We will regret the absence of men like him, who treated politics as a duty rather than an opportunity to gratify their public or private vanities.
Back in May, when it was obvious Mike Pence would get into the presidential race, I wrote a piece asking him to soberly consider his prospects and then evaluated them rather pitilessly myself. (I am told it did not please his communications team.) I wrote then that anyone who sought to run against Trump by relitigating January 6 was doomed to failure, and that Pence — because of his pivotal role that day — was the one candidate who literally could not avoid making it a centerpiece of his campaign. This was before Trump had been subjected to his serial battery of indictments, which had the predictably similar effect of solidifying his base support and blotting out coverage of the Republican primary nearly altogether. (There’s another debate coming in nine days — bet you forgot.)
I asked Pence then to be honest with himself about his reasons for getting into this election. My hope was that, knowing the matter of January 6 could not be avoided, he would at least grasp the nettle directly and manfully, and take credit for doing the right thing. Pence, despite his long career in politics, remains mostly a cipher to the American public, his legislative and gubernatorial career having been subsumed by his most recent role as Trump’s vice president. So the question remained open: What kind of man would he prove to be, really?
The answer has been given by the forthright manner in which Pence ran his race and the dignified way in which he left it two days ago. To be sure, his hand was forced by both poor fundraising and flagging polling numbers, but the same can currently be said for many other bitter-enders who remain in a field that desperately needs culling. Others should look to the example Pence has set. Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gathering, he was matter-of-fact: “This is not my time.” He then took the opportunity (at the symbolically chosen event) to make the case for U.S. support of Israel and to give a defense of the pre-Trumpian understanding of conservative foreign-policy values. “I have no regrets,” he said, and while I’m sure he has at least one (he would have preferred to win, after all), he sounded like a man who eminently believed every word out of his mouth.
But of course he never had a chance — I displayed zero analytical brio in saying so back in May. And not just because of the January 6–specific reasons mentioned above but because, as Charlie Cooke eloquently writes this afternoon, politics in the Trump era is simultaneously intellectually deadening and fraught with a curious weightlessness: Nothing has any real deeper intellectual meaning or content in a party where acceptable political positions revolve and shift around the uncertain magnetic polarities of Donald Trump’s inconstancy like valence electrons in an ionic bond.
That said, there are other reasons still. Any requiem for Pence cannot help but also feel like a requiem for the entire pre-Trump era of consensus Republican politics, which in its economic policies failed to survive the Trump insurgency of 2016 even as its foreign-policy planks now threaten to come undone as well. Pence was a member of the House Republican “Class of 9/11”: those first elected alongside George W. Bush in November 2000 who — after a mere nine months in federal office — collectively experienced the single most trajectory-altering event in post–Cold War world history as fledgling congressmen.
So it was no surprise that in Pence’s speech he sounded the same note he has for the past several months if not his entire career, asking, “Will Republicans continue to be the party of the traditional conservatives that has defined our movement of the past 40 years, or will our party follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles?” He was referring not just to domestic politics — where, outside the innumerate profligacy of Trump’s economic policies, Pence can point with genuine pride to his role in the administration’s record on judges that resulted in decisions like Dobbs and Students for Fair Admission — but to a long-established Reaganite foreign policy tradition based around the projection of strength worldwide and the maintenance of our international alliance structure to our national benefit.
The answer to Pence’s question, at least so long as the unstable political compound known as “Trumpism” continues to dominate our politics, seems to be neither “yes” nor “no” but rather “it depends on the weather at Mar-a-Lago today.” Without a doubt, some are thrilled to see it all at least temporarily up for grabs. But even while I myself have long argued that the pre-Trump Republican political consensus is a dead parrot whose revival would be an exercise in necromantic futility, we have lost something else with it: an expectation of public decency.
Mike Pence embodied a decency that, in public and in private, has been irrevocably swept away, immeasurably for the worse. Calm, reassuringly solid, without even the slightest hint of scandal or impropriety, he exhibited a dignified comportment and directness that on the debate stage this season felt like a refreshing splash of water, a throwback to an era when Republican politicians behaved like serious people making actual arguments rather than carnival barkers hawking their brands to an audience with reality-TV expectations. In any other primary season he’d have been a serious contender. He was instead a footnote, a fate that, while inevitable, was undeserved.
Perhaps one can judge Pence for having thrown his lot in with Trump in 2016, given how much Trump has subsequently done to cheapen the conservative values and hollow out the Republican Party that the former vice president stands for. But I think that gets it exactly backwards. I think of Pence as a bit like Mitt Romney in reverse, and I mean that as a compliment, for after a career spent changing or counterfeiting his beliefs in the fruitless pursuit of a position that would forever elude him, Romney now retires petty and embittered after having “seen the light.” Meanwhile Mike Pence kept his head down as Trump’s vice president, made sure the administration kept to the straight path on matters of life and the Court, and in so doing made an actively positive contribution to those years in a way few if any other conservatives can claim to have done. Then, when thrust into the crucible of January 6, he stood for the Constitution and nothing else. Mitt Romney has never been tested like that, not once in his life.
Mike Pence will never have to wonder about history’s judgment of the outcome. He can instead sleep the sleep of the just, and look at himself in the mirror with a clean conscience as he thinks, “Roe is gone. I did my duty.” As the political generation that Pence represents itself slowly departs and the Republican Party skips forward to an uncertain ideological page, we will increasingly regret the absence of men like him, who treated politics as a duty they felt called to perform rather than an opportunity to gratify their public or private vanities.