The tragic journey of Speaker Paul Ryan
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.
It’s hard to imagine that the 28-year- old who entered Congress in 1999 thought fate would lead himto protect a chief executive under scrutiny for an alleged payoff to a porn star, potential entanglements with Russian interference in our election, and efforts to derail legitimate investigations into his behavior.
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.
Ryan has been driven by two priorities: slashing taxes on the best- off Americans and eviscerating safety-net programs.
In announcing his retirement from Congress on Wednesday, he said he was “grateful” to President Trump for creating the opportunity “to actually get this stuff done.”
The “stuff” the speaker was obsessed with included a corporate tax cut that ballooned a deficit he hasmade 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, which is the policy translation of the bloodless phrase “entitlement reform.”
The many in Washington who personally like Ryan often wonder how he could so readily cozy up to Trump and empower House members — notably Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes — who have turned themselves into propagandists for Trump.
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.
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 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. The House Republican majority and Trump himself may well be wrecked by the president’s unscrupulous impulsiveness. Ryan’s departure will give him the opportunity to try to cleanse himself of the stain left by a low and dishonest political moment. In 2024, he will be just 54.
Yet he has been propelled to the exits because his sort of conservatism hit a dead end. It’s why we have Trump, and why Ryan was forced to acquiesce to a man whose statements he once condemned as racist and whose personal life is the antithesis of his own. This is the part of Ryan’s legacy he’ll have great difficulty living down.