The fight Vice President JD Vance recently picked with our European allies concerned much more than free speech.
It’s about two colliding visions of society and two contradictory forms of democracy, emerging out of the global struggle between the public and the institutional elites.
On Feb. 14, Vance addressed European leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference.
He was expected to deliver the bad news about the Trump administration’s lack of support for the Ukraine war — but the subject never came up.
Instead, Vance’s speech was an extended criticism of European governance, particularly with regard to the treatment of anti-establishment groups.
Declaring “there’s a new sheriff in town,” the vice president made it clear that the US-Europe alliance of elites that had prevailed during the Biden era was now officially dead and buried — and unmourned.
The vice president’s message sounded like an ultimatum: “I deeply believe that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. . . . If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there’s nothing America can do for you.”
Ample number of cases
Vance cited a litany of cases in support of his critique — a Briton arrested for praying silently some distance from an abortion clinic, Germans fined or jailed for posting memes some authority has labeled racist or misogynistic, the erection of an ideological “firewall” to keep populist parties forever out of power in Germany, France, and elsewhere.
“To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice,” he concluded.
“We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.”
With these words, the vice president turned the spotlight on a remarkable project that has been carried out in the dark of night and studiously avoided in polite conversation.
The US and Europe consider themselves to belong to the same club of nations: the democracies.
But the US is now governed by the ultimate populist, Donald Trump.
The European Union, and many member states, are largely ruled by technocratic elites.
Do the two sides mean the same thing — the same political system, the same individual protections — when they use the word “democracy”?
Far more than the US, the Europeans have tilted the balance of power in favor of the state over individual citizens.
In Germany and France, for example, public ridicule of elected officials is likely to bring a policeman’s knock on your door.
This has long been the case.
European politicians have always distrusted their electorates, which they imagine as an easily stampeded mob prone to national hatreds and genocidal violence.
The objective of elite rule is to keep the voters on a tight leash for the sake of peace and sanity.
The digital age, in Europe as everywhere, has played havoc with established hierarchy and authority. Massive protests from below like the Indignados of Spain and the Yellow Vests in France have rattled rigidly top-down societies.
Anti-elite populists have been elected to office in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Slovakia.
Populist parties, invariably described as “far right” by the European media, have earned sizeable chunks of the vote in France, Germany, Britain and Sweden.
By contrast, the traditional parties, home to the elites, are in a state of visible collapse.
The ruling coalition in Germany has just been swept out of office.
Emmanuel Macron’s technocratic party was defeated in the legislative elections, leaving France politically deadlocked.
The approval rate for the Labour Party government in Britain stands at 16%.
Horrified, panicked, feeling assaulted on all sides, the Euro-elites have sought to build an impregnable political fortress against the battering of the digital storm.
They have quietly abandoned the open society to construct what I would call a “guided society,” in which a tangled web of laws, regulations and political maneuvers allows the elites to act as sherpas to the public, leading it upwards and onwards always in the direction of preferred policies — open immigration, decarbonization, unconditional support of Ukraine, etc.
They have lost faith in old-fashioned democracy and turned to a “limited-option democracy” that disenfranchises populism and tolerates only a narrow band of electoral outcomes.
Criminalizing opinions
Disfavored speech has been criminalized.
Social media “standards” have been imposed that muzzle the platforms and cost them billions in fines for violations.
The police in virtually every European country surveil websites and devices for speech crimes.
Merely for posting taboo opinions on immigration or abortion, ordinary members of the public have been prosecuted, fined, sometimes jailed.
Populist parties have been treated as pariahs and barred from government — even when, as in Austria, they received the largest number of votes.
Limited-option democracy reached a logical endpoint in December in Romania, where the Constitutional Court, on the flimsiest of pretexts, canceled the first round of a presidential election that had been won by a pro-Russia populist.
Here was the contradiction at the heart of the new system, stripped of pretense and revealed for all to see: saving democracy entailed the overthrow of election results.
The European Union, which ritually condemns Hungary’s populist government as authoritarian, applauded Romania’s cancellation of a free vote — in fact, it may have influenced that decision.
Former Commissioner Thierry Breton proudly proclaimed the EU’s power to accept or reject elections, depending on the outcome.
“We have to prevent interference and make the laws apply,” Breton said, referring to claims of Russian involvement.
“We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary.”
It was Europe’s defection from the open society to a system halfway to China’s “social credit scores” that drew sharp criticism from Vance at Munich.
It was the pious hypocrisy of limited-option democracy that he repudiated as no democracy at all.
But the vice president spoke to his audience across a vast gulf of incomprehension.
He was pleading on behalf of democratic principles like freedom of speech and the sanctity of the vote.
As in a waking nightmare, the Europeans only heard the voice of populism in power, saying what must never be said, dismantling their carefully constructed safe spaces.
The well-appointed attendees at the conference looked too astonished to feel outrage.
Boris Pistorius, defense minister in Germany’s just-expired government, sputtered that the speech was “not acceptable” — a telling choice of words. We can be certain that if Vance had been a German citizen, he would have been censored and fined.
The issue at hand wasn’t a tiff between allies or even the potential breakup of a historically dominant security arrangement.
This is a dispute about the meaning and practice of democracy.
For those on one side, the censoring of “disinformation” and criminalizing of heretical opinions are necessary measures to prevent the rise of the “far right” — racists, xenophobes, neo-Nazis who would trample on democracy and return us to the Dark Ages.
And only the elites — according to the elites — own the necessary science and expertise to tell truth from falsehood, right from wrong.
For those on the other side — that of the “normies” — the turbulence of the digital era is no reason to abandon time-tested ideals like freedom of expression and the equality of all citizens at the ballot box.
The battle lines aren’t nearly so neat as to pit the US against Europe.
Every practice Vance condemned at Munich was zealously enforced and promoted by the Biden administration, as the vice president acknowledged.
Led by The New York Times, US news media treated Vance’s words as a bouquet of roses thrown to the crazed populist right of Europe — “dangerous” but rising parties like Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.
“Vance Tells Europe to Stop Shunning Parties Deemed Extreme,” read a headline in the Times.
“Mr. Vance’s remarks echoed those of hard-right leaders across Europe,” another Times article reported.
On “Face the Nation,” CBS’s Margaret Brennan asserted that Vance in Munich “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Freedom, according to Brennan’s thesis, led to genocide, and the open society was responsible for Nazi horrors.
In an extraordinary segment of “60 Minutes,” also from CBS, host Sharyn Alfonsi nodded admiringly during a discussion of how “Germany is dealing with online trolls. Here’s how the country is fighting hate speech on the Internet.”
Germany, it turns out, fights hatred by sending squads of cops to frighten people in their homes who have posted undesirable memes.
A censorship activist was shown explaining that free speech “needs boundaries.”
Otherwise, “a very small group of people can rely on endless freedom to say anything they want.”
During a deeply surreal interview, Alfonsi sat down with three German prosecutors who burst into laughter as they related the many ways they can silence and punish ordinary citizens who have sinned online.
Evidently, The New York Times and CBS crave the status of sherpas to lead the guided society and build those boundaries against “endless freedom.”
American ‘inquisitors’
American media has more in common with German speech inquisitors than with the freewheeling normies who elected Trump.
That’s the nature of this struggle, which is fought across national borders and along digital pathways.
The outcome remains very much in doubt.
Until almost yesterday, the elites controlled all the institutional high ground in the US and Europe, and seemed ready to implement their dream of a docile, easily guided society and a democracy that never threatens change.
Then, in a bit of historical irony, the result of our presidential election threw everything into confusion.
As to how the story ends — that will depend entirely on the logic and success of the Trump revolution.
