Paul Ryan’s work as speaker of the House is not quite done, but his official “farewell address” at the Library of Congress had an elegiac quality.
Ryan spent his first 17 years in Congress as a wunderkind with high ideals combined with a brain for policy, and enough political skill to convince his party to embrace his policy prescriptions. He spent his last three years as a speaker who achieved more than his detractors admit, but far less than he might have if a more conventional Republican had been president. He leaves with Washington in a condition of angry chaos his mentor Jack Kemp would have detested, with Ryan repeatedly lamenting that he doesn’t know how to fix it.
Ryan did tick off a list of the past Congress’s achievements that is, in truth, bigger than many conservatives have realized. (More on those, in another column.)
“The state of politics these days,” he said, “is another question, and frankly one I don’t have an answer for.”
And: “It becomes more industrialized, more cold, and more unfeeling. That’s the thing: For all the noise, there is actually less passion, less energy. We default to lazy litmus tests and shopworn denunciations. It is just emotional pabulum fed from a trough of outrage. It is exhausting. It saps meaning from our politics. And it discourages good people from pursuing public service. The symptoms of it are in our face all the time. And we have to recognize that its roots run deep, into our society and our culture today. All of this pulls on the threads of our common humanity, in what could be our unraveling.”
Then, asking: “how do we get back to aspiration and inclusion, where we start with humility, and seek to build on that,” he again says “I don’t know the answer to that.” And: “The drivers of our broken politics are more obvious than the solutions.”
Ryan said that trying to find solutions will be something he hopes “to spend more time wrestling with in [his] next chapter.”
Well, good. Somebody needs to wrestle with it. Because, as the government appears poised for a partial “shutdown,” as a president and the Senate minority leader send insulting tweets back and forth, as an admired defense secretary prepares to leave office while publicly castigating the president, and as the stock market tanks while the president insults his own choice as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, it seems almost impossible to find a leading, effective voice of sanity and comity.
Ryan, echoing his other mentor, Bill Bennett, correctly identified the need to strengthen “the mediating institutions of civil society, of the community. These are the places where we come together with people of different backgrounds—churches, charities, teams, PTA meetings.” But he offered no ideas for how to do so.
That’s why, when he declared himself “an optimist to the core” who still thinks we can still solve our political problems, it rang a bit hollow. Oh, I believe he believes his own words. Ryan is sincere. But he still seems to be searching, with his hopes not matched by any answers to “how.”
In both substance and tone, our politics and government are still a long way from where Ryan hoped to lead them. When those of goodwill and good minds, like Ryan, leave the field, the task gets even harder.
Here’s hoping, therefore, that Ryan’s “next chapter” still affords him a significant role in our public life. He’s too young to be the subject of elegies. We need him, in one way or another, in the battle.
