Franz Kafka’s famous story, Metamorphosis, is about Gregor Samsa, a salesman who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably become a bug.
Mike Pence’s famous story, also called “Metamorphosis,” is about himself, one kind of politician who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably become another kind of politician.
Mike Pence was Vice President to Donald Trump’s President. In that role, Pence was Trump’s stunningly reliable, astonishingly indefatigable, and stupefyingly unsurpassable Enabler. In my book, The Enablers, I wrote about Pence in part as follows:
Pence [felt he] had no choice. So long as he remained vice president to Trump, he could not risk disagreeing with him, distinguishing himself from him, certainly not in public, not once. Trump’s demand for, need for, fealty was absolute, so before all else it was Pence’s fulltime job to fall into line. [Moreover] part of his job description was to praise the president tirelessly, extravagantly, and effusively …. But Pence’s decision to lash his political fortunes to those of Donald Trump would prove costly. History is not likely to treat Pence kindly. He will be viewed as an enabler, an abject subordinate who, among his other failings, not once corrected or contradicted the president’s numberless lies.*
That was Pence then. Pence now is something different. Of course, unlike Gregor Samsa, Pence did not metamorphose overnight. It took him months, years even, fully to grasp, at least for public consumption, the man he had served so subserviently for so long.
But now, finally, his metamorphosis is complete. In a speech he delivered two days ago, Pence devoted himself entirely to separating himself once and for all from his former boss, his previous puppeteer. The former vice president spoke of what he now calls the “fundamental” and “unbridgeable” divide in the Republican Party – between traditional conservatives like himself on the one hand, and populists such as Trump and his clones on the other. It was a time for choosing, Pence said, echoing a phrase of Ronald Reagan’s. A time for the Republican Party to choose between traditional, long venerated conservatism or the “siren song of populism.”
So, what are we to make of Pence’s metamorphosis? Why did he – if he even did – have a change of heart? Are we to take his flip-flop seriously? Does anyone care?
First, why the apparent change of heart? He would deny that he has changed – he would insist that it is Trump who is different. To which there is an element of truth. Trump is far more dangerous a leader now than he was when he first asked Pence to run as his vice president. Even during his time in the White House, Trump went from bad to worse. His incitement to insurrection on January 6, 2021, was a logical, even predictable, outcome of what had come before. So, if Pence did not see Trump for what he was especially during the last year of his presidency, Pence was being willfully blind.
Second, are we to take Pence’s flip-flop seriously? Yes. I do not doubt that Pence now is more comfortable in his own skin than he was while serving as Trump’s Toady-in Chief. What we’re seeing in the present is in keeping with Pence in the past, the more distant past, before he lashed himself to the man who would be his downfall. Pence as a member of Congress, and Pence as Governor of Indiana was deeply conservative. He was never, however, on the fringe, at the extreme, a far-right populist.
Finally, does anyone care who Pence now is or what Pence now says? Not really. As I predicted, history has not treated Pence kindly. Even members of his own party largely ignore him, treating him as someone more marginal than consequential. Pence has become the quintessential example of someone who did too little, much, much too late.
From 2016 to 2020 Pence was so abject a follower he was an Enabler. From 2020 to 2022 he was so timorous a follower that despite the January 6 chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” he still did not separate himself fully and forevermore from the man who was his leader. Only recently did Pence finally complete his metamorphosis. Only recently did he wake one morning to find himself transformed into someone different.
Pence will never be an impressive leader. But at least he is no longer a pitiable, even pathetic follower.
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*Barbara Kellerman, The Enablers: How Trump’s Team Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Pp. 171 ff.