By Mike Pence
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Note: The following is an excerpt from Mike Pence’s
forthcoming book What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative
Conscience.
Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility. Since the
American founding, we’ve suffered from bouts of incivility, from the sharp
words of soundbites to much worse. When it happens, Americans often recognize
it and demand more from themselves and their countrymen.
I have long believed that personal attacks have no place
in public life, but I haven’t always lived up to my own standards. In 1990,
during my second campaign for Congress, I participated in one of the most
divisive races in Indiana congressional history. Even though I had come to a
personal faith in Jesus Christ years earlier, I became willing to do almost
anything to win and made decisions that I soon regretted. After I lost, I wrote
a short essay: “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner.” And I made a promise to
God and myself that if I ever had the chance to run for office again, I would
run in a way that honored God, informed the debate, and put winning and losing
after that. I resolved to do better no matter where life took me.
When the chance to run for Congress came around again, I
had spent a decade seeking to grow in my faith and aspire “to do unto others”
as I would have them do unto me. And throughout the ensuing twenty years in
public office, I pray that I have done just that.
In our world of social media, politicians face the
temptation to turn the public arena into a circus of insults — but all of us
must do better. People of all creeds in public life should demonstrate the
ability to disagree without being disagreeable or resorting to the personal
invectives that have no place in the public square. “Manners are more important
than laws,” wrote Edmund Burke. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or
purify, exalt or debase, barbarize, or refine us.”
As Russell Kirk wrote, “politics is the art of the
possible.” And civility makes the art of politics possible. That’s why politics
in a democracy includes rules of decorum. During the most raucous arguments in
Congress, for example, lawmakers will pepper their remarks with references to
their partisan rivals as “my good friend.” These traditions may feel arcane,
and they can break down in practice, but they also create ways to debate
proposals rather than personalities. I can claim that an idea is bad without
insisting that its author is a bad person.
Civility is how we can find principled common ground in
America. Conservatives must never compromise our principles, but we can
compromise on details.
When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he became
frustrated with some of his fellow Republicans: “They wanted all or nothing and
they wanted it all at once. If you don’t get it all, some said, don’t take
anything.” That’s not how politics works in a democracy — and Reagan knew it
from his time in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He was in
fact the only union leader ever to become president. “I’d learned while
negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for,” he
said. “If you got 75 or 80 percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take
it and fight for the rest later.” Reagan also liked to quote President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt: “I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to
bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.”
Major legislative achievements throughout American
history have come from bipartisan majorities, with both Democrats and
Republicans joining to create Social Security in the 1930s and pass civil
rights laws in the 1960s. More recently, though, too many politicians have
favored partisan power over principled common ground. The passage of the
Affordable Care Act — also known as “Obamacare” — became the first
transformational law ever rammed through Congress on a party-line vote. Not a
single Republican supported it, but it fundamentally altered health care for
Americans. It’s no coincidence that it also made health care worse.
The failure to find common ground and generate a broad
consensus on health care and so many other issues has led to our current period
of political volatility. Voters have thrust parties in and out of power with
whiplash speed. Since 2000, control of the House of Representatives has changed
four times and control of the Senate has changed five times. This is powerful
evidence of restlessness among the American people.
Incivility is at the heart of the problem. Liberals love
to pretend that Donald Trump invented incivility, but he’s more a symptom than
a source. Trump did not devise the personal attack in politics, though he may
have perfected it. Sadly, Trump’s abrasive and combative style, once unique and
jarring in the Republican Party, has been widely aped by right-wing populists.
Long before Trump, however, left-wing progressives
rejected civility and compromise. They followed the advice of the activist and
agitator Saul Alinsky, who wrote Rules for Radicals, a 1971 manifesto on
political confrontation. Among his thirteen rules, the most influential was the
last: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Not
surprisingly, the book includes an epigraph that praises “the first radical known
to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he
won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”
Many Democrats, most notably Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton, became disciples of Alinsky and brought his methods of demonization
into the politics of the 21st century. Progressives have relied on Alinsky’s
playbook for decades. Democrats routinely attack and demean Republicans and
other ordinary Americans. When he was running for president in 2008, Obama
spoke at a fundraising event in San Francisco: “You go into these small towns
in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have
been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” he said. “And it’s not
surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy
toward people who aren’t like them.” Hillary Clinton also mocked regular
Americans during her 2016 presidential campaign, at a fundraiser in New York
City: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of
deplorables,” she said, as her liberal donors laughed and clapped. “The racist,
sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
During my years in Congress, as governor, and as vice
president, I grew accustomed to the demonization of my faith, my family, and my
convictions by left-wing progressives and their allies in the media. I never
liked it, but I learned to live with it. Yet it has troubled me to watch the
coarsening of our culture from the normalization of foul language to the antics
of the cowardly trolls on social media who hide behind anonymity as they shout
their bigotry. This everyday cruelty has formed a grim backdrop to a worse and
growing problem. As the Bible says, “you reap what you sow.” As progressives
promote abortion on demand at any time and for any reason and increasingly
promote unnatural deaths from euthanasia, they cheapen life and foster a
culture of death. In 2025, a Democratic candidate for attorney general in
Virginia was revealed to have sent text messages wishing death upon a
Republican politician and then saying he also wished the man’s children dead.
Democratic officials refused to denounce him, and Democratic voters
inexplicably rewarded him with an election victory.
Words matter, and today the rhetoric of many left-wing
progressives as well as right-wing populists fuels a growing acceptance of
political violence. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, protests
ostensibly about police brutality descended into urban riots in dozens of
cities. Months later, populists rampaged through the Capitol, in an attempt to
overturn an election, assaulting police officers and vandalizing our seat of
government. The violence kept on coming: A potential assassin stalked Supreme Court
Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. Later, the governor of Pennsylvania saw his
residence firebombed and a Minnesota state representative and her husband were
killed in their home. During the 2024 campaign, President Trump narrowly
escaped an assassin’s bullet at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and
he survived another potential assassination on a golf course in Florida.
Political violence must be universally condemned, no
matter where it comes from and no matter who it targets. Sadly, it has become
disturbingly acceptable to young liberals. In a 2005 YouGov poll, 26 percent of
liberals aged 18 to 44 said that political violence is sometimes justified.
Among conservatives in the same age range, the figure was only 7 percent. (And
among Americans of all ages and all political persuasions, only 11 percent said
that political violence can sometimes be justified.)
We saw the tragic consequences of these sentiments with
the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in 2025. I knew Charlie
from the time I was governor through my years in the White House. One of my
final speeches as vice president was in Florida for Turning Point USA, the
organization he founded and led. Charlie was a good and godly young man, a
devoted husband and father. He was dedicated to taking his conservative message
to young people on campuses across the country, until an assassin’s bullet
killed him. He gave his life defending freedom of speech. Our movement and our
nation should ever remember him so.
The person responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk was
the man who pulled the trigger. He must face swift and certain justice. Nothing
will do more to ensure that this scourge of political violence comes to an end.
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that those of us in public life have a
responsibility to do better.
Three years before Charlie’s murder, I spoke at Utah
Valley University, just yards from the site of his killing. In my remarks, I
warned of mounting incivility: “If we allow radical voices to continue dumping
toxic waste into the headwaters of culture, our politics will only get more
poisonous over time.” The American people long for us to restore a threshold of
civility in public life, but it will take a new generation of conservative
statesmen to achieve it.
No comments:
Post a Comment