U.S. Vice President JD Vance threw a molotov cocktail into European politics with his speech in Munich last week where he said that Europe was abandoning “fundamental values” on democratic issues such as free speech and free press. “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”
The broader European reaction to Vance’s speech was a mixture of shock, outrage, satisfaction, and glee.
For the outraged, Vance’s hypocrisy was staggering. The man who represented a government that had voided the convictions for all who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in an effort to overturn a democratic election was lecturing Europe about values and democracy. The man who represented a government that has banned research funding based solely on the presence of specific words in the grant applications was lecturing about being offended by words. The man who represented a government that banned a news organization from being in the White House because it used the term “Gulf of Mexico” was lecturing Europe about free press. And, as a cherry on the cake, the man who represented a government whose leader would say that Ukraine was responsible for the Russian invasion was lecturing Europe on geopolitical security.
But there was a second category of responses to Vance’s speech—those who praised it as “refreshing” and important—where his blatant hypocrisy was both rationalized and diminished.
Vance knew he was being a hypocrite and these responses were precisely what he wanted.
Those who said, "Yes, it's hypocritical and I don’t like everything that’s happening in the U.S., but that doesn't invalidate his point” fail to understand that Vance's hypocrisy was the point. It was a conscious tool to undermine the very democratic values those in Europe who support him claim to protect.
Attacking European democracy, while representing a government that undermines democracy, fits perfectly with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon's famous political strategy of "flooding the zone with shit." You pump so much contradictory information into the public sphere that citizens can no longer distinguish truth from lies. Or, they simply don’t have the energy to care. And, in a sea of shit, everything stinks equally and thus everything is of equal value.
Here’s the central problem: if one minute you say “rule of law, democracy and free press are non-negotiable values,” you can’t then then turn around the next minute and say, “I don't like everything that's happening in the U.S., but JD Vance has a point.” If European politicians and opinion-leaders are willing to waive off Vance’s hypocrisy because he made some points with which they agree, what they are saying is that undermining the rule of law, the free press and free speech isn’t actually that important. And that's precisely the morally and ethically relativistic political ecosystem Vance wants to cultivate.
By getting European political allies to rationalize or tolerate Trump's attacks on democracy and law, what Vance was doing was carefully setting the stage for an environment where the same things would be rationalized or tolerated here in Europe. Those who waive off Vance's hypocrisy as secondary to his "main point" encourage the erosion of the very rights they claim to defend.
In short, if undermining democracy in the U.S. is dismissed as a mere rhetorical inconvenience, we set the stage for rationalizing and tolerating the same undermining process in Europe.
The hypocrisy wasn’t a mistake. It was a trap.
