Vance’s Many Hypocrisies
Don’t expect the vice president to protect democracy.
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As a senator, Vice President JD Vance was famous for sending a “wokeness” questionnaire to State Department nominees, screening their attitudes toward flying the Pride flag or otherwise using their position to express support for gay rights in countries where they would be posted as ambassadors.
He had a point. Under Democratic administrations, America’s public diplomacy had the unfortunate habit of inserting itself, typically clumsily, into divisive domestic issues in European countries, such as gay rights, immigration law, or the status of ethnic minorities.
Therefore, it was striking to see Vance abandon that view in his speech to the Munich Security Conference on Friday. Not only did the vice president avoid any discussion of actual security issues other than the nexus between immigration and terrorism, he delivered a diatribe against social media content moderation policies enforced by European countries, comparing them to Soviet-era censorship. Neither Russia nor China were the biggest threat facing Europe, he argued. Rather, that threat came “from within” Europe, including from EU “commissars.”
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat and a staunch Atlanticist, commented that the speech sounded like a deliberate effort to “pick a fight” with Europeans—and she was obviously right. The vice president doubled down on his remarks by meeting later that day with Alice Weidel, the leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD)—a party that has ben deemed too extreme even by France’s right-wing Marine Le Pen.
The list of things that were wrong with Vance’s ham-fisted intervention in Europe’s culture wars—and indeed in Germany’s election campaign—is long, starting with its hypocrisies. Yes, there were many hypocrisies. For starters, the vice president would be the first one to object loudly if a major European leader stood up on a podium in the United States to lecture Americans on the failings of Citizens United or the insanity (as it seems to a vast majority of Europeans) of America’s lax gun laws.
Accepting Vance, a 2020 election denier, as a bona fide advocate for democracy in its purest, unadulterated form requires a suspension of disbelief, as does his professed support for free speech—this in the same week that an AP journalist was barred from the Oval Office for his employer’s continued usage of the term “Gulf of Mexico.”
Vance’s conflation of freedom of speech with the question of how social media companies should be regulated, if at all, does not withstand any more scrutiny than the left’s notion that same sex marriage, welcoming asylum policies, or access to abortion count among the fundamental characteristics of any liberal democracy. By the same token, America’s TikTok bill, banning an entire platform instead of burdening it with legal obligations as the EU’s Digital Services Act does, would be a grave threat to free speech. But Vance seems slow to recognize the hypocrisy there.
In no society, not even in the United States, does free speech entail a positive right to access and use privately-owned social media platforms to disseminate ideas, no more than it entails my right to have my work published, at the time of my choosing, in The New York Times. The fact that, of all advanced democracies, only the United States has arrived at the expansive interpretation of the First Amendment that currently governs American political campaigns should give pause to anyone tempted to believe that such an interpretation is an obvious cornerstone of a free and open society.
To believe that is to embrace a right-wing version of American progressive cultural imperialism that the likes of Vance once excoriated. It is, furthermore, a view that stands in direct contradiction to a fundamental tenet of “national conservatism”: its veneration of national sovereignty. Even if one accepts Vance’s central claim, namely that European societies are using the pretext of “mis” or “dis-information” to restrict some forms of political speech, his performative outrage is a non-sequitur.
Every society sets some boundaries to free speech—even the United States. The question is, does Vance think that European societies should be able to set those boundaries themselves, and do so differently from the United States? Shouldn’t a self-styled conservative have a modicum of humility in the face of cultural and historical particularisms that are reflected in (democratically approved and implemented) injunctions against Holocaust denial, communist propaganda, or hate speech, which are embedded in the legal codes of different European countries?
The question is particularly salient, as Anne Applebaum points out, in the context of election campaign rules. Romania’s decision to cancel the first round of its presidential election last year was clearly a distressing one, but who is Vance to tell Romanians, or anybody, that they should forget about laws guiding elections and put up with any form of Russian interference?
To be sure, one could hold the view that the American way of doing things is inherently the best, be it on campaign finance, free speech, or gun rights. To most of Vance’s European listeners at the Bayerischer Hof, and indeed to a vast majority of Europeans, that view would be deeply unpersuasive, particularly in the light of America’s current experience. It would be a different thing altogether to elevate that view to a guiding principle of America’s alliances.
To do so, as Vance did on Friday, is strategic madness. A Europe governed by the likes of the AfD or Orbán would be the least likely to deliver the sort of policies that the Trump administration ostensibly demands of the Europeans. Instead of serving as a strong pillar of NATO, and significant customer of American liquefied natural gas, a nationalist Europe would be fragmented and provide a fertile ground for Chinese influence, Russian bribery, and ethnic conflict, resulting in endless headaches in Washington.
In a way, Vance’s performance was akin to the tacit elevation of progressive cultural causes by U.S. public diplomacy in an earlier age. The flying of pride flags by U.S. embassies created an opening for Orbán, as well as for Russian propaganda, to depict the Western alliance as inimical to “traditional” values and made it harder for pro-Western social conservatives to rally to the cause.
If anything, what Vance did in Munich was more pernicious. He framed the partnership between the United States and Europe as viable only insofar as Europe embraces a number of features of American political culture, which to most Europeans comes across at best as eccentric and at worst as repellent or extremist. And that is a recipe for destroying the most successful alliance in human history, not for making it stronger.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.
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Thank you Dalibor for your insightful text