The Self-Destruction of Paul Ryan and the G.O.P.

'Spinoza said that free will is like a stone that doesn’t know why it’s falling but wants to keep going. On Wednesday, Paul Ryan announced that he would not seek re-election. A midterm defeat, should Mr. Ryan have chosen to run, wasn’t exactly inevitable. But when no less an authority than the speaker of the House of Representatives expressed the desire to rejoin his children, with all the freedom of plummeting rock longing to eat dirt, it confirmed what practically everyone suspects: The Republican Party is in free fall, and its House majority is racing toward annihilation.

Mr. Ryan may be oblivious to the ultimate cause of his entirely free and unforced decision to spend more time with his kids, but it is, in a nutshell, Paul Ryan. He is truly the author of his own destiny.

Politics isn’t physics, but a governing Republican philosophy that sees it as a moral imperative to slash the budgets of social programs that benefit mainly older and working-class white people is bound, sooner or later, to drive a party of mainly older and working-class white people off a cliff. The slow-motion disaster now unfolding in Washington results in no small measure from Mr. Ryan’s puzzling success in persuading Republican elites that they could flourish as the party of free-market, anti-redistributive convictions.

Mr. Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future,” released in 2008, at the time of the catastrophic collapse of the American economy, set out a plan for the radical retrenchment of the American welfare state. It made a splash. Mr. Ryan became the party’s de facto wonk in chief and played a critical role giving the Tea Party’s otherwise inchoate politics of grievance a definitive shape. As he rose to the commanding heights of the Republican Party, first as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012 and then as speaker of the House in 2015, Mr. Ryan’s libertarian-leaning technocratic tactics for the piecemeal dismantling of the safety net became party orthodoxy.

Mr. Ryan’s ideas have always resonated with the corporate Republican donor class. But they are indifferent, at best, to the challenges faced by the mass of ordinary Republican voters. For decades, American innovation and growth has been largely concentrating in a handful of big liberal cities. When the recovery finally came, it came to the Democratic metropolis. Most of the sparse Republican outlands never bounced back.

Jobs were scarce, opioid addiction was rife, and life felt insecure. Indeed, life expectancy for many rural whites fell. A few red states graced with booming metro areas, like Texas, flourished under Republican regimes of low taxes and light regulation. But in more rural Republican states, like Kansas under Mr. Ryan’s mentor and former boss, Gov. Sam Brownback, taxes had been cut to the bone, and the promised boom never materialized to make up for the loss and degradation of public services.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opinion/paul-ryan-donald-trump-republicans.html?