RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?