By Preston Hill
A few months ago at the annual Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance was ridiculed after delivering a blistering condemnation of Europe— in Europe, to Europe.
Standing before an elite audience of European leaders, diplomats, and security officials, Vance unleashed a blasting critique of the post-Cold War liberal order. He lambasted European leaders for their overreliance on American defense commitments, warned against fighting endless wars, and condemned the hypocrisy of Western institutions that claim to uphold democracy while engaging in actions opposed to such values.
“Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not. And thank God, they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty,” Vance said.
“I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or, worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting pe- — people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy,” he said.
Here, the vice president defends the traditional, historically and universally understood definition of democracy: the belief that the will and expression of the people through free and fair elections are respected and upheld, even if that expression is uncomfortable for those in power.
Much of the West however, chooses to instead defend a different definition of democracy, the one that I refer to as Democracy Incorporated, or Democracy Inc. Instead of being primarily concerned with defending the will of the voters or the reality that elections have and demand consequences, Democracy Inc. chooses to defend the institution of democracy built by the post-WWII globalized world order.
Democracy Inc. protects the institutions of the bureaucracy, international law, Cold War alliances, and cultural liberalism. Democracy Inc. does not care if voters choose a leader or party that wants to end mass migration, depart from archaic and outdated international organizations, and support nationalist ideas. Democracy Inc. instead sides with these institutions at all costs, uniting parties both on the left and the right to guard against the so-called three “isms:” isolationism, protectionism, and nativism, as former President George W. Bush once declared. Democracy Inc. acts swiftly to condemn any and all dissent from or criticism of their sacred institutions and ideology.
The ways that we see Democracy Inc. defend itself today were explicitly called out by the vice president in his speech. Upon reminding Europe what the action and electoral definition of democracy really are, as opposed to the Democracy Inc. they currently defend, Vance uttered a line that sharply contrasts democracy with Democracy Inc. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls,” he said.
That word—firewall—is exactly the mission of Democracy Inc.
Vance continued by saying, “What no democracy—American, German, or European—will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid and unworthy of even being considered.”
The “firewall” specifically referred to by the vice president is the strategy behind the German political parties in power to lock Alternative for Germany (AfD) out of governing coalitions, and therefore out of any form of power. After coming in second place in the 2025 German Federal Elections with 20% of the vote, AfD was not even given the opportunity to form a coalition. Instead, the first-place party—the Christian Democratic Party (CDU)—formed a coalition with the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) and even considered other coalitions as well. As a result, 20% of voters in Germany had their voices ignored and drowned, even after AfD nearly doubled its vote share from the last federal election in 2021.
This “firewall” extends far beyond Germany in practice.
A few months after the German elections, the firewall was once again erected. Marine Le Pen—leader of the right-wing National Rally party in France— was found guilty of embezzling European Union funds and was handed a four-year prison sentence and a €100,000 fine. Most significantly and unprecedentedly, she was given a five-year ban on running for political office. This comes as the latest polls showed Le Pen and her party as the frontrunners in the 2027 French Presidential Election.
This specific charge, “embezzlement,” sounds serious on its face, but the actions taken by Le Pen are far less scary than that word would imply. Like most of the European Parliament, Le Pen mixed parliamentary and party funds because there was so much overlap between her staff in those two fields. Is this a violation of French law with regard to improper use of funds? Yes, and a fine of a few thousand pounds would have been sufficient and procedural in this case. However, the elevation of characterizing this behavior as “embezzlement” is absurd, and was clearly done so to strip Le Pen of her political power and influence. The French establishment stripping Le Pen of her electoral eligibility is in and of itself a violation, a violation of democracy. Barring the leading candidate for president of one of the most powerful nations on Earth based on the actions she took in this case is anti-democratic and authoritarian. If her conduct was so egregious and immoral, then let the voters determine whether that behavior disqualifies her from holding office. But the French establishment knows what happens when a candidate is made a martyr because of bogus lawfare.
What happens is President Donald Trump.
Shortly after announcing his candidacy for president of the United States in 2022, Donald Trump was hit with 91 felony counts. Months later, Trump was convicted on 34 counts of “falsifying business records in the first degree,” a charge never before brought in criminal court in United States history and is really a paperwork error. Nonetheless, voters in the 2024 Presidential Election saw through the scare campaign perpetrated to label Trump a “convicted felon” and re-elected him to office. It wasn’t even really that close. U.S. voters are lucky that their establishment did not take the route that Romania did in its recent election.
Earlier this year in Romania, “far right” candidate Calin Georgescu won the first round of last year’s presidential election in a shocking result, but it was overturned by the Constitutional Court after intelligence accused him of being backed by Russian TikTok accounts. Did the “Constitutional” Court care that Georgescu received the most votes? No, because Russia favored him, and that was enough to overrule the will of the people. As the vice president stated, “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
But Democracy Inc. doesn’t only use its power to prevent specific leaders and parties from gaining power and influence. It also targets and seeks to control the speech of everyday citizens.
A few months ago, 60 Minutes aired an interview with German prosecutors discussing their nation’s “hate speech” laws.
They gleefully explained that German law prohibits any speech that could incite hatred or is deemed insulting. When asked by the host if it is a crime to insult someone in public, the three of them said yes. When asked if it is a crime to insult someone online, they replied that it’s worse than a public insult, and that even reposting an insult or false information is a crime. 60 Minutes also explained that the penalties can include stiff fines, jail time, or even the seizure of a person’s private devices. This is Germany, not in the book-burning years of 1945, but in the supposedly “democratic” world of 2025.
At the heart of Democracy Inc., its defenders will do anything and everything to protect its ideology and institutions, and if the will of the voters or leaders conflict with them, they couldn’t care less. In the European Union, when countries elect leaders to stop mass migration, a group of unelected judges in Brussels, Belgium tell them they must continue to allow mass migration. When President Trump was elected in 2024 to carry out mass deportations, freeze foreign aid, and implement voter ID, a single unelected judge had the power to stop him in his tracks—and has done just that.
The people are growing more and more impatient and intolerant of these institutions that time and time again thwart the will of their votes and voices. The nationalist, populist movement is growing by the day, and the efforts to squash it are only making it stronger.
In 1945, the Allied Powers celebrated the fall of the oppressive regimes and the triumph of democracy, vowing to establish a post-World War II order that would champion and protect those same victorious democratic values. However, 80 years later, what do we see when we look across Europe and the West? Strict anti-speech laws, the imprisonment and disqualification of political candidates, and the repeated rejection of the will of the voters all in the name of “democracy” as is repeated over and over by the establishment.
But the democracy they defend is not the democracy espoused by the ancient Greeks, Thomas Hobbs, or the Founding Fathers. The democracy they defend is a self-serving, power-structured, corporation—and they will do anything to maintain it. But, the world is awakening—and the days of Democracy Inc. are numbered.
Just as the vice president said: “If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”