Surus Illinois
Vice President J.D. Vance’s first major assignment from Donald Trump was to join a bunch of European leaders who thought of themselves as our close allies—and to read them the riot act. This happened at the Munich Security Conference on February 14. Instead of discussing armaments and armies, Vance said: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” Europe, according to Vance, had become hostile to free speech. It was hostile to free speech because it was hostile to democracy. And you could measure its hostility to democracy by the fact that for 50 years European voters had kept asking for less immigration and had kept getting more of it. Vance admitted that it reminded him a bit of the United States.
Is Vance right about Europe and the West more generally?
Vance is certainly right that the Europeans’ situation resembles ours. Europe is split between two camps: so-called “populists” and “elites.” (Neither of the two camps has a name for itself, so—without any ill will—we’ll use the names applied to each by their foes.) The difference between here and there is that for the second time in three elections, populists have now taken power in the U.S. In Europe they have a harder time, ruling only in Italy, Slovakia, and Hungary.
As Vance sees it, that’s because Europeans have worked to make populist victories impossible. He has been particularly critical of Germany. In February, the main anti-immigration party there, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), became the country’s second-largest, close behind the Christian Democrats. The Social Democrats, who are one of the most successful political parties of modern times, have been contending for power in Germany since the middle of the 19th century. The AfD has now left them in the dust. And yet the AfD was kept out of the Munich Security Conference, so Vance went out and met with their leader, Alice Weidel. In so doing, he waded into a live controversy.
German progressives argue that ostracizing the AfD is necessary—even if it means excluding the AfD from legislative functions to which they are constitutionally entitled as the largest opposition party. Otherwise Germany risks repeating the horrors of Nazism. The AfD’s supporters counter that their party was founded in 2013 by a bunch of macro-economists concerned about German bailouts of deeply indebted European countries. It can have little to do with the Nazis. Of the war criminals long tracked by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, only three appear to be still alive, all of them about 100 years of age. Not much to build a revanchist movement around. And yet efforts to police Nazism have suddenly taken on a new life, ten decades after Nazism’s founding and eight decades after its defeat.