House Speaker Paul Ryan’s 2016 options were never very good.
He could be blamed for stealing the Republican nomination from candidates who had actually earned the votes of millions of GOP primary voters or blamed for refusing to stand up to — and perhaps even enabling — Donald Trump.
By taking a pass on the presidential race, some disappointed conservatives will say Ryan failed to do his part to stop Trump.
Republican leaders haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory when it comes to Trumpism, largely ignoring its legitimate grievances in favor of repeating 1980s conservative slogans and relying on its less admirable sentiments more than they’d prefer to admit.
But the argument Ryan has somehow enabled Trump strikes me as more than a little unfair. The House speaker really has spoken up for one strain of modern American conservatism while Trump has (perhaps unwittingly) become the figurehead of another.
On one side, there is the view that America is an idea. It is a set of political and ideological propositions, some basic notions of government and its relationship to the people, found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
“We care about restoring the American idea, and that is the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life,” Ryan said earlier this year. “We are the only country on earth that is founded on an idea.”
Trump, on the other hand, believes the United States is something less abstract. It’s not quite about blood-and-soil nationalism, but blood and soil — a specific country and people — are important parts of nationhood.
“We either have a country, or we don’t have a country,” Trump likes to say. Pressed to define conservatism in one of the GOP presidential debates, Trump replied, “I view the word conservative as a derivative… of the word conserve. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country.”
This seemingly arcane dispute has a lot of practical applications. It explains why Ryan sees immigration as something that should be more labor market-driven, part of a conservative opportunity society, while Trump emphasizes the federal government’s fiduciary duty to the people living in the United States.
It’s also why Ryan’s conservatism is about freeing markets and limiting government while Trump emphasizes a government that protects and asserts American interests.
Jeff Sessions could hold up Trump’s end of the intellectual debate better, but he lacks the billionaire’s charisma and probably couldn’t replicate his national political success. Nevertheless, this fundamental disagreement is why one Republican’s true conservative is another’s effete “RINO.”
As the GOP hurtles toward a contested convention, these differing views of America are also shaping the ways the competing camps view the party.
To many #NeverTrump conservatives, the Republican Party is a vehicle for certain conservative policy ideas. It cannot and should not nominate someone who doesn’t share those ideas and the delegates have a responsibility to ensure the nominee is a person with a good chance of winning on the Republican platform.
Nonsense, say Trump supporters. The Republican Party is defined by the people — that is the actual, real, live breathing humans who vote in the party’s primaries and participate in its nominating process. If their plurality choice is Trump, then he is a Republican. The convention should ratify the choice of those GOP voters. If Trump didn’t win enough in the primaries and caucuses to get to a majority under the rules, everyone else did even worse.
There’s obviously some truth to both of these conceptions. America with a radically different form of government — say a monarchy or dictatorship rather than a constitutional republic — would in a meaningful sense cease to be America, as certain ideas about government are central to our founding.
On the other hand, many people born in the United States aren’t classical liberals or have political views that are very different from the Founding Fathers’. Are they not Americans? The conservatives who believe America is linked to an ideology are more likely to support birthright citizenship than those who don’t.
Many of the immigrants who come to America and naturalize aren’t classical liberals in this sense either. But conservatives who see America as an idea tend to view immigration as a conservative value and immigration restriction as statist or protectionist micromanagement.
Lots of people have tried to synthesize these competing values. Ronald Reagan was definitely more in Ryan’s camp than Trump’s. But he also said, “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
Ryan’s conservatism obviously isn’t Trumpism. Unlike a lot of anti-Trump conservatives, however, he must lead Republicans whose congressional districts voted for Trump and he has to show some respect for the will of the Republican voters — more than a third of the party — who have chosen Trump.
So the GOP hasn’t missed out on airing a conflict of visions between Ryan and Trump. That debate is already going on, independent of the speaker’s future political plans.
