JD Vance and the European Crisis
Editor's Note
One valuable way of understanding the cold civil war is as the conflict between those who value continuity with our past — the American and Western tradition — and those who insist on a break from our inheritance. This divide is every bit as stark in Europe as it is in our own country. Daniel J. Mahoney explores how Vice President JD Vance’s recent speech in Munich clarified the battle lines and the nature of the fight ahead.
Foreign Policy magazine’s headline regarding Vice President JD Vance’s February 14 remarks at the Munich Security Conference got to the heart of the matter, declaring it “The Speech That Stunned Europe.” That it assuredly did, although Vance said nothing that had not already been said by a score of thoughtful and discerning European critics of the continent’s march toward a version of “liberal democracy” that was hardly liberal at all and even less democratic.
Vance’s speech stung because it took precise aim at the pretensions of a European consensus that stigmatizes and even criminalizes patriotic, religious, and classically conservative and liberal convictions that were part of the European mainstream just a few decades ago. Now, radical secularists among the European elites have no place for what Pierre Manent has called “the Christian mark” of Europe, while “Christophobia,” as New York University Law Professor Joseph Weiler (himself an Orthodox Jew) has termed it, is de rigueur, and naïve effusions about Islam as a “religion of peace” are a requirement for entrance into the civic conversation.
The same Europeans who were quite willing to make their peace with a Soviet Union whose permanent existence they took for granted now rage at the slightest accommodation with post-communist Russia. Legitimate sympathy with Ukraine as a victim of Russian aggression has given way to moralistic indignation devoid of any realistic political aims. “Populist” parties that plea for meaningful borders and the end of carbon “net zero” (which is rapidly de-industrializing Germany and leading to massive energy shortages) are considered beyond the pale, relegated to the illegitimate category of “far-right.”
As such, they are subject to shrill denunciations, increasingly draconian media censorship, and, in politics, a cordon sanitaire that leads faux-centrist parties such Macron’s Renaissance in France and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany to form alliances with parties of the left, even the extreme left. To borrow from Pierre Manent once again, official Europe is now committed to a kratos not just without a demos, but against the demos.
It was not always thus in Europe. Indeed, it was in the name of “liberal and Christian civilization” that “good Europeans” and proud patriots such as Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer fought both Nazism and communism less than a century ago. They aimed to situate modern democracy and “the rights of man” in the continuity of Western civilization, of which they saw themselves as heirs and caretakers.
In communist Poland, for instance, the Solidarity movement fought proudly for “human rights.” But that fight occurred, as the philosopher Ryszard Legutko explains in his essential book The Demon in Democracy, in the context of a broader “defense of human dignity (in its original and not corrupted sense), access to culture, respect for truth in science and nobility in art, and a proper role given to the Christian religion.” The great anti-totalitarian moral witnesses of the twentieth century (Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Benda) did not fight for moral relativism, radical secularism, “transgressive” sexuality, a diminution of patriotism and national sovereignty, or an assault on traditional institutions such as the family and the Church that gave strength and ballast to a self-governing people.
If these essentially conservative-minded great statesmen were alive today, they would surely be denounced as too retrograde to be tolerated by the guardians of the new elite consensus. (It is an open question whether the old liberal democrats were sufficiently alert to the subversive character of liberalism in its new guise, but that is a question for another occasion.)
Democracy is thus turned against itself, its new proponents displaying open contempt for its old principles: the consent of the people, freedom of speech, the noble moral inheritance passed on to us by our forebears. A nefarious “culture of repudiation” (as Roger Scruton so aptly called it) reigns supreme: at once illiberal and contemptuous of Burke’s “eternal contract” that connects the living to the dead and the yet to be born. Democracy so understood becomes “revolutionary,” even nihilistic, but also heavy-handed, sclerotic, and unaccountable to ordinary people.
For pointing out these hard truths, Vance earned the scorn of the European proponents of “progressive democracy.” But before American conservatives succumb to hubris and moralistic contempt for all things European, it is necessary to remember that “progressive democracy” is a truly global phenomenon and that we Americans are deeply complicit in it. Here at home, woke despotism remains alive and well among intellectuals, academics, bureaucrats, powerful elements of the “deep state,” the entertainment industry, the political class, and myriad institutions in civil society.
Until just two months ago, the United States was fully committed to using her political influence and military power to promote woke imperium, with ubiquitous Pride flags proudly flying from our embassies around the world. David Pressman, our ambassador to Hungary from 2022 to 2025, stated almost every day that a commitment to “LGBTQI+” values and gender ideology was a precondition for belonging to the democratic world. He constantly berated his Hungarian hosts, a proud Christian and democratic people who broke free of totalitarianism and have done so much to make their country a home to Hungary’s Jewish minority. Americans must proceed with an appreciation of our own culpability for the spread of the anti-demos version of democracy.
In his address at Munich, Vice President Vance did reiterate the nobility of the common struggle of Europe and America against communist totalitarianism. But Vance forcefully challenged the consensus of European elites that they are still defending freedom today by using the fight against “hateful content” in social media (and political life more broadly) to combat criticisms of feminism or Islam, or even criticism of government ministers, as is increasingly the case in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Vance took particular aim at the erosion of “conscience rights” in Great Britain, once the proud home of modern liberty, highlighting the case of a 51-year old physiotherapist and army veteran who was charged for silently praying for three minutes about his aborted son outside an abortion clinic. That man obstructed no one, and interacted with no one, as Vance pointed out. Since the speech, another pro-lifer has been arrested in Scotland for the crime of silently praying. In the land of Orwell, “thoughtcrime” is now an increasingly ubiquitous instrument of progressive democracy.
Vance might have also mentioned that French officials have closed and fined conservative television stations in the name of the fight against “hate” and “disinformation.” Vance was rightly alarmed by the cancellation of the second round of Romanian presidential elections — all because a “populist” candidate had a reasonable chance of winning and because the Russians had ostensibly spent a few hundred thousand dollars to buy social media to “influence” the elections. That candidate has now been banned from the upcoming presidential elections. The Horizon darkens, and not only in Romania.
Vance reminded his European listeners that political opponents often arrive at different judgments about issues (“alternative viewpoints”) and may appeal to a different or wider array of facts. That is part and parcel of free political life. Big questions must be adjudicated at the ballot box, and no good comes, as Vance said, from dismissing the concerns of those one disagrees with or in “shutting people out of the political process” altogether.
In an impressive display of rhetorical finesse, Vance quoted Pope John Paul II’s memorable words to the long-suffering people of Warsaw in June 1979 (himself quoting the words of Christ): “Do not be afraid.” The anti-totalitarian import of those words could not be any clearer. It also indicates the root cause of this authoritarianism or proto-totalitarianism: fear of the people, and more deeply, fear of truth.
In the Munich speech, Vance recalled “inconvenient facts” and challenged European leaders to return to common sense. The crucial divide is as follows: Do we see liberal democracy as the fulfillment (however imperfect) of a noble civilizational inheritance or as a definitive break with the injustice and oppression of the Old West? Everything rests on the answer to that all-important question.
Recent DOGE revelations about what USAID has in recent years encouraged and funded at home and abroad — the new racialism, sexual transgression, subversion of traditional institutions, opposition to moral conservatism, various proponents of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the trans cult, and atheism overseas — makes perfectly clear the numerous ways in which “progressive democracy” actively subverts the sturdier and more sober forms of liberal democracy to which Americans were long accustomed.
The lines are now drawn for all to see. The battle between true and false liberalism is undoubtedly the battle of our time. It is nothing less than a conflict for the soul of the Western world and of liberal democracy itself.