"New York -- When Vice President JD Vance lectured sullen European leaders in Munich last week about the "threat from within" and "the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values," he could have been channeling the British essayist Douglas Murray -- and he almost certainly was.
In an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan before his election, Mr. Vance revealed that he'd read "bits and pieces" of "The Strange Death of Europe" (2017), Mr. Murray's best-known book, which argues that "Europe is committing suicide" by a combination of unchecked immigration and a reckless abandonment of its Judeo-Christian principles.
In his trademark style, Mr. Rogan described Mr. Murray as "the Paul Revere [1] of this s---."
"I wasn't surprised that Vance's speech received such a cold response in the hall in Munich," Mr. Murray says. "He delivered truths to the European elites that they have spent years running from. Even the reaction to his speech proves the problem." European leaders are "forever trying to shoot messengers who tell them about their problems -- even when the message comes from friends -- rather than actually facing those problems."
Mr. Murray, 45, has published 11 books. The first, a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover, was published when the author was 20, "a disgusting age, quite unforgiveable." The most recent is "The War on the West" (2022), an account of the attack on "all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced."
He laments that "the side of democracy, reason, rights and universal principles" has prematurely surrendered to its cultural enemies on the postcolonial and race-obsessed left.
In his writings on Western "declinism" -- a word he uses often -- Mr. Murray resonates with Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), a German philosopher and prophet of decline; Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), the American political scientist who wrote "The Clash of Civilizations"; and Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), the Italian journalist who spent her last years warning us that Europe was becoming "Eurabia."
The British magazine Prospect has described Mr. Murray as "a darling of the global illiberal right," and a review of "The Strange Death of Europe" in the left-wing Guardian referred to his "gentrified xenophobia."
Mr. Murray, whose icons are Edmund Burke and the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton (1944-2020), scoffs at these put-downs." "Far right," he says, is "one of those labels around whose use we could do with having some hygiene. I've only ever been called 'far-right' by Islamists and far-leftists who want to try to stigmatize me like I'm a totally unreasonable head-banger. It is a smear, designed to shut down debate."
The term isn't without its value, he adds, when correctly applied. Mr. Murray is "very worried" about the far right in Europe. "I think it exists." The right "goes wrong when it starts to play -- and I say 'play' with deep quotation marks -- with ethnonationalism. I think most people realize that's where it starts to go off the rails." I ask him about Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which is running second in the polls ahead of Germany's Sunday election. Elon Musk has thrown his support behind it, and Mr. Vance met its leader after his Munich speech.
"There are very big problems here," Mr. Murray says of the AfD. "It's a curate's egg -- maybe good in parts, but certainly bad in some parts. I mean, there are some people at the top of the party who would be normal Conservatives in Britain, maybe even centrist Democrats in America." But there also "people in the party who are extremely worrying. Proper neo-Nazis. And then you think: Wow, this is the party that is trying to correct the CDU" -- the center-right Christian Democratic Union.
Educated at Eton and Oxford, Mr. Murray is the sort of silver-tongued Englishman who bowls Americans over with his lightly worn smarts. He divides his life between London and New York, where he is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Would young Americans be up to the task? Maybe -- if "you have the right values in place, and if you don't teach them to hate the country they're from." He calls America the one country in the West that isn't in decline, "which doesn't mean there isn't the danger." Britain has been a source of despair to Mr. Murray since he was a teenager, when he saw the way the Church of England "turned from a place which had a creed and a belief into a sort of Greenpeace of prayer." In fact, a sense of foreboding had kicked in even earlier, when he was 10. "I was in my school playground in London when the news broke that Margaret Thatcher had resigned." He remembers saying to a school friend as they kicked a soccer ball, " 'But who else can do the job?' And the subsequent years have shown that the answer is: nobody."
America's "great resilience," he believes, keeps decline at bay. "The country can be stress-tested very, very badly and it still keeps going." He admires the American character, offering an unexpected example of its strength. "There's a specific thing which Americans may not notice about themselves but which I can assure you an outsider notices. Which is that -- unless you have a horrible social circle -- if you do well, your friends are pleased for you." This isn't true in Britain, or Europe generally. "Strong negative instincts kick in. 'Don't get above yourself.' 'Who do you think you are?'"
America resists decline, also, because it has "very good foundations." Mr. Murray says he is "forever railing against Americans who do down the founders of this country. Because I don't think the ones who do that realize how lucky Americans are to have had the founders you had." Mr. Murray stumbled recently on some notes he'd made after lunch with Henry Kissinger. He can't remember when it was, but Kissinger had just read "The Strange Death of Europe" and had remarked to Mr. Murray: "It's not clear to me that the country that dislikes its past has any future." This is why fraudulent history like the New York Times's "1619 Project" and political crusades like DEI are dangerous. "They're intended to demoralize us, to trick Americans into believing that their country is a force for evil."
Mr. Murray is encouraged by Donald Trump, who has "clearly tapped into the countermovement that exists in his country of people being aware that they've been pushed too far." A lot of Americans are "quite rightly horrified by the rewriting of the American story, and they would like, as people do, to be proud of their country and to have a reasonable estimation of it. So there's definitely been a movement back the other way." Mr. Trump knows instinctively "that people like winners. That's why one of his biggest insults is to call someone a loser."
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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute." [1]
2. The Weekend Interview with Douglas Murray: Meet Europe's Paul Revere. Varadarajan, Tunku. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 Feb 2025: A11.
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