Ryan was a party man, not firefighter for a GOP ablaze

The mistake about Paul Ryan, the one that both friends and foes made over the years between his Obama-era ascent and his just-announced departure from the House speakership, was to imagine him as a potential protagonist for our politics, a lead actor in the drama of conservatism, a visionary or a villain poised to put his stamp upon the era.

This Ryan-of-the-imagination existed among conservatives who portrayed his budgetary blueprints as the GOP’s answer to the New Deal, among centrist deficit hawks who looked to him to hash out their pined-for grand bargain, and among liberals for whom Ryan was the most sinister of far-right operators, part fanatic and part huckster.

It existed among the donors who wanted him to run for president, the pundits who encouraged Mitt Romney to choose him as a running mate, the big names who pressured him into the speakership. And it existed among anti-Trump conservatives who looked to Ryan to be the Republican of principle standing athwart Trumpism yelling stop.

But the real Ryan was never suited for these roles. He was miscast as a visionary when he was fundamentally a party man — a diligent and policy-oriented pilot who ultimately let the party choose the vessel’s course. And because the institutional GOP during his years was like a bayou airboat with a fire in its propeller and several alligators wrestling midship, an unhappy end for his career was foreordained.

This is not to say that he lacked principles. The frequent descriptions of Ryan as a Jack Kemp acolyte — a supply-side tax cutter and entitlement reformer and free trader who imagined a more immigrant-welcoming and minority-friendly GOP — were accurate.

But even there, he came to those principles at a time when they were ascendant within the party — in the period between the supply-side ’80s and the late-1990s window when centrist liberals seemed open to entitlement reform. And then as Republicans moved away from them, tacking now more compassionate-conservative, now more libertarian, now more Trumpist, his resistance to the drift was always gentle, eclipsed by his willingness to turn.

Then came the 2016 election, in which Ryan temporarily resisted Donald Trump and then surrendered lest he break the party (which a party man could never do), and after that the Trump administration, in which Ryan has obviously steered Trump toward standard Republican policies — but has just as obviously been steered as well. Most of Ryan’s past big-picture goals are compromised or gone, and while he attempted Obamacare repeal and achieved a butchered version of corporate tax reform, he’s accepted spending policies that make a mockery of any sort of libertarian or limited-government goal.

In a dispensation where the GOP was leaderless, rudderless, yawing between libertarian and populist extremes, he was never the kind of figure who could impose a vision on the party.

Instead, he only knew how to work within the system, which because the system had turned into a madhouse meant that his career could only end where it ended: in a record of failure on policy and principle that he chose for himself, believing — as party men always do — that there wasn’t any choice.