Former Vice President Mike Pence gave a full-throated condemnation of Republican populism on Wednesday and implored Republicans to embrace conventional conservatism over the rising motion he likens to progressivism on the left.
Talking on the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm Faculty in Manchester, Pence laid out a stark distinction between his imaginative and prescient for the Republican Get together and that of populists like former President Donald Trump.
Pence sees the variations between conventional conservative values and populism as irreconcilable and notes the GOP has come to a crossroads:
I got here right here to St. Anselm Faculty to easily say from my coronary heart that Republican voters face a alternative on this state and in each state across the nation as these primaries unfold, and I imagine that alternative will decide the destiny of our celebration and the course of our nation for years to return. So right now I requested my fellow Republicans this: Within the days to return, will we be the celebration of conservatism, or will we comply with the siren music of populism unmoored to conservative rules? The way forward for this motion on this celebration belongs to 1 or the opposite, not each. That’s as a result of the elemental divide between these two factions is unbridgeable.
Pence argued that whereas conservatism within the GOP has lengthy had ideological variations with liberalism within the Democratic celebration, populism is now threatening conservatism “from inside” the GOP. Pence sees populism as the suitable’s equal of progressivism on the left, with each being completely different strains of the identical ideology.
“These ideologies are fellow vacationers on the identical street to damage,” he contended earlier than noting a few of America’s earlier left-leaning populist actions.
Pence is worried that populist Republicans are prepared to desert long-held conservative values within the GOP, together with “religion in restricted authorities,” in favor of “an agenda stitched collectively by little else than private grievances and performative outrage.”
“The Republican populists would abandon American management on the world stage, embracing a posture of appeasement within the face of rising threats to freedom. Republican populists would blatantly erode our constitutional norms,” he added.
He then took intention at his former working mate, Trump, who has adopted populist themes since getting into the political realm in 2015, and his “imitators” within the major discipline whom Pence sees as abandoning the U.S. Structure and the life motion:
A number one candidate for the Republican nomination final yr referred to as for the ‘termination of all guidelines, laws and articles even these discovered within the Structure,’ whereas these imitators on this major have demonstrated a willingness to brandish authorities energy to impose their will on opponents. And even after a historic victory for all times, Republican populists would relegate the reason for defending the unborn to the states, a lot in the best way throughout one other time within the lifetime of our nation, those that sought to protect an excellent evil tried to go away that query to the States alone.
“There’s already a celebration that embraces appeasement overseas. There’s already a celebration that might ignore our nationwide debt. There’s already a celebration that wishes to marginalize the suitable to life,” Pence went on so as to add.
The previous vp and Indiana governor sees himself as “probably the most certified, probably the most constant, and probably the most confirmed conservative on this race” and believes a path of conventional conservatism “should information our celebration and our nation as a lot right now as they’ve for the previous 50 years.”
“Ought to the brand new populism of the suitable seize and information our celebration, the Republican Get together we’ve lengthy identified will stop to exist, and the destiny of American freedom can be unsure,” he cautioned.