Paul Ryan stepping down amid conservatism’s decline
Paul Ryan started his political life hoping to be the champion of a sunny, forward-looking conservatism. He will step down from the House speakership as the personification of conservatism’s decline.
One is tempted to call Ryan’s journey tragic, the tale of a young, idealistic family man transformed into an enabler for the most morally indifferent and utterly selfish president in our nation’s history.
Yet tragedy often implies a protagonist who suffered because of forces beyond his own control. Ryan is very much responsible for the fix he and his party are in. This is why he had to push back against suspicions that he is leaving before a political deluge engulfs House Republicans this fall.
Ryan has been driven by two priorities throughout his career: slashing taxes on the bestoff Americans and eviscerating social-welfare and safety-net programs in the name of “entitlement reform.” Whatever advanced these objectives was worth doing.
In announcing his retirement from Congress on Wednesday, he was thus reduced to repeating four times in response to questions that he was “grateful” to President Trump for creating the opportunity, as Ryan put it at one point, “to actually get this stuff done.”
The “stuff ” the speaker was obsessed with included a corporate tax cut that ballooned a deficit he has made a career out of denouncing.
At his news conference, Ryan was required by journalists to acknowledge the trillion-dollar annual budget holes that a supposedly conservative Congress and administration have helped create. He reiterated his stock response, mourning that the Senate never approved his plans to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps.
The many in Washington who personally like Ryan often wonder how he could so readily cozy up to Trump and empower House members who have turned themselves into propagandists for Trump’s desperate quest to escape accountability.
The answer lies paradoxically in Ryan’s idealism, rooted in his youthful fascination with the philosophy of Ayn Rand. She identified with society’s winners and regarded ordinary citizens as moochers and burdens on the creative and the entrepreneurial.
Although Ryan gave warm speeches about compassion, his biggest fear was not that the poor might go without food or health care but, as he once said, that the “safety net” might “become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”
He later backed away from Rand and acknowledged that the hammock was “the wrong analogy.” But his policies suggested that he never abandoned his core faith.
Given where Ryan’s passions lie, it is unsurprising that he would prop Trump up as long as the president was willing to embrace a modern-day Social Darwinism that married efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act with reductions in government’s impositions on the managers and owners of capital.
If Ryan has presidential ambitions, he is certainly wise to walk away now. Ryan’s departure will not only give him time with his family but also the opportunity to try to cleanse himself of the stain left by a low and dishonest political moment.