The writer is in Australia.
If you watch nothing else online this year take it from me and watch last week’s speech by US Vice-President J.D. Vance at the annual Munich Security Conference. It’s only 19 minutes long, including all the preamble pleasantries. It’s delivered by a man who is not afraid to tell hard truths, even to friends. And boy-oh-boy did the assembled European elites hate what they were told. To say that the applause was muted would be a gross exaggeration. It was more stunned silence and the gritting of teeth from the assembled Eurocracy.
In a way, the Vance speech was a paean of praise to democracy – by which I mean majoritarianism, not that recent judicially confected and morally pregnant understanding of democracy that insists we build in all sorts of judicially favoured substantive rights-related understandings that the great-and-the-good happen to approve of that can, if needed, override what the mere plebs who constitute a majority voted for. So the Vance speech shunned that sort of sleight-of-hand reliance on moral abstractions. It made clear it was siding with the non-insider everyman and everywoman whose views, said Vance, have been ignored and at times suppressed and even criminalised by the European elites. More bluntly put, Vance came to praise populism. He came. He spoke. And, outside the conference hall, he conquered.
Early on the US Vice-President stated baldly that he worried that the biggest threat to Europe was not Russia or China. No, Vance suggested that the biggest threat came from within, from an abandonment of fundamental values by the political, judicial and (by implication) lawyerly and other elite castes in Europe. He mocked the former EU Commissioner who had praised the Romanian elites who just recently annulled an entire election, supposedly due to a few hundred thousand dollars of online spending from Russian sources. If you can’t trust your voters in those sort of situations you just don’t really believe in democracy. Vance then derided the same functionary who had proposed, more like recommended, that the same outcome could happen with the upcoming German election if the results did not go the way the EU elites wanted. These sort of views, said Vance, were “shocking to American ears”. Well, they’re pretty shocking to my ears too. And they do sit on a fundamental distrust of one’s own country’s voters.
Vance then pointed out that the US taxpayers, the ones who stump up a much larger chunk of their take-home paycheques to defend Europe (over 70% of the NATO budget) than Europeans themselves are prepared to spend to defend themselves, have long been told they spend this money “in the name of our shared democratic values”. Ya, right implied Vance. “When we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.” The privileged European elites in the audience took that with faces frozen in some sort of befuddled rictus. But Vance is right and the Euro elites are wrong.
The same is true when Vance talked about how mass immigration had been imposed by the EU over the heads of, you know, actual voters. “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.” No, that was Angela Merkel and a handful of EU elites who’d done so while laughing at all who objected as moral midgets and closet racists. In effect, they were laughing at democracy though I don’t think with the various terrorist attacks, ballooning rape rates, attacks on Jews and crime generally, that these sort of establishment politicians are doing much laughing now. (And isn’t it bizarre that a supposedly conservative politician like Merkel turned out to be a cross-dressing Green – on energy policy, on foreign policy, on cultural issues? It’s funny how a few years can totally alter a retired politician’s legacy.) By contrast Team Trump/Vance in under a month has come close to stopping illegal immigration entirely and is doing what all other conservative US politicians said for years couldn’t be done. They’re deporting illegals, which means anyone who came in illegally. This, Mr Dutton, is the biggest vote-winning policy right now in the democratic world and for the life of me I cannot understand why the Australian Coalition Government hasn’t come out strongly with a promise to slash immigration for a whole term of Parliament while we try to get per capita GDP out of recession, build infrastructure that can cope, and require a bit of old-fashioned assimilation of values be injected into what more-and-more are the patent failures of the multiculturalism religion.
Vice-President Vance also called out the elephant in the room. I refer to the significant inroads on free speech in Europe. (He could have made the same claims about Australia, inroads far too often shamefully supported by a Liberal Party that really hasn’t got any obvious commitment to free speech, this being the most disappointing aspect of Peter Dutton’s leadership.) Vance stated baldly that “free speech is in retreat [in Europe, and this writer would add in Australia] and in the interests of comity… but also the interest of truth [also in the US under the Biden administration], which sometimes had the loudest voices for censorship”. Vance called out the Soviet-style resort to claims about misinformation. He gave chapter and verse the shocking examples of speech suppression in the UK. He mocked the conference organisers for banning from the conference political parties whose views they disliked, even ones garnering big chunks (and in Germany’s case in the upcoming election perhaps the biggest chunk) of the vote. To Americans, said Vance, “this looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation and who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion”. Spot on as regards the whole of the thuggish lockdown era censorship and politically policing speech. Spot on as regards our eSafety Commissioner. Spot on as regards the entire ‘allowed speech only’ worldview of the European Union.
As I said, the audience grimaced through the whole speech. Clapping was more honoured in the breach than the observance. Afterwards a Left-wing German politician got on his high horse, stood on his bogus dignity, and took great offence. I suppose as he’ll soon be thrown out by German voters he had to do it pronto.
Yet I did not hear a single claim or idea from Vice-President Vance with which I disagreed. Nor could I imagine any Australian, Canadian or British conservative politician setting out these home truths. Right now the best hope Australians have on the free speech front comes from the Trump administration in the US and from the billionaire Elon Musk who knowingly massively overpaid for Twitter and did all people who value freedom a huge favour.
Listen to this speech and you’ll find yourself muttering ‘my kingdom for a J.D. Vance’ because you sure as heck can’t see one in the rest of the conservative anglosphere world.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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