Mike Pence should go away already

It’s 2001, and a young Mike Pence is listening to George W. Bush deliver his first major speech to Congress. The Indiana representative has waited a long time for a Republican president, but something is wrong. Bush is talking about not only expanding the size of the Department of Education — a Jimmy Carter creation — but growing its power, too. Wasn’t Bush supposed to be a Republican? Why, then, was he arguing for a bigger federal government?

It was here that Pence resolved to cling to “tried-and-true” conservatism, he explains in What Conservatives Believe, his new book, published Tuesday. In doing so, he broke with his party’s leadership to vote against Bush’s flagship education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act. That moment would harden into a governing conviction: that Republican orthodoxy had been compromised, and that it was his calling to restore it.

In these benighted times, as the “siren song of populism” grows ever louder, the former vice president still dreams of that restoration: a nation that rises up and lives out the true meaning of its creed — low taxes, limited government, and unwavering support for Israel, America’s “most cherished ally.”

That this dream is shared by approximately 16 other Americans, the vast majority of whom constitute Pence’s extended family, hasn’t stopped him. This is an exaggeration, but only slightly. The truth is, that brand of conservatism — it used to be called fusionism, for combining free-market orthodoxy, free-policy hawkism, and “traditional values” — is quite literally dying along with the subscriber base of National Review .

What Conservatives Believe, Pence’s third book since leaving the White House in 2020, is yet another long-winded attempt at vindication . The book is framed as a statement of principles, rather than autobiography. It offers no insight into the internal machinations of the Trump White House, nor does it attempt a psychological portrait of the most powerful man in the country. It does not even advance a new or original critique of MAGA populism or progressivism — ostensibly the book’s central purpose. Instead, readers are treated to nostalgia politics and a catalogue of policy prescriptions that would have seemed dated in the Bush era, let alone this one.

The new book does serve one important purpose, however. For all its denunciations of populism, Pence’s work is a powerful reminder of why Trump emerged in the first place. Before 2016, fusionism was the GOP’s governing philosophy. Its true believers — the likes of Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy — were seen as the future . Likewise, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich were all serious contenders for the presidency. It was hardly a golden age — and yet, this is the world that Pence seems to want to return to.

Trump may be an (extremely) imperfect vessel for working-class America, but he at least recognized that something was rotten in the old order. Pence, by contrast, refuses to grapple with that failure. If What Conservatives Believe reveals anything, it is that Pence still mistakes the consensus that produced Trump for the one that can succeed him.

There is something almost endearing about Mike Pence. A conservative “ proudly out of sync ” with the times, he is one of the rare few who practice what they preach. A devout Christian married for 41 years, the lifelong Hoosier has lived such a scandal-free life that his biggest “controversy” was converting from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity as a college student. To this day, he never eats alone with a woman unless it’s his wife, and he refuses to attend events involving alcohol without her by his side. (In the post-#MeToo era, many other politicians might have wished they’d adopted a similar approach.)

“In Pence’s telling, the specter haunting America is the unholy alliance of progressives and Right-wing populists.”

This rigidity also extends to Pence’s politics. Despite growing up in a Democratic household in which John F. Kennedy (a fellow Irish Catholic) was the poster boy, Pence began flirting with the GOP during that same period, and the opinions he adopted early haven’t changed. In What Conservatives Believe, he describes Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and proto-Reagan, as his intellectual hero. The young Pence found The Conscience of a Conservative , Goldwater’s statement of principles, “stirring and compelling.”

“Stirring” and “compelling” are not words that immediately spring to mind when reading The Conscience of a Conservative . Its didactic style, however, is clearly something Pence seeks to emulate in his own writing. He writes that conservatives “must begin with moral clarity”; they “must find commonsense solutions”; “they must have faith”; and, most important, they “must never forsake our constitutional principles.” It’s the kind of message that might have had some purchase 50 years ago, but in the age of Trump’s “ weave ” and rambling Truth Social posts, it struggles to regis…