The new Republican

“I had some pretty traumatic experiences in my youth,” she explained in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I was raped at the age of 16. That was the reason that I dropped out of school. My parents said, ‘If you’re going to stop going to school, then you’re going to start going to work.’ And I took that job as a waitress at the Waffle House.”

“Teenaged me would be shocked that I’m still alive,” Mace recounted. “I literally lost all hope for my future during some very troubling, traumatic times in my life.”

But she started taking night classes to get her diploma, and slowly, hope started to creep back in.

“Then in 1996, the Citadel decided to let women in,” she said of the famous South Carolina military college. “And my father is a graduate of the Citadel. … He’s a man that I admire deeply. I knew that if I followed in his footsteps at the Citadel, that maybe I, too, could achieve something in my life.”

Mace became the first woman ever to graduate from the Citadel, shattering a glass ceiling. She credits the experience with saving her life: “Because to be able to go through that and say that I succeeded, I know that I can take whatever life throws at me.”

These life experiences shaped Mace into the person she is today. But the story of her political journey starts elsewhere. The congresswoman describes herself as a “limited government fiscal conservative,” or small-l “libertarian” who “keeps the Constitution literally as my guide, [because] the founding fathers created an enormous instrument to guide us in all things, and they did a really good job.”

She explained that former South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney and Sen. Tim Scott influenced her heavily when they rose to political prominence during the heyday of the Tea Party. “When I saw just how hard they work, how smart they were, the kind of things I thought they could achieve in their roles in Congress, I was really excited to be a part of that. When the political bug bites you, it’s really hard to let it go. It’s almost like an obsession, and I’m the kind of person when I get focused on something, I don’t stop until I win.”

Running her own political public relations company, Mace quickly realized how much more efficient the private sector was than big government.

“As someone who believes in the free market and who has been in business for over 20 years, I believe that the private sector can do a much better job than the government sector,” she said. “If everything operates like big government agencies, that’s not efficient with our tax dollars. Business can do so much better with so much less.”

Coming to this conservative worldview, Mace quickly found herself in a different position than many of her peers. As a single mother of two children, she is exactly the type of person the progressive movement claims to stand for. But Mace soon realized that being a single mother, a woman, didn’t mean she had to buy into the narrative that people like her need to be uplifted and saved by the government.

“I made some decisions that were very bad for me early in my life,” she explained. “But over time, I made some very good decisions that brought me out of a very dark place, and helped me become successful. I didn’t need the government to tell me what to do. On my own, I was able to make decisions to improve my life.”

However, Mace says that her background does give her a different insight into the conservative worldview.

“I know that our conservative ideology is very compassionate,” she said. “But the Republican Party as a whole, we have not done as good a job as we could showing that compassion. Because when people think of Republicans, they think we’re cold, that we don’t want to help you, that we are unfeeling or that we don’t care. And that’s just simply not true. We do care enormously and want the best outcomes for all the children, and all of our kids and for everyone’s future.”

This perspective, combined with her relative youth and generational differences, may be why Mace’s ideological vision of conservatism is markedly distinct from GOP orthodoxies of bygone eras. For one, she places more of a premium on diversity and representation in politics than some other conservatives.

“We need to have more women run for office,” she said. “We need to have women from all walks of life, all colors, come forward to run for office.”

I pressed Mace on what makes this approach different from the kind of identity politics conservatives decry from the Democratic Party.

“We don’t do identity politics,” she countered. “[Identity] is not something I talked about when I was running for office. It’s something you talk about after you win. It’s a heartwarming story that people really like. When you have a minority candidate, or you have a female candidate, there’s a very strong likability factor in many ways, there’s a need for it.”

“But you’ve absolutely got to be qualified,” Mace answered. “The preface that I always use is that we have qualified candidates that identify with us, but we don’t run on identity politics. So, our races are very much different [from Democrats]. Because we don’t try to use that to our advantage.”

Mace did highlight the diversity of her freshman GOP class, which includes many other congresswomen and minority members as well. She similarly lauded the broad ideological diversity among her fellow lawmakers. However, Mace criticized the fringe views expressed by a select few of her colleagues.

“I have very deep concerns about those who embrace QAnon,” she said, likely referring to congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected Republican with a long history of dabbling in fringe conspiracy theories. “I’ve been very vocal about that within my own party. For me, when I look at the future of the Republican Party, that is the only detriment. [We have] to ensure that we don’t allow QAnon and conspiracy theorists to lead us into another constitutional crisis, like we just experienced on Jan. 6,” she said, referencing the assault on the Capitol by those who, egged on by Donald Trump, tried to stop the certification of the election.

“Because of the gravity of the situation that happened that day, I [have] really focused on holding Republicans accountable,” she said. “Because we can’t point fingers at the other side, at the Democrats or at the Left — who have violence and fringe issues on their side — if we don’t first take responsibility for our own mess.”

This willingness to push back on her colleagues shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who know Mace. While a proud Republican, the congresswoman says she is “an independent voice” and “in a caucus of one.”

Mace is very much a classic fiscal conservative, who supports free-market capitalism and reining in government spending. On foreign policy, she supports Trump’s “America first” vision regarding bringing troops home from Middle East quagmires. It’s Mace’s mixed views on social issues that are at odds with some of her colleagues in Washington — though perhaps more representative of younger Republicans.

She is pro-life but successfully pushed for the inclusion of rape and incest exceptions in South Carolina state abortion legislation. She is a supporter of both religious liberty and gay marriage.

Mace said it was “great” that Trump supported gay marriage and waved the rainbow flag on the 2016 campaign trail. “If we can include that as part of our platform and include Republicans that have those same beliefs, then we’re going to be able to continue to grow our party in the future,” she said, citing her endorsement from the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest organization of LGBT conservative voters. “I think most Americans … don’t want the government in their businesses or in their bedrooms.”

Similarly, while Mace vocally supports law enforcement and the rule of law, she also believes in criminal justice reform and acknowledging the reality of race in America. Indeed, her district in South Carolina is actually where the horrific, racist 2015 mass shooting at an African American Church in Charleston occurred. Mace and I discussed the chilling tales her friend Sen. Scott has told of being a member of the U.S. Senate and still getting pulled over many times by Capitol police.

“There’s a kid that works at one of my favorite restaurants on Daniel Island that I visit here in my hometown, and, in the last year, he told me he has been pulled over like 10 times,” Mace similarly recounted. “I don’t know that I’ve been pulled over 10 times in my lifetime, let alone a year. And so, we do have to recognize that there are disparities in different populations.”

It’s more than just talk. While in the South Carolina state Legislature, Mace had a prison reform bill signed into law that banned the shackling of pregnant inmates. And the congresswoman indicated that criminal justice reform was one area in which she is very open to bipartisan cooperation with President Biden and congressional Democrats.

That doesn’t mean she won’t fight just as hard against Biden’s big government policies and power grabs. “I am not going to desert the Constitution or my fiscal conservative credentials. Those are two things that are nonnegotiable for me as a lawmaker. But there are areas where we can work together.”

Mace, for example, has criticism for the new president’s sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending proposal — “We don’t have $2 trillion to give away” — and for Biden’s attempt to include a federal $15 minimum wage in the relief legislation. “Well, No. 1, mandating a $15 minimum wage has nothing to do with COVID-19,” Mace said. “The problem with these [massive spending] packages that are being shoved down Congress’s throat is that oftentimes, they’re slipping in things that literally have nothing to do with COVID-19. And it’s ridiculous. The American people really do deserve better.”

“The people who have truly, truly been affected, their wages are down from COVID-19, they’ve lost their jobs, or small businesses who have had to be shut down — those are the ones we should be targeting,” she continued. “And only those individuals and small businesses. Everyone else that’s back at work and hasn’t been affected shouldn’t be getting financial benefits.”

One idea Mace proposed for helping families struggling amid COVID-19 and school closures is allowing parents to write off childcare expenses on their taxes. Similarly, she says the COVID-19 crisis and the way public schools have remained shut, despite ample research showing they are not COVID-19 hot spots, prove even more why conservative proposals for expanding education options are so important.

“I was a big school choice person before COVID,” she said. “But COVID-19 just proved that we need more choices for our children. My kids are stuck in a system right now where they don’t get to go back to school. I think next month, they’re going to start by allowing them to go in-person two days a week. It’s not enough.”

“If parents had more choices, they could make better decisions for themselves,” Mace concluded. “Some parents who [work] at home [may be] OK with virtual schooling because they have the time, the ability, and the resources to do that. I don’t. I work full-time. The father of my kids, he works full-time, too. We can’t.”

Mace radiates authenticity and enthusiasm, whether it be her off-the-cuff explanation of how she and her children love to play Clue on game nights when they unplug or the vicious hatred of black licorice she offered up when our conversation turned to food. The congresswoman’s persona, not just her perspective, is refreshing in a Republican Washington establishment that so often feels detached from what the average person experiences.

“I want to be a new voice for the Republican Party,” Mace explained. “I don’t want to be someone that just goes up there and screams into the microphone or [yells] on the latest news hit. I want to be someone that can be effective, be an effective leader and be a new voice for the Republican Party, because we’re going to need that going forward if we want to be successful in the future.”

Brad Polumbo is a Washington Examiner contributor.