{"id":22355,"date":"2025-04-01T17:46:13","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T23:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/a-retreat-from-democratic-values-vice-president-jd-vances-munich-disgrace\/"},"modified":"2025-04-01T23:46:13","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T23:46:13","slug":"a-retreat-from-democratic-values-vice-president-jd-vances-munich-disgrace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/a-retreat-from-democratic-values-vice-president-jd-vances-munich-disgrace\/","title":{"rendered":"A retreat from Democratic values: Vice President JD Vance\u2019s Munich disgrace"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bret
Bret Stephens, The New York Times (Tony Cenicola\/The New York Times)<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In April 1928, Joseph Goebbels, later the Third Reich\u2019s chief propagandist, wrote a newspaper essay addressing the question of why the National Socialists, despite being an \u201canti-parliamentarian party,\u201d would nonetheless compete in that May\u2019s parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy\u2019s weapons,\u201d Goebbels explained. \u201cIf democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s postwar federal republic, established over the ruins the Nazis made, has been haunted by Goebbels\u2019 taunt ever since. How does a free society guard against being used, and possibly destroyed, by the rights and privileges it grants the enemies of freedom? How does it avoid the postwar fate of states like Czechoslovakia, which allowed communist parties to gain a fatal foothold in their fledgling democracies? What about Palestinians, who voted for Mahmoud Abbas for president in 2005 and Hamas for parliament in 2006 \u2013 and haven\u2019t had an election since?<\/p>\n

For countries with a totalitarian past, finding the right answers to these questions is hard. Few have done it better than Germany, which remains unmistakably democratic not because it unthinkingly honors a principle of unfettered liberty (no democracy does) but because it vigilantly monitors the enemies of democracy while maintaining a memory of what the nation once was. It\u2019s something for which all Americans should feel especially grateful, given the price we paid in lives to defeat Germany\u2019s previous political incarnations.<\/p>\n

But not, apparently, JD Vance. The vice president\u2019s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference \u2013 in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe\u2019s retreat from democratic values \u2013 combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

Why does the AfD dismay so many Germans, including traditional conservative voters? The party began in 2013 in protest of Germany\u2019s fiscal policies in Europe. It gained a further boost through its opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s open-arms policy toward the uncontrolled immigration of more than 1 million Middle Eastern refugees.<\/p>\n

But the party soon took a much darker turn. In 2017, Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke, a party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, complained that Germans were \u201cthe only people in the world who\u2019ve planted a monument of shame at the heart of their capital\u201d \u2013 a reference to the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust \u2013 and that the country needed \u201cnothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance.\u201d In 2018, the party leader at the time, Alexander Gauland, dismissed \u201cHitler and the Nazis\u201d as \u201cjust a speck of bird s— in over 1,000 years of successful German history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, the German investigative news site Correctiv reported that in 2023, AfD politicians had met with other far-right extremists in a hotel in Potsdam, near Berlin, to discuss an \u201coverall concept, in the sense of a master plan\u201d for the \u201cremigration\u201d of \u201cmigrants\u201d to their countries of ethnic origin \u2013 no matter whether those migrants were asylum-seekers, permanent residents or German citizens. The star of the show was a 34-year-old Austrian named Martin Sellner, who as a teenager confessed to putting swastika stickers on a synagogue before going on to lead Austria\u2019s so-called identitarian movement.<\/p>\n

This record explains, in part, why all of Germany\u2019s mainstream parties refuse to go into any sort of coalition government with the AfD, even as it is polling in second place in this month\u2019s federal elections. Vance may seem to think it\u2019s the responsibility of democracy to embrace any party or point of view; it\u2019s worth wondering what he might have said if, instead of the AfD polling at around 20%, an antisemitic and antidemocratic Muslim Brotherhood-style party was drawing a similar percentage of voters.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another reason to fear the AfD. Last year, The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Erika Solomon reported on a secret session in the German parliament in which lawmakers heard evidence of ties between AfD politicians and Kremlin-connected operatives. The AfD denies the allegations, but it\u2019s no surprise that the AfD wants to end German military aid for Ukraine and restart the Nord Stream pipelines through which Russia used to supply Germany with natural gas.<\/p>\n

In its first term, the Trump administration fought tooth-and-nail against Nord Stream, on the justified grounds that it made Germany dependent on an enemy of the West. Someone might ask Ric Grenell, Trump\u2019s former ambassador to Berlin and now his special envoy, why the administration is now so fond of a party that effectively sides with that enemy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an argument to be made in a future column that some European governments go too far to curtail legitimate free speech. There\u2019s another one to be written about the many ways that Europe\u2019s supposedly mainstream right-of-center parties, particularly Germany\u2019s Christian Democrats under Merkel, adopted left-leaning positions on migration, domestic security, fiscal policy, energy policy and other issues that drove conservative voters into the arms of the far right.<\/p>\n

For now, the important point is this: Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace.<\/p>\n

This <\/em>article <\/em><\/a>originally appeared in The New York Times. By Bret Stephens \u00a9 2025 The New York Times Company.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephens, The New York Times (Tony Cenicola\/The New York Times)du1-i-syn In April 1928, Joseph Goebbels, later the Third Reich\u2019s chief propagandist, wrote a newspaper essay addressing the question of why the National Socialists, despite being an \u201canti-parliamentarian party,\u201d would nonetheless compete in that May\u2019s parliamentary elections. \u201cWe enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22355"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}