Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week. In the run-up to his announcement, Pence has cast himself in the mold of another influential Republican president — but not the one he served under as vice president.
Pence wants us to associate him not with the norm-breaking presidency of Donald Trump but rather with the earlier version of Republicanism exemplified by Ronald Reagan. This isn’t exactly an attempt at moderation; he embraces cuts to popular entitlement programs, for example. But in many of his disagreements with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Pence’s views are in the direction of more mainstream Republican politics: backing Ukraine in the conflict with Russia, reestablishing constitutional principles and distancing himself from the growing populist wing in the party.
Pence, in other words, is trying to move past Trump by moving backward.
Pence, in other words, is trying to move past Trump by moving backward. This strategy is akin to a pattern we often see with parties that have been underperforming — adopting the label of “new” or “modern” in concert with a move to the center. Political parties often present ideological shifts in terms of time. In the 1950s, moderate Republicans like Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower promoted a “modern” vision of Republicanism, which accepted some New Deal principles, but put a Republican spin on those ideas and sought to slow the growth of government. Their more conservative opponents favored a backward-looking revival of the party of Coolidge, Harding and Hoover.
In the 1990s, after his party lost three consecutive presidential races, Bill Clinton identified himself as a “new kind of Democrat,” who would abandon the “big government” of the New Deal and oppose “reverse discrimination” alongside racial injustice.
The benefits of hybrid, moderating ideologies have proved fleeting, however. As
Read the full article here