Paul Ryan, man of ideas
The Times takes a farewell look at Paul Ryan:
As has been strenuously noted, Trump and Ryan are stylistic and philosophical opposites: Trump the blunt-force agitator vs. Ryan the think-tank conservative. Trump lashes out while Ryan treads carefully. Ryan still fashions himself a “policy guy” and a man of ideas: In high school, he read the conservative philosopher Ayn Rand and was captivated by her signature work, “Atlas Shrugged.”
Stop right there. One, reading Atlas Shrugged does not make anyone a person of ideas. Two, Ayn Rand was not a philosopher. She was a screenwriter and a novelist.
The speaker says he tries to encourage good behavior in the president. “He put out a tweet last night that was really good,” Ryan told me after he and the president hung up. (It was apparently an inoccuous tweet about trade.) The speaker’s words carried the vaguely patronizing tone of a parent affirming a potty-training milestone.
Which would be slightly less horrifying if the guy being potty trained didn’t have the sole power to launch the nukes.
Ryan has been bashed from almost all sides for going along with Trump.
Ryan’s defiance to Trump, such as it is, can carry an almost pro forma quality. He will avoid or claim ignorance if possible (“I didn’t see the tweet”), chastise the president if he must (rarely by name), wait for the latest outrage to pass, rinse and repeat. “Frankly, I haven’t paid that close attention to it,” said Ryan at a June news conference in which he was asked about the job status of Scott Pruitt, the scandal-drenched E.P.A. administrator who was finally run out of office in July and whose mounting offenses over several months would have been impossible for even the most casual news consumer to miss.
“I can understand all of the rationalities,” says Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative radio host in Wisconsin who spent years trying to persuade Ryan to run for president before turning sharply against him over Trump. “In a Faustian bargain, you get a lot of things. You get the wealth, you get the beautiful women and you get all this good stuff.”
You get a lot of things, you get all this good stuff – money, cars, fuckable women. Stuff, man.
After our meeting in his office, Ryan addressed a packed house of congressional interns in the Capitol Visitor Center. A former intern himself, Ryan has a well-known Washington origin story: He worked as a waiter at Tortilla Coast, the renowned Capitol Hill bar and restaurant, before being elected to Congress at 28. In his talk to the interns, Ryan encouraged students to resist the temptation of Twitter “snark.” He encouraged them not to “degrade the tone of our debate” and to appeal to our “common humanity.”
In other words, brass-necked hypocrisy.
Ryan prefers to tell Trump how he feels in private. He joins a large group of Trump’s putative allies, many of whom have worked in the administration, who insist that they have shaped Trump’s thinking and behavior in private: the “Trust me, I’ve stopped this from being much worse” approach. “I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy,” Ryan tells me. “I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal.”
I locked in on the word “tragedy.” It sets the mind reeling to whatever thwarted “tragedies” Ryan might be talking about. I asked for an example. “No, I don’t want to do that,” Ryan replied. “That’s more than I usually say.”
Sure, what right do we have to know?
Ryan gave a little lunchtime speech and there was a Q and A afterwards.
Rubenstein also sprang a question about whether Ryan thought it would be proper for Trump to pardon anyone caught up in the Mueller investigation.
“I’m not going to touch that one,” he said. Rubenstein followed up with a related question about whether Trump should be allowed to pardon himself. Ryan laughed. “I’m good, thanks,” he said, as if he were resisting a plate of hors d’oeuvres — not touching that either.
Because this is all a joke. Haha, so funny, having a mob boss running the country.
Rubenstein eventually touched down elsewhere, but the pardon question lingered, at least with me. It came off as a quintessential example of Ryan glibly blowing off what could be a monumental abuse of presidential power and a potentially gigantic crisis. I raised this in the car heading back to the Capitol. His eyes bulged for an instant, as if some defense enzyme had been released.
“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff,” Ryan said of the pardon issue.
“Shouldn’t you?” I said. It’s speculative, to a degree, I allowed. “But if you’re not going to touch that, who is?”
“I don’t think he’s going to do things like that,” Ryan said of Trump.
“He already has,” I said, referring to Trump’s pardoning of lawbreaking allies (Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D’Souza).
“No, I’m talking about firing and things like that,” Ryan said.
Trump has already done that too (James Comey) and has reportedly wanted to fire Mueller on at least two occasions. “My point is,” Ryan said, “and I’ve said it all along, Mueller should be able to do his job.”
Ryan seemed to become agitated by this line of questioning. “I’m not going to spend my time being a pundit, theorizing and speculating,” he said. “I’m going to spend my time making a difference in people’s lives, getting stuff done.” Now I was slightly annoyed by Ryan’s reduction of my question to “pundit theorizing,” as if Mueller’s investigation held zero significance to people’s lives. “I’m not going to spend my time getting into these circular debates,” Ryan added. “I’m trying to get an agenda passed.”
I pointed out that if Trump fires Mueller, it might be too late for Ryan to do anything even if he wanted to, and the country could already be well into a constitutional crisis.
“I don’t think — ” Ryan began, then stopped. “He knows my opinion on these things.”
In other words he’s a worthless self-protecting Trump-enabling piece of shit.
Trump and Ryan are of a piece. Unfortunately the public tends to equate a less caustic style with a difference in philosophy.
Oh, I dunno. He managed on his own account to wade through Atlash Rugged, which is more than I could do.
Though I do admit that I started at page 97 of the only copy I had access to, which was the first available page. it. It was hanging on a nail inside a bush dunny, and pp 1-96 had already done their duty.
Honestly, how many people who aren’t in high school or undergraduates are reading Rand? I guess I was slightly older than that when I read her, which is probably why it didn’t take.
Before I knew who Rand was I bought a copy at a book sale based on the back cover blurb. I think I managed a chapter before passing it on to my mother, who described it as “not her thing” and passed it to my sister, who described it as “nasty” with a curl of the lip.
Right. Ryan has been nothing but a self-promoting, de-regulating, environment-killing, welfare-bashing conservative automaton, but he’s house-broken, so people think he’s “nicer” or has a more human view of the world. There is not one thing about Ryan that leads me to think he belongs in any position of power.
Oh, sadly, lots of people not in high school still read Rand and, worse, take her very seriously. It’s pathetic.
I think if your personality already leans to the selfish (as it does for a lot of teens) and you think you’re special and you think rules shouldn’t apply to you and you’re naive enough to think that the world is a meritocracy AND you never mature beyond that point, libertarian ideas can seem attractive for a time. As long as you never actually think hard about them and never let any actual life experience contradict the shallow ideology.
I read Rand after college. I found her novels to be thought-provoking but ultimately unconvincing. I enjoyed them as stories as well — they’re goofy and melodramic, the characters are one-dimensional, unrealistic archetypes, and the moral of the story is delivered with no subtlety at all, but somehow to me they were still entertaining. Overall I’m glad I read them, although I’m surprised people treat them as blueprints for life.
I’d say Rand was definitely a philosopher, just not a very good one. The consensus among other philosophers is that she was derivative and inconsistent. Some respected philosophers have a somewhat higher opinion of her philosophy (but none as high as Rand herself).
As for Paul Ryan, he’s a complete hack. He has the ability to play the part of a smart person, and so he gets called a policy wonk, an economics wiz, etc. His proposals were jokes, just cobbled together boilerplate Republican ideas, with numbers that didn’t add up, magical unspecified savings and revenue, and other gimmicks. And yet the press would describe them with terms like “smart” and “serious”.
Good riddance to Ryan.
Ryan had perfected the art of using the right sorts of words and phrases, and just the right look on his face, to appear smart and serious to people who want to hear the message he is peddling. People who can’t think beyond the simplistic philosophies of Ayn Rand no doubt feel he’s very clever.
The consensus among philosophers is that she’s not a philosopher – those that have an opinion on her at all. Philosophy is a profession, with credentials and criteria. There have been and are a few philosophers without PhDs in the subject, but Ayn Rand is not one of them. The fact that she had some Ideas About Things does not make her a philosopher.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls her a philosopher:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/
“Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a novelist-philosopher”
“It does not help that she often dismisses other philosophers’ views on the basis of cursory readings”
…while making it clear that she isn’t very respected:
“For all her popularity, however, only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously”
So I don’t think my “bad philosopher” characterization is that out there. I think the problem is the definition of “philosopher” varies more than you suggest. See Wikipedia’s multiple mushy definitions:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher
You said it’s a profession, so the definition you have in mind is probably similar to what the Stanford Encyclopedia calls professional philosophers take her work seriously.
Ugh, hit Post too soon and garbled the end.
I take your point that Rand was not a philosopher in many ways that term is used…but she was in some ways it is used, by many people.
Regardless of whether we accept the “philosopher” label, I think we agree her ideas were misguided and have caused a lot of harm.
Ugh, god. Yes I know some people call her a philosopher, and I’m saying they’re wrong. Donald Trump calls himself a stable genius, and he’s wrong. Melania Trump poses in immaculate sneakers and jeans and a $1400 designer shirt to pretend she’s gardening, but she’s not. Homeopaths are not doctors. Barnes & Noble shelves Rand in the philosophy section, and they’re wrong. A crank with a system ≠ a philosopher.
The world is full of pretentious shits claiming to be some prestigious X when they’re not. It’s deeply obnoxious. Ayn Rand was a shit novelist with delusions of grandeur.