Pence’s Conservatism Speech: It’s Hip to Be Square

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 07, 2023

 

Displaying all his talent for translating observations about the contours of human nature into modern parlance, Michael Brendan Dougherty last November took the opportunity to answer a rhetorical question: Aren’t you embarrassed by the state of the GOP? His response: “No more than usual.”

 

“It would be cool if the Right were cool,” he added. “But it never was.” Nor should it be. A political philosophy inclined toward the individual over the collective must sacrifice the passions that produce trends and fashions. The tastemakers will not join a movement that’s wary of exciting revolutionary ideals meant to remake the world in alignment with the ethos of this generation or the next. Conservatism especially suffers from an acute hipness deficit, in part because it cannot flatter the pretensions of those who think they’ve stumbled upon a genuinely new theory of social organization, and it cannot attempt to capitalize on the faddish sentiments that bubble up from the streets. Your new ideas aren’t so new at all, the conservative insists; their consequences are knowable and often undesirable. What a drag.

 

Enter former vice president Mike Pence, a uniquely uncool politician bearing an even less cool message. “Ask for the ancient paths,” he told the audience at New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College on Wednesday, quoting, as squares are wont to do, from scripture.

 

And yet, moored as they are to enduring principle and cursed with a knowledge of history, the uncool have the distinct advantage of knowing a sideshow when they see one. Or, at least, they are willing to cut to the quick at the risk of offending delicate sensibilities. That asset was on display in Pence’s attempt to recenter the conversation Republicans are having among themselves on the true stakes of the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary race: Will the Republican Party be a conservative party or a populist party?

 

Projects designed to marry these two competing political philosophies have thus far fallen short. Those failures were inevitable, the former vice president posited, because the two dispositions are in conflict. Pence drew few distinctions between the populism gripping the American Right and the radical progressivism of today’s Left — deservedly, because their distinctions are cosmetic.

 

The GOP’s populist faction “would substitute our faith in limited government and traditional values with an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage,” Pence observed. The progressives, too, traffic in the latter.

 

“The Republican populists would abandon American leadership on the world stage,” Pence added. This, he said, harks back to the populism of William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long and, in our time, Bernie Sanders. And the Right’s populists, like their progressive counterparts, would tear down institutional safeguards to advance ambitious demagogues — at least, they would if Trump’s call for the “termination” of the Constitution is any indication, Pence added by way of example. This is the kind of prudence and dry historical literacy that wouldn’t survive a focus group. It’s valuable, nonetheless.

 

Another tactic of the terminally uncool is that they retain the right to describe plainly the unpleasant features of our shared reality. They can say, as Mike Pence did, that the country is on a collision course with a debt crisis because of extremely popular social programs dating from the days of the New Deal and the Great Society. They can bluntly state that stirring up popular resentments against the wealthy is avarice — a sin that leads to policies restricting the economic growth from which we all benefit. And the voguish moral relativism that saturates American college campuses? The uncool can dispense with it unapologetically while also leveling with you about the evils in this world — evils busily assaulting human dignity while chipping away at the precious and costly geopolitical order our forebears built.

 

Pence is an imperfect champion for the brand of conservatism he promoted in New Hampshire, as the contradictions in his speech illustrate. He touted the record of the administration in which he served, which “succeeded because of a conservative agenda, not in spite of it.” Indeed, many of the Trump administration’s successes at home and abroad were conceived by its conventionally conservative officials. But the same cannot be said of its profligate spending record. And it muddies Pence’s critique of Trump, the current front-runner in the GOP primary race, to burnish the former president’s conservative bona fides. Likewise, if Pence is guided by the legacies of Reagan and Coolidge as much as Eisenhower, as he told us, that betrays the extent to which the GOP was always to some extent influenced by right-leaning populism. Another note of discord is that he praised constitutional federalism and the powers reserved for the “sovereign states” while also rejecting the notion that states should seek their own covenants on the issue of abortion, which he likened to slavery.

 

There are, however, no perfect messengers, and life is full of complexities and trade-offs. No one who respects you enough to level with you will tell you any different. You’re certainly unlikely to hear nagging truths like those from someone who is using you only to enhance his own status. Only the tragically old-fashioned would be so gauche as to quote Reagan unironically, express sincere admiration for the wisdom of America’s Founders, acknowledge the limits of the presidency’s power, and express humility in the face of the challenges before us. Those messages don’t win the news cycle — they’re utterly indifferent to trending topics. Indeed, for those who are intoxicated by the allure of cultural combat, such talk is downright boring.

 

But maybe it’s because we’ve grown bored with the timeless and enduring that cultural combat has now supplanted more serious fare. Perhaps it’s because too many GOP politicians peddle simple solutions to complex problems that the Right has increasingly failed to secure the incremental victories the American system was designed to produce. Do Republicans think that limited government and the pursuit of liberty are no longer enough to meet today’s challenges? And is it because the GOP has traded its appeal to the vast American middle to throw in with those who seek to radically revise the status quo that it is sacrificing so many winnable races?

 

Pence has presented Republican voters with a choice, at last, between distinct visions for the role of the state — one that sees it as a weapon to be wielded against their domestic enemies and another that views it as a tool, and not always the right one, to help all Americans achieve their God-given potential. It’s worth considering whether Pence, bummer of an anachronism that he is, has a point.

 

At least Pence deserves credit for raising these questions and framing the race as a contest between the new hot trend versus the wisdom of the past. No one who is trying to appeal to the masses would dare to do what he did. But then, popularity is overrated.