforce with smug disdain. And their reaction to Vance’s speech only reinforces that perspective.
Notwithstanding Vance’s challenging remarks, it remains to be seen if Europe’s peasantry will rise from their obeisance and force their leaders to heed them. Though I am hopeful they will, I am not optimistic.
The big tell for me in JD Vance’s speech was when he spoke about the “extraordinary blessings of liberty,” as in
“Surprise?” That’s George-Gilder-speak.
Godfrey Daniels. Mother of Pearl.