Mike Pence speaks at the Schar School of Policy and Government’s Constitution Day event on Sept. 17, 2025. (Rithvik Hari / Fourth Estate)
In Mike Pence’s new book, is the former VP offering substance, or empty rhetoric?
BY GIUSEPPE S. DISTEFANO, OPINION EDITOR
Former Vice President Mike Pence returned to George Mason’s Arlington campus for a Sept. 23 book discussion, marking the first time he’s returned to campus since teaching “The Character of the American Constitution.”
Pence’s new book, “What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience,” is what he calls a “twenty-first century version” of Barry Goldwater’s 1960 manifesto, “Conscience of a Conservative”. In it, Pence lays out the defining policies that he says conservatives believe in, in a time where he fears people are unsure what it means to be conservative.
Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell moderated the book talk, asking Pence about the book, his thoughts on the state of the Republican Party and his hopes for its future.
On the surface, Pence wants what’s best for the country and for young people, and hopes that with “What Conservatives Believe,” he can inspire a new movement to take up the cause of conservatism, with this book presumably serving as a primer.
Pence, however, acknowledges the bipartisan failure to implement change that positively affected Americans, so what does his rehashing of conservatism have to offer for Americans who have already lived under the consequences of it? The answer is nothing.
While Pence gives the reader much to chew on through quotes from conservative icons of yesteryear — and of course, scripture — he offers virtually no introspection from his own experiences or observations of substance.
By taking the attack on the right-wing populists of his party for threatening the Republicans’ conservative principles, Pence doesn’t do enough to reflect on the failings of the conservative movement itself. Additionally, he does nothing to give people an alternative to what the MAGA ideology offers, which is a vessel for their rage against the political establishment that people like Pence represent.
It’s clear too that this is intentional, as much of what he has to offer to the reader in his book is the advice to “keep the faith” in the system, which to me reads as if he has nothing new to say.
What’s better is Pence’s response to a question posed by an event attendee: Could a free-trade-loving, small-government-supporting conservative replace Trump? Pence answered that he “hopes” a traditional conservative candidate appears in 2028, and that voters will likely want to return to a candidate with those values.
Does anyone think that this speaks to “having faith in the process”?
How can people trust in what Pence has to say, given how bendable his own principles have been over the past 10 years? This becomes clear in Pence’s decision to become Trump’s vice president in 2017, allowing himself to play second fiddle to a man who was the antithesis of everything he stands for in faith, politics and lifestyle.
The conservatism he espouses today and with this book is the same brand of conservatism that he shed when he became vice president, and the same that is considered a weakness for Republicans now.
At the beginning of his book, Pence sets up an allegory to Rip Van Winkle. He claims that just as Winkle slept through the American Revolution and woke up to a new world after it ended, the same happened with him and the Republican Revolution of the ‘90s.
I believe Pence, yet again, finds himself in a different world, at a time when people no longer seek answers in the past but instead look for fresh ideas and reforms. Pence remains out of touch with why people are mad and how we got here, and he doesn’t seem to care to learn.
In the end, conservatism as Pence knows it is dead, and it is clear that he can’t accept the fact that he helped the man who killed it gain power — Donald Trump.
