JD Vance is taking a lot of heat for his speech in Munich. The speech itself was fantastic. There's nothing he said in this speech that I disagree with.
His major theme is that if you embrace democracy, you have to embrace ideas and votes for things you don't like. And he excoriates (but doesn't name) Thierry Breton for having cheered the annulment of a Romanian election under EU pressure...and for musing about the possibility of doing the same thing in Germany (if the AfD were to prevail).
But, of course, the obvious rejoinder to this would be that Vance's own boss, uh, quite famously objected to, dismissed as rigged, and sought to have overturned an election
he didn't like. And I think that's 100% fair to be throwing that back in Vance's face. In other words, Vance doesn't occupy the moral space to be the one to be saying this. It's really something that ought to be coming from somebody like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.
But would they ever give this speech to Europe? Given John Kerry's odious remarks about social media not long ago, I seriously doubt that they would. I fear that Biden or Harris might be just fine with the idea that a Romanian election should be annulled if it didn't turn out the way they wanted (they claimed Russian interference, natch). Because the entire enterprise of this is thwarting populist political parties in Europe.
Shouldn't Europe instead be addressing the underlying causes that are driving people into the arms of populists?
Anyway....you be the judge. It's 19 minutes long.