In April 1928, Joseph Goebbels, later the Third Reich’s chief propagandist, wrote a newspaper essay addressing the question of why the National Socialists, despite being an “anti-parliamentarian party,” would nonetheless compete in that May’s parliamentary elections.

“We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons,” Goebbels explained. “If 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.”

Germany’s postwar federal republic, established over the ruins the Nazis made, has been haunted by Goebbels’s 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 — and haven’t had an election since?

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’s something for which all Americans should feel especially grateful, given the price we paid in lives to defeat Germany’s previous political incarnations.

But not, apparently, JD Vance. The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — 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.

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