Over the past decade, Romney had squeezed into different molds to meet different moments. Now he could find freedom in his true political identity—not the full-spectrum conservative or the out-of-touch elitist, but the sincere, pragmatic, well-intentioned statesman who sees that something is wrong and wants to help fix it. Success would be measured at the margins. He understood that. Romney didn’t come to the Senate believing he could save the Republican Party from itself. But he did take solace in knowing that his six-year term would end in 2024, meaning he would serve at least as long as Trump—and very likely outlast him.
“He will not be president forever,” Romney said. “Are we changed forever? In some respects, yes. But we’re also going to change again. That’s why, in some respects, I think character matters are of such significance. Because policies come and go. But matters of honor, integrity, civility, respect, family orientation, respect for faith, respect for the Constitution—these things are enduring.”
Romney had aged. His face was thinner, his presence less commanding, his majestic mane of hair noticeably grayer than it once was. But he still wore that placidly pained expression, the one from when he quit the presidential race at CPAC in 2008, suggesting that something was wrong, and that he had more to say about it.
“Just remember, we’ve had serious divides in this country before,” Romney said, trying to sound reassuring. Then he chuckled. “But, you know, we had Abraham Lincoln then. Now . . .”
The smile slowly vanished, his voice trailing off.
Epilogue
HE WEARS A WOOLEN BLUE VEST, A WEEK-OLD BEARD FLECKED WITH early hints of gray, and the look of a man liberated from the cruelest of confinements.
Not long ago, Paul Ryan was the most powerful lawmaker in the United States. Now there is nothing left to denote his significance, just a plainclothes member of his Capitol Police detail leaning against the wall and chomping on a Jimmy Johns sandwich, waiting for his assignment to expire for good in another week. The former Speaker has been content to fade into relative anonymity. Everyone knows him here in Janesville, of course, but they’re past the point of treating him any better or worse because of it. Ryan can exhale. No more legislators to babysit; no more presidential Twitter tantrums to abide. He is now a full-time dad who can enjoy his kids’ high school years from the comforts of home while collecting six-figure honorariums for forty-five-minute speeches and plum stock options for the hardship of sitting on corporate boards.
Yet Ryan is not at peace. Whatever relief he feels in retirement is tempered by the nagging sense that something is gravely amiss with the government, and the party, he left behind. Revel though he may in the “legal substance that stands a longer test of time”—a restructured tax code, a bigger military, a conservative judiciary—Ryan’s grimace gives him away. He knows the foundational tremors that have shaken Washington portend consequences farther reaching than any doubling of the standard deduction. Worse, try as he might to ignore his own agency in the poisoning of our body politic, Ryan knows he could have done more to supply antibodies.
It’s this sense of guilt—or fear, perhaps a bit of both—that now animates the former speaker. Sitting in his political office, on the third floor of a brick building on Main Street in Janesville, Ryan attempts to diagnose what went wrong.
“What people will think about, read about, which gets all the attention, is this wave of populism. This disruptive populism, which feeds off identity politics, is what’s harmful and hurtful and dark,” he says. “But it’s more of an indictment on culture and the deinstitutionalization of society. I think technology combined with moral relativism [has] basically blown up norms, including civility in civil society and moral truths. And it’s a weaponized system that tears at the institutions that have given us this free society we’ve enjoyed for over a couple hundred years.”
Ryan believes “the real test of our generation” is to “figure out how to re-institutionalize and rebuild these guardrails.” This, he insists, cannot be achieved by government. Rather, it falls to the governed, the voters of all partisan affiliations who have shrugged off the coarsening of public life because it reflects their private realities.
“We’ve gotten so numbed to it all,” Ryan says. “Not in government, but where we live our lives, we have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example. And prop up other institutions that do the same. You know?”
Americans may not want to hear these prescriptions from Ryan, believing that he was part of the problem rather than part of the solution. And he may not disagree: Indeed, a principal reason that Ryan quit is that he found it impossible to set that good example from inside Congress. The incentive structures are too warped, the allure of money and fame and self-preservation too powerful, for individuals to change the system from within. Things were trending in that direction long before Donald Trump moved in down Pennsylvania Avenue, and the hastening on his watch has rendered the modern Congress—and the modern GOP—a relic of its former self.
“The old meritocracy is dead,” Ryan says. “You can leapfrog good deeds. You can leapfrog earning success. You can leapfrog being a good person, even, and shortcut your way toward the top of the political pile because you’re a better entertainer. You’re better on Twitter, you have better followers. Hits, clicks, eyeballs, ratings.”
He continues, “There were a couple people who did it early, saw the curve, jumped it, tapped the vein. There were a million mini-me’s that said, ‘Well, shit, if this freshman senator from Texas can do it, I can do it. . . .’ And then you had the big gorilla of Donald Trump, the force that he is, just beat them all at the same game.”
Regarding the new Democratic majority in the House, and its social-media sensation, freshman New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former Speaker adds, “They’ve got this with AOC. They’ve got the same damn thing. It kind of concerns me. I mean, I sort of wish they were being the governing party and holding up standards. But they’re going to have the same problem we have.”
Well, not necessarily. A renegade rank-and-file member of Congress is hardly the same as a renegade president. Moreover, it’s an open question whether the Democratic Party is reborn in the populist, convention-shattering mold of Ocasio-Cortez. On the Republican side, that question has been asked and answered.
For a long stretch of the 2016 campaign, Ryan refused to accept Trump’s takeover of the GOP. He traversed the stages of grief: denial (no way can Trump win), anger (“I called him a racist!”), bargaining (the RNC PowerPoint slides), and depression (“This is fatal,” he told Reince Priebus) before finally coming to terms with it. This resistance was grounded in a basic belief that the Republican Party was still his party.
Looking back, Ryan says, he should have known better. Having considered the converging political, cultural, and socioeconomic events of the twenty-first century and reflected on them in the context of historical intraparty ideological swings, he recognizes now that the American right was primed, even overdue, for revolution.
“Trumpism is a moment, a populist moment we’re in, that’s going to be here after Trump is gone. And that’s something that we’re gonna have to learn how to deal with,” Ryan says. “I’m a traditional conservative, and traditional conservatives are definitely not ascendant in the party right now. Trump’s clearly an indicator of that. But I remember in the early nineties, when I was working for [Jack] Kemp and [Bill] Bennett, we were called neocons back then. And neocons weren’t just guys who wanted to invade Iraq; neocons were free-trade, free-market, supply-siders who were also strong on national defense. And then there were the paleocons, which was the Pat Buchanan wing. And the paleocons were kind of what you have now: isolationist, protectionist, and kind of xenophobic, anti-immigrant.”