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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By Sohrab Ahmari

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.

In advance coverage of Notes, Didion’s executors (a cohort that includes her agent, her longtime editor, and Knopf’s current publisher) take special care to emphasize that when the memos were discovered, they had been printed out and arranged chronologically in a file folder near the author’s desk, as if the gesture of organizing documents in a 50-cent folder constitutes an instruction to publish its contents in a glossy $32 hardcover decades later.

Didion’s life and work were governed by her infamous capacity for restraint. She exercised an almost anachronistic degree of discretion, a level of dignity that would not be possible for public figures who came after. But even casting aside Didion’s persona, this was a writer famed for her meticulous perfectionism, a woman who rewrote her drafts dozens of times until every sentence sang. It’s difficult to imagine her agreeing to publish a book whose first line is, “Re not taking Prozac”. Perhaps if Didion had the opportunity to fashion these memos into a project with more direction and economy, this book would have earned its place within her body of work. But as it stands, one wonders whether Didion would even grant that Notes to John qualifies as a proper book, a unit of composition that could be stacked alongside Didion’s masterful nonfiction collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.

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Joan Didion's insufferable disciples

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In her private transmissions to her husband of nearly 40 years, Didion comes across as guarded and self-censoring. In a work of this nature, we hope to unearth at least a few stray details that might complicate our understanding of the author’s inner life. The only interesting aspect of this project is the gesture itself — the impulse to catalogue her therapy sessions and report them to her husband. But the tone is perfunctory and clinical, written as if under a court order to document her therapeutic insights.

Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik’s tabloid-adjacent double biography of Didion and the artist Eve Babitz, published last year, delivers many times more compelling insights into Didion’s mindset. Anolik writes, “Engraved at the top of her stationary was Joan Didion Dunne, but she always … ran a line through the Didion”. This prompts Anolik to wonder: “If ‘Joan Dunne’ was how she wished to be known, why didn’t she order stationary with a Joan Dunne engraving? Was it because she wanted to call attention to the fact that she, a major writer, was allowing her identity to be subsumed by that of her husband, a minor writer?”

In this case, Didion’s scattered personal effects are more revealing than her private writings to her closest confidante. Anolik isn’t the first observer to clock the author’s cosmetic deference to her husband, although she provides the most complete accounting of it. Also from Didion & Babitz, a letter that Babitz wrote but did not send to the diminutive Joan Didion in the Sixties: “Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it were not for the fact that he regards you a lot of the time as a child, so it’s alright that you are famous? And you yourself keep making it more alright because you are always referring to your size.”

The balance of power in the Didion-Dunne marriage was delicate. The couple’s lifelong friend Dan Wakefield remarked on their shared magazine column: “The Saturday Evening Post wanted Joan to do a column called Points West. She said she would, but only if she could alternate writing the column with John, and only if she and John could each have their own separate byline.”

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Is the Tradwife just a kink?

By Poppy Sowerby

Like Andy Warhol, Didion saw something in American culture before the culture saw it in itself. She was ahead of her time, a sort of proto-trad-wife — a breadwinner masquerading as a beauty queen. Didion would have married into an affluent single-income household had that been her ambition, devoting herself to motherhood and family life, writing in her spare time. But, as Anolik keenly observes, Didion wanted both “the democratic fame of a popular hack and the aristocratic grandeur of an acknowledged literary genius.”

Like the tradwives that came after her, she could not suppress her careerism, nor could she suppress her appetite for fame and attention. Contemporary conservative influencers monetize the performance of motherhood and housekeeping, but Didion carved out the archetype when it still possessed an aura of newness, rejecting the burgeoning counterculture, conforming to an Old World model of femininity and making it look cool. She’s rarely credited for her supreme contribution to the phenomenon that is the socially conservative It Girl. Every time she denounced the spirit of the age — the Sexual Revolution, the women’s movement, almost every aspect of the Sixties — her star rose higher.

But Didion continually failed to live up to her traditional aspirations, even in her fantasies. She told Dr. MacKinnon: “I keep hearing that small girls imagine themselves as brides, princesses in wedding dresses. I never had: my earliest picture of myself being ‘married’ was getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South American city wearing dark sunglasses and getting my picture taken.” Indeed, at no point did she encourage her daughter, Quintana, to date or consider marriage. She spent the bulk of these therapeutic sessions bemoaning Quintana’s unwillingness to seize the opportunities Didion found for her in photograph. She continually expressed frustration that Quintana’s focus seems to be on “leaving her job rather than going somewhere specific”.

It apparently didn’t occur to Didion that work might not provide the same salvation for Quintana as it did for her and Dunne. Status was Didion’s prescription for alcoholism and depression. Superficiality was her prized maternal wisdom. She told her doctor, “I had said repeatedly over the past few years — when Quintana expressed unhappiness or hopelessness about her situation — I had tried to explain that she had to make a decision to be happy. That there was an actual benefit to putting on a happy face”. Over the course of a few dozen sessions, the author cobbled together an impression of Quintana’s well-being based on her enthusiasm for her professional life and her capacity to manage basic daily tasks. In one of her first sessions, Didion expressed confusion at Quintana’s backslide into addiction, saying, “She had seemed fine, a blizzard of efficiency — I had even today gotten a check for medical reimbursement, with the paperwork all efficiently highlighted, ready for filing”. And that’s what the Didion estate has delivered with Notes: efficient paperwork, ready for filing.

The notes that were originally printed in Didion’s files end in 2001, although the collection includes an additional brief from 2003, recovered from Didion’s computer, written eight months before Quintana’s death. The picture these transmissions paint is of a woman whose capacity for understanding the people in her life extended only to her husband. Even then, there were instances in which the mask slipped, and Didion’s cultivated docility to her husband disintegrated. In 1969, Didion wrote that she and Dunne were on vacation at the Royal Hawaiian hotel, “in lieu of filing for divorce”. Another telling moment from Didion’s biography: after miscarrying in her early 20s, she expressed regret at “having missed an interesting moment in Cuba”.

This flippant cynicism — abortion reduced to tourism — is not entirely in line with Didion’s carefully cultivated persona: a good Protestant girl, the debutante from Sacramento who got her start in National Review. These disclosures reflect what Anolik calls Didion’s “contradictory extremes … concealment and exposure, mystery and blatancy”. The paradoxes are expertly woven into her memoirs Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, written when Didion was at the height of her abilities, and could reflect on Quintana’s death with transparency and control. The problem with Notes is that it is devoid of paradox; it’s exposure without concealment, blatancy without mystery, a woman writing to and for her husband. Whether or not these memos were interesting to John Dunne at the time of their writing, they are unlikely to be of interest to the general reader.