JD Vance Wants Europe To Let The Vampire Enter
The Trump administration is pushing for an end to Germany's political firewall, which must remain
If you've seen even one vampire movie, you know the rule: A vampire can't enter a home unless it is invited.
Usually the vampire is a dude, and usually he's pretty damn handsome and suave and sophisticated – like Roxy Music lead man Bryan Ferry circa 1977 – and usually he can talk his way into entering a home and, eventually, sucking blood and other vampire-related activities. But if he is rejected, if permission is not granted, the vampire has no choice but to go take a coffin nap or watch the game or whatever a vampire does in his free time.
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The vampire's request for willing entry came to mind the other day when JD Vance chastised European political leaders, especially those in Germany, for refusing to partner with anti-democracy far-right parties in governing majorities. This comes just weeks after German politicians from both liberal and conservative parties reaffirmed their pro-democracy commitment to maintaining a firewall against representatives from the Alternative for Germany – a neo-Nazi outfit favored by international fascist leader Elon Musk. This firewall, or refusal to include AfD in a governing majority, has become common practice in European nations doing everything they can to beat back ascendant fascist movements.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Vance told European elected leaders last week during a security conference in which the United States abandoned its longstanding commitment to European security against Russian aggression (we're now allies with authoritarian butcher Vladimir Putin, which doesn't feel great).
Anthony Reimer
Vance hardly stopped there. He lashed out at the European Union for what he called authoritarian censorship of far-right political parties and "Christians praying in their own homes" – a ludicrous charge he knows to be a lie. This is where the vampire's request for entry comes in: Vance and other anti-democracy champions are asking European leaders to let their democracies destroy themselves, the way we have done in the United States over the past decade. Just let these fascist parties into the governing fold and see what happens, Vance says, poking his finger into the chests of small-d democratic leaders. If the parties that are opposed to human rights and free elections topple your system of governance, if they end self governance the way they say they want to, then your precious little democracy was never all that strong to begin with, Vance says.
It calls to mind the so-called Westminster Declaration signed in October 2023 by people who fancy themselves "free speech absolutists" and never seem to be interested or concerned with any speech that is not explicitly right wing in nature. This, as you might imagine, makes free speech absolutism the very pinnacle of bad faith politics. Their goal is not to protect and defend speech, but to bully governments and social media platforms into allowing the free flow of fascist propaganda that will empower their preferred candidates and elected leaders and lead to the (actual) censorship of all dissenting views. We've seen this unfold on the X platform formerly known as Twitter, the algorithm that suppresses anti-fascist speech and favors far-right misinformation designed to make society sick with half truths and lies and yes, fear, lots of fear.
Denny Carter
I wrote back in fall 2023 about the bullshit Westminster thing, and Vance's recent advocacy of the normalization of fascist EU politicians brought to mind what the various Westminster signees really wanted.
The Westminster document whines about European regulatory efforts underway that could stem the tide of fascist invective being hurled across social media platforms by people whose politics is based on inflicting pain, intimidating political adversaries, and gaining power specifically to roll back the hard-fought rights gained by women, LGBTQ folks, and people of color (that queer folks and women signed the Westminster Declaration shouldn’t obscure this fact; these people can be fascists too). These people – these well-funded and determined pro-authoritarian, anti-democracy forces – should have unfettered speech in the western world, the free speechers argue. If multicultural democratic republics are as strong as you think they are, the thinking goes, fascist speech will simply fade into the background and pose no threat to so-called free societies. This, of course, is the basis of the bad-faith concept of the Marketplace of Ideas, which, naturally, is horseshit. The letter holds up 1948's Universal Declaration on Human Rights (they're suddenly into human rights) as a defense of unfettered speech in free nations. The documents' "corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error." This is an argument for democracy to devour itself, to use a free society's freedom against itself, to inject harmful and even deadly speech into the democratic experiment and watch it die, then shrug and say, oh well, I guess it was never as strong as we thought. On we go into our fascist future.
That Vance would travel to Europe and speak with Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD who has been held up as proof that the party is not in fact fascist, is nauseating and as alarming as anything that has unfolded over these past three nightmarish weeks. The AfD is so extreme, so dangerous, that other far-right European parties have refused to engage with them and, more than a couple times, admonished them. The new American administration appears bound and determined to collapse democratic societies the world over with help from Putin and other Eastern strongmen. While this is far from a certainty – more than 200,000 people recently took to the streets to protest AfD – it is the goal.
Unlike Democrats in the US, German officials seem to understand the world is facing a once-in-a-century political crisis.
German defense minister Boris Pistorius ditched his planned speech last week to push back on Vance's unhinged attack on our former European allies and their anti-fascist bonafides. And to his credit, Pistorius outright rejected the mere premise of Vance's bad-faith argument.
“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes — this is not acceptable,” Pistorius said, conceding nothing to the authoritarian American vice president telling Germany to give the vampire a chance. “This is not the Europe, not the democracy, where I live.”
Germany, Pistorius said, had learned the hard lessons of allowing radical anti-democracy forces into power-sharing arrangements. They would not make the same mistake today with those vying for similar arrangements who have denied and even defended the horrors of the Holocaust.
Denny Carter
For now it appears German political leaders, along with other prominent European officials, are steadfast in their icing out of fascist parties that have gained political and cultural traction thanks in large part to Russian disinformation campaigns and election interference (they fuck with our elections too but no one really cares since they help Republicans). German leaders seem utterly uninterested in the bad-faith pleas of American right wingers to loosen social media rules and anti-fascist governing tactics. They are doing what's best for democracy, and that includes a continued refusal to engage in good faith with deeply dishonest and unserious people who cloak themselves in the feigned righteousness of free speech absolutism.
I only hope Europe continues to reject American overtures to permit anti-democracy parties into the governing fold – a worthy example for pro-democracy forces in the United States should (when) we wrestle control of the government from the country's rampaging far right. The US, with just two parties – one of which has crumbled under the weight of the nation's fascist movement – had no such luxury. We had no firewall. The vampire asked to come in and we said yes.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
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