Credit former Vice President Mike Pence for continuing to carry the Madisonian, Reaganite, conservative banner even as the Trumpist semi-Right runs into sewer holes where autocrats are embraced, basic decency is considered weakness, conspiracy theories are welcomed, big government is OK if it is used for the aims of one’s own side, and freedom takes a back seat to retributive order.
To that end, the organization Pence founded three years ago, Advancing American Freedom, is launching an aggressive, $20 million “American Solutions Project,” with some major conservative leaders, to push Reaganite ideals while fighting against “unprincipled populism.” Ed Feulner, the founder and longtime president of the Heritage Foundation in its heyday, will join the board. So will Art Pope, a political legend in North Carolina responsible for decades of conservative successes there.
The additions of Feulner and Pope, along with a $20 million budget to support candidates and legislative efforts, means that Pence is far from a spent force in American politics. More importantly, the areas in which the American Solutions Project will focus show a keen sense of timeless principles. The parent organization, AAF, already has been one of the most admirably specific and philosophically sound groups on a tremendously broad range of topics, but now the $20 million ASP project is particularly concentrating on five key “policy priorities.” It is right to choose those five, including two on which the Trump-besotted pseudo-populists go the other direction.
Those two are an embrace of “free trade with free nations” and a call to “restore U.S. global leadership,” including unabashed, but “fiscally responsible,” support for Ukraine. Despite Trump’s trade-war mentality, which actually led to the trade deficit getting larger when Trump wanted the opposite, a vast 74% supermajority of the public rightly believes that international trade is “good for the U.S. economy.” And despite the morally bankrupt hostility to Ukraine among Trump’s wing of the congressional GOP, the respected, apolitical Pew Research Center reported on Feb. 16 that 74% of the public says Ukraine’s battle for existence is important to U.S. national interests.
The other three ASP policy priorities are to “rein in government spending and taxes” — another area Trump failed as even before the pandemic he became what was then by far the biggest-spending president in peacetime history — to “defeat the Chinese Communist Party,” and to “unleash American energy dominance.”
This isn’t merely gauzy wish-casting. As is the habit of the AAF organization as a whole, the new initiative fleshes out each of those five areas with more specific objectives. Meanwhile, Pence has the big picture in proper perspective. “We cannot let our agenda be stitched together by grievances and performative outrage, but by the principles enshrined in the Constitution that have guided our country since the American founding,” Pence told the Washington Examiner. “AAF will hold fast to conservatism and advocate for strong defense, U.S. global leadership, limited government, and traditional moral values. I know if we hold to our principles, the American people will rally to the cause of freedom.”
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Pence is right, against Trump’s fetish for brute force, that freedom is and still should be the heart of the American experiment. “Freedom” and “liberty” are words that Trump rarely uses.
In early 2016, it was horrifying to hear multiple conservative activists in private conversations say that their goal, in backing Trump, was to “burn it all down.” That’s not conservatism. It’s nihilism. Pence, in a career in public life, always has been about building good things up so free men and women can thrive. Toward that end, Pence’s new American Solutions Project is a worthy initiative.