Great Speech: Not Anti-European, but Anti-Woke

JD Vance sang a hymn to democracy, arguing that it cannot be based on the censorship of dissenting opinions.

In today’s commentary, it is appropriate — because of its content, its audience and its qualified protagonist — to comment on a speech made by recently elected United States Vice President JD Vance. The venue was the Bavarian capital of Munich, the forum was the 66th International Security Conference, and the audience was a qualified representation of Western political and military elites.

To properly interpret Vance’s 20-minute, paperless speech, it helps to know his history. He is the 40-year-old son of a divorced woman who suffered abuse from the men in her life, and he was raised by a grandmother who raised him in accordance with her Evangelist religion. He attended prestigious Yale University and received a law degree; yet, because of personal contradictions between his religion and his reason, he joined the Marines and participated in the Iraq war in 2005. There, he became disenchanted with the values promoted by his country as he observed the mistreatment of various Christian minorities. The publication of a thoughtfully written memoir led to his early entry into politics in Ohio: He was elected to serve as a Republican senator of the United States.

The contradictions between Christian evangelism, his reason and his conscience culminated in 2019 with a conversion to Catholicism that followed his reading of “The Confessions” and “The City of God,” two extraordinary works by St. Augustine. The saint was a former Manichean heretic, given to pleasures, who converted because of the prayers and tears of his mother, St. Monica and who became his church’s well-known saint and religious healer. Vance continues to turn to St. Augustine as a model of conversion.

In Munich, he made a speech that was neither conventional nor politically correct, but quite the opposite. Speaking of Europe’s security, he affirmed that its main enemy is not Russia or China or any other external danger. Instead. the danger is the intrinsic loss of the values and principles upon which it was built, and neither the United States nor NATO can help it against that enemy.

He sang a hymn to democracy, arguing that it cannot be based on the censorship of opinions that differ from those held to be the only ones accepted by the “woke” culture that currently dominates the West, especially in the digital world. He considered the recent mass attack in Munich by an Afghan asylum-seeking immigrant to exemplify the reason for opposing the massive immigration of people with values contradictory to those of the West — values shared by Europe and the U.S.

He did not talk about Ukraine or next Sunday’s German elections. But he did antagonize the government of socialist Olaf Scholz.