Mike Pence was a hero on January 6th. It's hard to understate that. He defied the whims of Donald Trump's angry mob and fulfilled his constitutional duty to certify the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election. I admire his consistent pro-life stance, his committment to marital fidelity, and the overall tone and tenor of his life. But in the wake of January 6th, the event that truly shook me out of my Youtube-induced right-wing stupor, I've gone through a process of "deconstructing" many of my prior conservative beliefs, and while there was, for a time, a firewall between the "Trumpian" beliefs that started as his personal eccentricities - tariffs, harsh immigration tactics, using the state to reward friends and punish enemies - and the "core" conservative and libertarian beliefs - mostly unfettered free markets, small government, low taxes, concern for debts and deficits, social issues - those beliefs have also taken a beating.
I heard somewhere once that there are only two labels in the political world that are fundamentally relative, and those are "conservative" and "radical." The point is that what is "conservative" changes with the context one finds himself in. I used to think it was pathetic that "conservatives" in Britain, Australia and Canada were pro-abortion and pro-state healthcare, and these weren't contested positions. This has much more to do with what is being "conserved" in these contexts than America, the birthplace of revivalism, the charaismatic movement, and the place with the strongest evangelical voting block in the whole world. What we see as pre-Trumpian conservatism is a function mostly of National Review and William F Buckley's excising of the John Birch Society from the Republican Party combined with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority political Christianity movement. It's called fusionism. Strong national defense, Christian social issues, free markets. The three legged stool. It was a product of its time and it needed to die because its late cold war context hit a sunset. What we didn't anticipate was the revenge of the Birchers, that old, angry, paranoid group of conspiracy theorists and racists finally had their day after all 50 years later.
Mike Pence's book reads much like the material of his I'm mostly familiar with; that's to say his Presidential debate performances and the occasional speech. (This is especially so because I have the audiobook version, read by the author.) Even though the opportunity has been forever and ever forclosed for him, he sounds as though he's still running for President. It is a dry, issue-by-issue recitation of his positions, giving his best shot at taking credit for enacted policies through the overuse of the phrase "the Trump-Pence Administration." I know the real difference between the first and the second Trump administration, and it doesn't have much to do with Pence himself at all.
The first Trump administration was staffed by what many have called "The Adults in the Room," people such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Mark Esper, Bill Barr. These were serious career public servants who were able to serve the country effectively, offered to Donald Trump by the Republican Party as an attempt to bring competence and experience to the administration. The Heritage Foundation's judicial picks represented their priorities, not Trump's. This time around, the entire balance of power has shifted. Donald Trump won the 2016 election by a hair's breadth, and he needed the cooperation of the party to succeed in governing. This is no longer the case in his decisive win over Kamala Harris. In a show of his immense power, Donald Trump did not participate in any of the Republican Party debates, including the several that Pence was a part of. He won anyway by a ridiculous margin. The vast majority of his endorsed candidates for every statewide office succeed on his word, and he often sinks longstanding political careers simply by endorsing opponents. And on nearly every issue, Trump has waffled, changed his mind, equivocated, and pivoted to suit his whims or purposes, from abortion to immigration to China to gun control to taxes. Nothing sinks him, from making a billion dollars off crypto scams to taking a free 3/4 billion dollar Qatari jet to ordering his IRS to permanently absolve his family from tax investigation and almost ordering them to give two billion dollars to his Jan 6 rioters to asking his justice department to scrub his name and withhold his files from the legally-ordered Epstein files release. All of this free from any consequences from his voters. The point is this:
Donald Trump is the Republican Party now. He has single-handedly redefined what it means to be both a conservative and a Republican, and that means nothing more than to support him and all he does personally. Period. There are no "conservative principles" anymore, and explicitly so.
Trump succeeded by convincing America that the postwar democratic norms which underpinned Reagan have failed us, such as free trade, immigration, multilateral diplomacy, even democracy itself. In the view of the vast majority of self-identifying conservative voters, the only thing that can 'save' the country is a strongman willing to amass power to himself so he can wield it against the country's enemies, within and without. So when Pence tries to no-true-Scotsman 'conservatism' away from Trump back towards Reagan, he makes himself look weak. There's no room for morality, consequentialism, or tit-for-tat warnings in the conservative movement anymore, just power: the will to take it and the will to keep it.
There are few topics so infuriating as Israel when talking with conservatives both past and present. Their beliefs involve a mix of facile theology and platitudes, refusing to deal head-on with the moral atrocities committed by the Netanyahu government towards civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, supported by the vast majority of the Israeli people. If Pence wants to fall back on "God will bless those who bless Israel, and curse those who curse Israel," perhaps he needs to rethink his definition of Israel as Abraham's children according to the promise [Gal. 3:29] and not a modern nation-state erected by the British in 1947, claiming to be Jews and who are not [Rev 3:9].
Pence seems supportive of Trump's moves in Iran, which I believe are a disaster that have cost many American lives and even more Iranian lives. This is in line with my view of Marco Rubio's transformation as he took power in the second Trump administration: The Neocons, or hawks, as you like, may have opposed Trump, but it was never on moral grounds - that was just a pretense. Ultimately they were afraid he'd stand in the way of their ambitions to invade Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other targets, which I am quite sure they are pleased to be very, very wrong about.
He also incredibly seems to take issue with George W. Bush and the No Child Left Behind Act, criticizing it as a sign of "big government conservatism" in the closest period to orthodox Reaganism we've experienced in my lifetime. The audacity of a president wanting standards for children in reading and math! This from the VP who presided over a 7.8 Trillion dollar increase in his term? The hypocrisy is stunning. At least Linda McMahon is in charge of the Department of Education, ensuring no corner is safe from Trump's influence peddling - How much money did TKO, Dana White, and Vince McMahon make off the schlocky White House MMA event again?
There is really only one way to restore sanity to the Republican Party. They must lose, and they must lose fantastically, for an extended period of time. The right-wing social media, podcast, cable news, and AM radio ecosystem is thriving better than ever before, soothing the consciences of Trump's voters and reframing every event as a demonstration of his leadership and an indictment of his opponents. There is no getting off this train, for the vast majority of these devotees, comprising about 30-40% of the country. However, this is not 51%. Virtually all Democrats and a large majority of independents recognize this insanity for what it is, and they will punish this party for their excesses. I will be joining them until such a time their losses force a drastic realignment of their priorities, and then one day in much more normal times, maybe I can stand alongside them protesting abortion and forced cake-baking again. This is the worst book I've read in many years.