Brendan O'Neill: JD Vance has signed the death warrant of the status quo

Well, that was a delicious spectacle. America’s self-made VP gloriously roasting the wizened technocrats of Europe. A Yank from dirt-poor origins sticking it to Europe’s turbo-smug ruling class. How they squirmed as the boy from Ohio who somehow made it to the top of US politics chastised them for their indecent desertion of the ideals of liberty, democracy and security. It was like an intellectual waterboarding, and I loved every minute of it.

This is JD Vance’s stirring speech at the Munich Security Conference yesterday. But you already knew, given it’s gone wildly viral. For 20 minutes, the millennial vice-president upbraided the assembled grey-faced dignitaries over their backsliding from the virtues of the Enlightenment. He lamented ‘the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values’. He invited us to rediscover ‘the blessings of liberty’. Judging by the fits of pique in certain quarters – Vance ‘shocked delegates’ with his ‘blast at Europe’, wailed the babies at the BBC – many an ear is still deaf to his cry for freedom. But some of us are listening.

It was on the liberty to utter, the bedrock virtue of every civilised society, that he issued his most stinging rebukes. ‘Free speech, I fear, is in retreat’, he said. He recounted Europe’s recent acts of nutty censorship. He reminded his audience that German cops raided the homes of citizens ‘suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online’. The old Stasi felt your collar if you criticised your Stalinist betters – the new one comes a’knocking if you mock PC ideologies.

He spoke, with righteous alarm, about how Sweden recently convicted a Christian activist for the blasphemy of burning a Koran, shortly after his friend was murdered for doing the same. He seemed genuinely aghast, as well he might be, that modern Europe would do something as heartless as convict a man for the ‘speechcrime’ his pal had just been killed for. He reserved his greatest concern for ‘our very dear friends, the United Kingdom’. The ‘basic liberties of religious Britons’ are being sacrificed to PC, he said. He cited the arrest of Christians for the thoughtcrime of ‘silently praying’ close to abortion clinics that have had ‘buffer zones’ erected around them. Prayercrime, if you will.

There’s a Soviet feel to these clampdowns on ‘problematic’ speech, he said. He accused Europe’s rulers of ‘hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like “misinformation” and “disinformation”’ to crush ‘alternative viewpoints’ they don’t like. He’s dead right. ‘Misinformation’ is now little more than a slippery euphemism for ‘dissent’. On everything from the Covid lockdowns to the gender lunacy, what our rulers call ‘misinformation’ is often just thinking that deviates from theirs. We’re so done with being called merchants of misinfo by a ruling class that thinks men can get pregnant.

Then came his sucker punch: the good guys of the Cold War are increasingly mimicking the bad guys, he said. Oof. The fall of the Berlin Wall and death of the USSR was meant to usher in a new era in which Europe would embrace the ‘extraordinary blessings of liberty’, he said. But instead, we’ve become a continent on which speech is fiercely policed, dissident ideas are punished and the results of democratic elections are cancelled. There he was referring to Romania, where the result of the recent presidential election was unceremoniously binned on a jumped-up suspicion of Russian meddling. It’s wild that it took an outsider to tell Europe’s rulers how mad that assault on democracy was.

‘When I look at Europe today’, said Vance, I wonder what ‘happened to some of the Cold War’s winners’. So do many of us Europeans. We’re perturbed that our continent has morphed into a sad Soviet tribute act. Europe’s leaders love to say, in fantastic doublespeak, that they only crush ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ to ‘protect democracy’. Yet as Vance reminded them, censorship is democracy’s implacable foe. ‘Dismissing people, dismissing their concerns… shutting people out of the political process’ – this ‘protects nothing’, he thundered. In fact, ‘it’s a surefire way to destroy democracy’. His plea to Europe: let people speak. Including Elon Musk. To the Eurocrats who view Musk’s outbursts on X as intolerable intrusions into Europe’s political affairs, Vance said: ‘If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.’

Vance ended by posing a pretty radical question to Europe’s rulers: have you ever considered… trusting the masses? ‘We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership’, he said. ‘To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice.’ People have wisdom. Wow. It is a testament to the anti-democratic turn of our times that it feels balls-out revolutionary to hear a world leader express such a simple, true idea. After years of watching Europe’s little people be branded ‘low-information’, ‘xenophobes’, ‘gammon’ and ‘idiots’ by a ruling class that thinks it has a monopoly on reason, it feels good to hear someone with power express that old idea that modernity was built on: people are wise, people are good, give them a shot.

Predictably, there’s been a furious response to Vance’s speech. Among the Economist-reading classes who hate Brexit and think Trump is a monster made by ill-informed rednecks, there’s horror at his suggestion that the plebs should be trusted to think and speak as they see fit. He’s ‘attacking Europe’, they wail, oblivious to the truth that it is they who are attacking Europe, from within, with their ruthless dismantling of all the gains and wonders of Europe’s tumultuous political history.

They’re scared because they know Vance has effectively signed the death warrant of the status quo. European technocracy and wokeness more broadly are all about insulating decision-making from the pressures and beliefs of the oiks. And now here comes this uppity Yank to tug at that insulation and propose giving back the people their voice and their clout. It’s a wholly welcome intervention.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.