JD Vance’s home truths too hot to handle for Euro-elite
“That’s great,” conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger remarked. “But is it for good? Many in Europe are fearful of a time where maybe some kind of a second Trump could be looming in the future.”
For the Euro-elite, the new US administration is the sum of all fears. The 47th President is not merely some kind of second Trump but the actual Donald Trump with an agenda.
On Friday, Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, was greeted with nervous applause as he took the podium at the Munich conference. Harris’s 2022 speech focused on an external enemy. Vance, on the other hand, was there to talk about the enemy within, the woke forces undermining the common principles of freedom and democracy that underpin the post-war trans-Atlantic alliance.
“The threat that I worry the most about vis a-vis Europe is not Russia,” Vance said. “It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
If Europe was to defend itself against foreign enemies, it must first be clear about what it was protecting. “What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?” he said.
Vance illustrated Europe’s retreat from liberty by detailing the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old British Army veteran who was found guilty in Bournemouth Magistrates Court of praying within 150 metres of an abortion clinic. The court reasoned that his silent prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because, at one point, his head was seen slightly bowed, and his hands were clasped. Smith-Connor’s moving defence that he was praying for his unborn son, who had been aborted 22 years ago, cut no ice. He was ordered to pay costs of £9000 ($17,800).
Vance illustrated the elite’s apparent contempt for democracy by pointing to mass migration.
“No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” he said. “All over Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promised to put an end to out-of-control migration.”
The elite had gone further by refusing to deal with democratically elected parties they didn’t like. In France, President Emmanuel Macron contrived to deal Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National out of any meaningful role in government, despite that party winning the largest share of votes in the legislative election.
The centre-right and centre-left parties in the European parliament used a similar strategy to sideline a bloc of patriotic conservative parties in elections in June.
In Germany, the SPD, in cahoots with the nominally centre-right CDU, will try to use the same tactics to neuter Alternative fur Deutschland after next week’s Bundestag election.
The excuse in every case is that the leper parties are dangerously far right; if not fascist, then fascist adjacent. Vance drew attention to the arrogance at the heart of this argument. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” he said. “There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle, or you don’t.”
After almost 18 minutes of uncompromising criticism, Vance tried to soften the atmosphere with a joke. “I say this with all humour,” he began. “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
Vance paused in anticipation of laughter. There wasn’t any. Deutsche Welle reported: “The tension in the room was almost palpable.”
Vance’s speech would have been uncontroversial had it been printed as an article in the National Review.
Yet Europe’s oligarchs are ill-prepared for such insubordination. They attend conferences such as this one to have their egos stroked, not to listen to home truths from a self-confessed hillbilly.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accused Vance of unacceptably interfering in the imminent elections on behalf of AfD, a party he said was linked to the Nazis. Yet Scholz’s attempt to grasp the moral high ground emphasised the draining authority of Europe’s political class, which has struggled to come to terms with the popular fury driving support towards parties such as the AfD in almost every European democracy.
Scholz’s SPD is running a distant third at 16 per cent in the latest polling, seven points behind the AfD. The Chancellor’s approval rating is 20 per cent, according to a recent Newsweek survey comparing the popularity of national leaders. Macron is on 18 per cent. Trump, by contrast, has never been more popular. Newsweek puts him at 52 per cent.
Vance sees the European old guard’s intolerance of dissent as a sign of weakness. “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,” he said. They “simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way”.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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