Former Vice President Mike Pence called the alarm about the Republican Party’s lurching away from the tenets of Reaganism: strong defense, limited government, and traditional values.
Mike Pence argued that Trumpian Populism was a threat to the party in a speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College titled Populism vs. Conservatism: Republicans’ Time for Choosing.
Republicans Should Return to Conservatism
“I really do believe that we’re in the midst of a healthy debate in the Republican Party today – whether or not we’re going to continue to hue towards that time-honored conservative agenda of a strong national defense, American leadership in the world, limited government, fiscal responsibility, traditional values, and the right to life, or whether we’re going to follow the siren song of populism away from many of those same timeless conservative principles,” Pence claimed.
Donald Trump chose Pence as his running mate due to his connection to the Republican establishment. Now freed from being Trump’s understudy, Pence feels he can return to Reaganite rhetoric.
He fails to see that Trump became acceptable to the Republican base due to the failure of the party to live up to their rhetoric. Republicans talked fiscal responsibility but doubled the national debt under George W. Bush and then again under Trump. They talked about traditional Judeo-Christian values but did nothing to advance them and cowered when the Democrats would call them names. Republicans turned away from military interventionism due to the successive bureaucratic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pence’s Rhetoric Flies in the Face of Reality
Pence’s problem is he has failed to adapt to the changes on the ground. As governor of Indiana, Pence personally talked about conscience rights when it came to same-sex marriages; however, in contrast with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis he backed down when corporate America pushed back.
The clash between Populism and Reaganite Neoconservatism was exemplified by the exchange between Pence and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy at last month’s Republican primary debate.
“We can do both, Vivek. We’ve done both. We’ve been the leader of the free world, the arsenal of democracy for years. The Reagan Doctrine years ago made it clear, we said, if you’re willing to fight the communists on your soil, we’ll give you the means to fight them there. So our troops don’t have to fight them,” Pence said in a riposte against Ramaswamy over his belief the U.S. should not be involved in the war in Ukraine.
“Vivek, if we do the giveaway that you want to give to Putin to give him his land, is not going to be too long for he rolls across a NATO border. And frankly, our men and women of our armed forces are going to have to go and fight him. I want to let the Ukrainians fight and drive and the Russians back out.”
Admissions of corruption at Ukraine’s Defense Ministry with regard to the disbursal of military aid and reports that American weapons from Ukraine’s stockpiles have ended up on the black market send the message that policymakers have learned nothing from Iraq or Afghanistan. In both conflicts, corruption undermined the ability to win those wars, creating the narrative of “endless wars.”
The End Is Near for Mike Pence
Pence’s problem is that he has not adapted to the realities of the 2020s.
Reagan faced a different paradigm in the 1980s. The America of 1981 no longer exists. Reagan inherited a $900 billion national debt in 1981. Today the national debt stands at $33 trillion. In 1981 the U.S. had a robust national industrial base. In 2023 that industrial base that won the Cold War has been outsourced to China and other countries.
The American people have watched bureaucracy squander military victories, and they wonder why. Mike Pence is polling in the single digits because he has not seen that the world has changed around him.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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