Former Vice President Mike Pence sees a new calling in restoring traditional conservatism in the heart of the Republican Party.
It’s a tall task with a Republican Party that is defined by President Trump, whom he once helped elevate, and increasingly embracing populist policies.
But in his new book out today, What Conservatives Believe, Pence takes sharp aim at what he calls “progressivism in disguise,” and heaves some strikingly direct critiques at Trump’s governing.
In one early section that reminded me of the list of grievances against King George III in the Declaration of Independence, Pence lists a number of ways that the second Trump administration has, in his mind, strayed from traditional conservatism.
“Where Trump once defended the right to life, he washed his hands of the pro-life cause, claiming that abortion policy is no longer the business of the federal government,” Pence wrote. “Where he once pushed the courts in a conservative direction through smart nominations, he attacked many of the people and groups involved in building one of his most important legacies. Where he once wanted businesses to flourish in a free-market system, he worked to give the federal government partial ownership of several corporations. Where he once wanted to engage with the world and lead, he has increasingly withdrawn from it and sought to isolate the United States from its longtime allies.”
But the heart of Pence’s argument isn’t about Trump himself, but about the ideological debates that the Republican party will have to grapple with as Trump eventually exits as its dominant force.
“Will we remain a party of conservative beliefs, or will we follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles?” Pence asks. “The divide between these two factions is too vast. Republicans must pick a side.”
He laments that in the new Trump administration, “the lawfare invented by the left-wing progressives” that targeted Trump between his presidential terms “found new advocates among right-wing populists,” pointing to cases against Trump’s antagonists FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Attorney General Leticia James, and former national security adviser John Bolton.
“Conservatives know this cycle of criminalizing political differences must end,” Pence writes.
Pence says the Constitution’s limitations "frustrates partisan warriors, who accuse those who support the Constitution of favoring process over results.” But he encourages standing on principle.
“As conservatives, we should pursue our preferred outcomes, but we must also play by the rules of the game — and the Constitution’s rules were put in place to preserve the conservative principle of limited government,” Pence writes.
That will be a tough sell for a large segment of the right that has encouraged and embraced Trump’s second-term ethos of being as aggressive as possible with executive power in order to quickly accomplish policy goals.
Pence writes about the importance of American families, but laments that “some right-wing populists have decided that American families need the support of industrial policies and the welfare state” — referencing a 2019 speech from then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on “common good capitalism,” which Pence was “was just a warmed-over version of big-government Republicanism.”
Pence also faces an uphill battle in his “case for Israel,” given that a majority of Republicans under 50 now have an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a recent Pew survey. He argues that figures like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson who have questioned U.S. military support for Israel have been proven wrong, and draws a hard line on the issue.
“There is no room in the conservative movement for opponents of U.S. support for Israel, and there is no place in America for antisemitic rhetoric and bigotry,” Pence says.
The book also isn’t just constant Trump-bashing. His chapter on “Law and Order from the Neighborhood to the Border” calls to completely shut down illegal immigration through methods like strong border security and mandatory E-Verify. But he doesn’t explicitly give Trump praise for how he’s handled the border in his second term.
Pence does not get into arguments surrounding demographics and identity that have animated the most hardline immigration restrictionists in the Republican party until later in the book, in his chapter on “Equality of Opportunity.”
While he argues that policies must encourage assimilation and that schools should teach English to children who don’t speak it at home, Pence warns: “Our movement must resist the sentiment of populist who view legal immigrants as threats to national identity and even sink to the slander of so-called replacement theory, which makes conspiratorial claims about nefarious plots to replace whites with non-white immigrants in the United States and throughout the Western world.”
“Americans may not be connected by race, ethnicity, or ancestral bloodlines, as is the case in many countries. Yet we share a common past of forebears who arrived somewhere else,” Pence writes.
Pence said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that his book was not a rejection of the MAGA movement, but thinks that those who supported the MAGA movement believe in conservative principles. He notably brushed off a question about whether Vice President Vance — who is supported by the GOP’s populists — could embody those principles as a leader of the party.
Further reading: ‘What Conservatives Believe’ Review: Mike Pence’s Way, by Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal… Mike Pence says the Trump administration has ‘departed’ from conservative principles, in NBC News… Mike Pence says he hopes Trump administration will drop weaponization fund, in CBS News…
