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.  

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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 catalog 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.)

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 register.

Unlike most other anti-Trump books, Pence’s work is different in that he is willing to take on his own side, even if his attacks on the president remain restrained. 

In Pence’s telling, the specter haunting America is the unholy alliance of progressives and Right-wing populists. He argues that the latter peddle “progressivism in disguise,” warning that they are “fellow travelers on the road to ruin.” Both dream of a collapse in the America-led international order, and seek to enlarge the state to such a degree that it crushes the economic freedom of Americans. No one is spared from Pence’s withering attacks — not even Marco Rubio, whose “common-good capitalism” is dismissed as a “warmed-over version of big-government Republicanism.” 

For Pence, the only answer to the problems of capitalism is more capitalism. He shows little willingness to consider that the system itself may have helped create the very populism he condemns. Across 264 pages, Pence devotes just one paragraph to the causes of the populist revolt in 2016, while Barry Goldwater earns 36 mentions. Though he concedes that globalization “left behind” some regions of the country, he blames big government — rather than trade, deindustrialization, or immigration — as the source of America’s ills. Beyond that, readers are served a steady diet of folksy maxims about how “populism is like a gust of wind” and hollow aphorisms such as: “Populists follow urges, not principle.”

Perhaps we should not expect much more from a man who once described himself as Rush Limbaugh on decaf. Pence’s role during the first Trump administration was largely ceremonial; he was the inscrutable mute who nodded, smiled, and applauded on cue, but rarely spoke out of turn. Unlike JD Vance, who has carved out a far more visible role in foreign policy and other issues, Pence left office without a signature policy achievement to call his own. He surfed the populist wave all the way to the Number One Observatory Circle and never seemed quite sure what to do once he got there.

This is Pence in a nutshell. He was content to ride on Trump’s coattails, claiming the administration’s successes as his own, until the president turned on him on Jan. 6. Crucially, Pence mistook his elevated status in the White House for evidence that he represented a constituency that was loyal to him, rather than the president. In doing so, he misunderstood the movement itself: MAGA was never a coalition awaiting conservative stewardship, but a personal following organized around Trump alone. Pence’s failed presidential campaign in 2024, lasting fewer than five months, proved as much.

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If there is an heir to Trump, that person will not be a bible-thumping Christian who preaches a return to civility and fiscal conservatism. More likely, it will be a figure who best channels the values Trump claimed to represent: ending foreign wars, draining the swamp, and reviving America’s industrial heartlands. Trump may have failed in some of these promises, but he at least forced a reckoning on them. That his coalition grew, rather than shrunk, over three elections shows he had a far greater sense than Pence — or any Republican for that matter — of where the country was headed.

Pence, by contrast, believes the problems facing 21st-century America can be found in the 20th century, with the “provable” ideas of Ronald Reagan guiding the way. So how would the former vice president address the very modern problems of social atomization, the breakdown of communities, and the infiltration of technology into everyday life? Pence answers these thorny questions with grandfatherly wisdom: “social media often can feel like antisocial media,” “iPhones transform into what I call ‘iFOMOs’ because users suffer from a ‘fear of missing out,’” and the suggestion that the Founding Fathers might have prefaced the Tenth Amendment with “ICYMI.”

These sparkling insights may read more like a church newsletter than a political diagnosis, but they point to a broader truth. The world that produced Reagan — and the Republican consensus he embodied — has long since disappeared, replaced by economic dislocation, cultural fragmentation, and a crisis of institutional trust that Reaganite platitudes are poorly equipped to address. The tragedy of Pence is not merely that he was eclipsed by Trump, but that he still cannot see why Trump emerged in the first place. The world has moved on from Pence and his ideology; only Pence seems determined to remain behind.

To his parents’ surprise, the boy gets even more excited and starts to dig wildly into the pile. “Son,” the mum cries, “what are you doing?” The boy turns around with a smile on his face and replies, “With all this stuff, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”

That neatly sums up the state of mind for many American conservatives today. With Donald Trump in the White House building tariff and border walls, and the Left gunning at them from their towers in academia and the media, conservatives often feel like their movement is dying under a heap of dung. If only there were a pony somewhere in there, they mutter to themselves.

The reality is not so bleak. Fading American conservatism has an excellent chance to renew itself and become again a dominant political force. But to do that, it needs to be a little less distinctively American and bit more like the conservatism found in other Anglosphere countries.

American conservatism differs from the rest of the world’s centre-Right attitudes in two respects: it is distinctly Protestant in tone and policy, and it remains unreconciled to the existence of the modern social welfare state – both of which attitudes are now decisively out of touch with mainstream American thought.

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Vice President Mike Pence excellently encompasses them, however.  His acceptance speech for the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016 started: “I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” This expression of faith is non-controversial within conservative circles. But fewer than one-third of Americans would be able say the same about themselves.

Pence’s weren’t empty words. As Governor of Indiana, he garnered national attention when, in 2015, he signed a law allowing businesses to cite religious convictions to exempt themselves from anti-discrimination statutes. Staunchly anti-abortion, long opposed to same-sex marriage, and notably religiously observant, Pence is an excellent representative of the evangelical Right’s political movement. He is not, however, an excellent representative of the middle of American political opinion.

Fewer than 40% of Americans attend religious services weekly, and non-believers – or non-Christians – are a large and fast-growing share of the population. Polls consistently show a majority favours a woman’s right to have an abortion, at least in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Americans also favour same-sex marriage, and those under the age of 30 favour it by nearly 4-to-1 margins. The only major group in America that still opposes it is white evangelical Christians; in other words, Mike Pence and the core of the Republican Party.

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If Pence’s sincere but ostentatious religiosity is off-putting for tens of millions of Americans, his devotion to conservative economic nostrums dismays millions more. American conservative thought remains opposed to virtually any expansion of social welfare programmes; it has opposed efforts to expand government-subsidised healthcare coverage, regardless of whether such efforts were pushed by Republican or Democratic presidents. Pence enthusiastically opposed both Obamacare and President Bush’s expansion of the popular health insurance programme for senior citizens, Medicare.

This deep-rooted antipathy stems from the very beginnings of the modern American conservative movement. It began in opposition to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which established the first national government regulation of business and the first government pensions (Social Security). The journalist William F Buckley summed it up in an oft-quoted epigram from the mission statement of the magazine that became the bible of the new movement: “It [National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

But history did not stop, despite the election of Buckley’s friend Ronald Reagan and then three more Republican Presidents since. It turns out that Americans like big government, even if they prefer less of it than do Swedes or Danes. Every significant conservative-led effort to curtail, reform, or reduce large government programmes has failed spectacularly. Yet movement conservatives remain undaunted. Their biggest domestic priority today is dramatically to reduce spending on Social Security, Medicare, and a government-run health insurance for the poor and the disabled, Medicaid, without raising any taxes to help finance the indebted programmes. As they say in the South, that dog don’t hunt.

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One can only begin to understand the conservative intellectual opposition to Trump in reference to these foundational beliefs. Trump openly said he would not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid and – to put it mildly – did not strike a conventional Christian pose on the campaign trail. His embrace of tariffs and opposition to free trade struck movement conservatives as heresy precisely because it championed government intervention in markets to help people in need. Yet their caterwauling availed them not; it turned out that even a majority of Republicans had long since ceased to worship at the conservative altar.

Trump’s tenure in office does, however, show how certain longstanding conservative priorities can be part of the new emerging conservatism. Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation of business are longtime conservative priorities. His focus on religious liberty, without the ostentatious preaching of religious belief so common among other Republicans, is proving popular. Trump is even curbing some of the less central elements of the social welfare state. The number of people receiving disability insurance benefits had been rising dramatically for over 15 years, but the number has been shrinking since Trump’s inauguration. Conservatives may not be getting what they want, but they are getting what they need.

Trump’s victory was marred by his casual insensitivity to gender, racial, and ethnic sensibilities: he offended and drove away millions of people who could have rallied to the cause of a new, less doctrinaire conservatism. But he nonetheless shows conservatives something they ought to have seen long before his arrival. Americans may revere the past, but they have no wish to return to it. They live in the present and dream for the future and they want political leadership that shares those values, not one that scorns the present and see the future in the past.

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America remains open to a moderate conservatism, one that is at peace with the modern state and modern morality and seeks only to trim its excesses and preserve core religious freedoms while placing its power squarely in the service of the vast majority. That is what Republicans in state leadership roles have done, and they have consistently won re-election even when more doctrinaire, national Republicans have faltered. In this sense, Republican governors are more like Trump than most care to admit.

This brand of conservatism should sound familiar to non-American readers. It is more like what the British or Canadian Tories, Australia’s Liberals, and New Zealand’s National Party have done for decades, following Edmund Burke rather than Milton Friedman. That brand of centre-Right thinking has its own difficulties. But that does not mean that American conservatives should not look abroad for some inspiration.

American conservatism faces what Reagan called “a time for choosing”. Reagan burst on to the national scene with a 1964 television speech with that title, and told Americans that “there is no Left or Right, only an up or down”. How to move up, towards what Reagan called “the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order,” requires choice, and that requires judgment rather than ideology. American conservatism can thrive if it can discard old ideological coats that no longer fit and instead choose new, better-tailored ones.

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