David Michael Miller
It’s not often that a politician gets a chance to be thought of as great. And almost always it’s how they handle horror and tragedy that makes them great. Think about Lincoln and the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression, Reagan and the Challenger explosion.
But politicians don’t always rise to the occasion. George W. Bush had the opportunity with 9/11 to forge international solidarity against terrorism. But he turned it into an excuse to invade a country that had nothing to do with those attacks. We’re still paying for that.
And House Speaker Paul Ryan was handed a ticket to greatness by the unnatural disaster that is Donald Trump. Ryan could have courageously stood up to Trump. He could have declared the president unworthy of the office and refused to work with him. That may have emboldened Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to follow suit and Trump would have been forced to mend his ways or resign.
Even more significantly, Ryan was in a position to do nothing less than save American liberal democracy from a man who has open contempt for our institutions (when he’s not displaying outright ignorance of them). Our democracy may well still survive Trump, but Ryan could have played a historic role in that effort.
But Ryan’s history with Trump is a steady move toward accommodation and complicity. Ryan ostensibly opposed Trump’s candidacy — until it became clear that he would win the nomination. Then it appeared he was biding his time until Trump lost the election and he could assume de facto leadership of his party. But after Trump became president, Ryan just capitulated. His relatively tepid criticisms of Trump’s most outrageous statements and actions became even more pale.
Less important, but still significant, Ryan might have saved his own party. Republicans who once shunned Trump have moved steadily into his camp. Now, 89 percent of Republicans support the president. That didn’t just happen. If powerful people like Ryan had stood up to him and offered a strong, consistent alternative vision for what Republicans believe, the modern GOP may not have secured its place in history as America’s most notable blood-and-soil neo-fascist movement. Nobody who accommodated Trump — most notably Wisconsin’s trio of Ryan, Gov. Scott Walker and former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus — will be spared the wrath of history. It will be an embarrassment for our state that these three played such an outsize role as collaborationists.
Look, there wasn’t much to like about Paul Ryan to begin with. He was no intellectual. Essentially, the guy read one book called Atlas Shrugged when he was a teenager, and if he read another one, it didn’t seem to challenge his thinking. The central focus of his political career was to destroy Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and, later, the Affordable Care Act. Ryan’s sunny view of the free market as a benign force had no grounding in reality. Like Atlas Shrugged, it was fiction.
Still, faced with the greatest challenge to American democracy in our lifetimes and confronted with a man who Ryan, to his credit, clearly loathed, the speaker had a chance at greatness. But he didn’t have the courage or the moral grounding or the intelligence to see where he stood in history.
Paul Ryan isn’t just a failure as a political leader; he squandered his chance to be a great one.
