By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 13, 2018
As this “news”letter has a certain — hard-earned —
reputation for scatological juvenilia and bawdy pandering, you would think that
the Pee Tape Renaissance unfolding before our eyes would provide ample column
fodder. Also, it’s not exactly unfair to accuse its author of exploiting the
inexplicably massive popularity of this “news”letter for self-indulgent
score-settling and self-promotion. So, it wouldn’t surprise me if you thought
that the guy who puts the “G” in G-File would dedicate this week’s epistle to
highlighting and debating David Brooks’s column on my forthcoming book. (Fun
fact: If every subscriber to the G-File bought a copy of my book in the next
ten days, it would almost surely beat James Comey’s apparently underwhelming
tome on the bestseller lists. Not that I’m hinting or anything.)
But I shall forgo all that — for now. Instead, I want to
write about something that’s already old news. Of course, what counts as old
news in a world where a fruit fly can live a rich and successful life through three
or four full news cycles is not necessarily ancient history.
In a normal time, the announcement that the Republican
speaker of the House is retiring to spend more time with his family — after
just a few years on the job — at a moment when Republicans control the federal
government and have more officeholders nationwide than at any time in almost a
century and the economy is roaring would be almost unimaginable. But that news
is already starting to feel like one of those mildly interesting things that happened
last week, like when you find a lone curly fry in your bag of normal fries.
Mr. Whiskers
As a general proposition, I don’t like getting to know
politicians. The list of reasons why is too long to lay out in its entirety
here. But some of the top reasons include:
Most politicians
are actually pretty boring. Maybe they’re not boring with constituents and
their friends, or when they’re tying women to bed posts, but around pundit
types, they often tend to be so cautious and untrusting (I wonder why!) that
normal conversations outside of sports (which I am hardly fluent in) often
become awkward and, sometimes, painful.
Many are conniving
and needy. I’m always amazed by how many House members remind me of
characters from Glengarry Glen Ross.
They may not be constantly begging for the good leads, but they’re always
looking to make a sale, work an angle, or get some advantage. Many older
Republicans love to complain, like Jack Lemmon’s Shelley Levene over a cup of
cold coffee, that they’re never given the respect they’re due from conservative
journalists. The senators are often Stepford Politicians. You can almost hear
the gears grinding inside their skulls as they try to figure out how the biped
in front of their Ocular Sensors could be useful, or detrimental, to their
future presidential run. Again, this may not be how they are with normal
people. It might just be how they treat people in my line of work, particularly
if they don’t know them. Lions don’t make friends with hyenas and all that.
Very few of them
are intellectually interesting. I have no idea what the numbers are — but
it seems to me that very few politicians are really interested in ideas, save
when tactics, marketing ploys, and stratagems can be gussied up as ideas. This
doesn’t mean they’re not smart — or, at least, cunning — but for both good and
ill, politics doesn’t reward being able to talk about de Tocqueville nearly as
much as it rewards being able to remember the first names of every
car-dealership mogul and union honcho in your district.
There are exceptions to all of these things, of course.
Mike Gallagher is a really interesting and fun congressman. Kevin McCarthy
isn’t an intellectual as far as I can tell, but he comes across as the kind of
guy you’d want to go to Vegas with. Ben Sasse — my occasional podcast victim —
is the rare exception to all of these
observations. I’m not sure he’d be a good Vegas wingman (he’d probably be
constantly asking the pit boss about casino metrics of something or other), but
he’s almost surely the most intellectually engaging senator since Pat Moynihan.
All that said, the most important reason I try to avoid
getting to know politicians is that friendship is a burden.
Because I haven’t bought that pill whose main ingredient
was originally found in jellyfish, I can’t remember if I’ve written this
before, but I bring this up all the time in speeches. My policy towards
politicians is similar to that of research scientists towards their lab
animals: You don’t want to get too attached, because you might have to stick
the needle in deep one day.
It’s much easier to jab Test Subject 37B than it is to
stab Mr. Whiskers.
Similarly, it’s easier to give politicians a hard time if
you don’t feel any personal loyalty to them. As I’ve long argued, friendship
can be far more corrupting than money (if a friend asked me to write a column
on their book, I’d sincerely consider it. If a stranger offered me cash to
write about it, I’d show him the anterior side of the digit between my index
and ring fingers).
And that brings me to Paul Ryan.
Cheese Lover
Returns to Dairy State
I’ll admit upfront: I like Paul Ryan, personally. I’ve
known him a bit for years. No, we’re not buddies. I’ve never gone bow-hunting
with him or eaten a single cheese curd in his presence (a bonding ritual in his
native lands). But even before I met him, I felt I knew and understood him
better than most politicians. I started in D.C. as a larval think tanker, and
so did Ryan. We’re about the same age (I know, I know: I look so much younger —
and healthier) and share a lot of the same intellectual and political
lodestars. There was a time when Jack Kemp was my Dashboard Saint, too.
I’ll spare you all the punditry about Ryan’s retirement
(I’ll simply say ditto about Dan McLaughlin, Jim Geraghty, and John Podhoretz’s
takes). I think he’s telling the truth about wanting to be with his family. But
I also think, if we were on Earth-2 and President Mitch Daniels were in office
and Republicans were enjoying the luxury of a boring and mature presidency that
was tackling head-on the Sweet Fiscal Crisis of Death coming our way, the pull
of Ryan’s family might not have been nearly so acute.
Again, I’m biased. But as a general rule, whether you’re
on the right or the left, if you personally hate Paul Ryan, that’s an indicator
to me that you’re an unreasonable person. Sure, you can disagree with him. You
can be disappointed in him. But if you buy the claptrap from the Krugmanite
Left or the Bannonite Right about Ryan, if you think he’s evil or a fraud, I’m
going to assume you’re part of the problem in our politics.
As Jonathan Last and Michael Warren pointed out on a Weekly Standard podcast, the hatred
aimed at Ryan, and also people like Marco Rubio, from the Left stems from the
fact that Ryan and Rubio defy the strawman the Left so desperately wants to
have as an enemy. How dare they be thoughtful and compassionate! How dare they
be young and attractive! By what right do they make serious arguments for
conservative policies! To paraphrase Steve Martin in The Jerk, they listen to their serious responses to journalists’
questions, and scream at the Maître d’, “This isn’t what we ordered! Now bring
me those toasted cheesy gaffes you talked us out of!”
Beyond the brass-tacks punditry on the significance of
Ryan’s retirement — what this means for the midterms, etc. — there is a deeper
historical and political significance. I’ve been saying for a couple years now
that conservatism, stripped of prudential, traditional, and dogmatic adornment,
boils down to simply two things: The idea that character matters and the idea
that ideas matter. Stripped of the compromises Ryan made and the decisions he
was forced into, Ryan’s career boils down to modeling these two things. He is a
man of deeply decent character, and he’s a man that cares deeply about the
importance of ideas. Did he fall short of the ideal? Of course. Who hasn’t?
There’s a reason Bill Rusher’s favorite psalm was, “Put
not your faith in princes.”
Politicians are flawed not only because of the incentive
structure that is inherent to their jobs but also because, to borrow a phrase
from social science, they’re people.
(Pat Moynihan had his flaws. You could set up a bowling
alley using his weekly allotment of wine bottles as the pins. He wrote like a
liberal-leaning neocon intellectual, but he voted like a ward-heeling Irish
politician.)
The fact that Paul Ryan was a man out of place in his own
party says far more about the state of the GOP than it does about the man.
Consider this week alone:
• A president
who cheated on his first wife with his second and “allegedly” cheated on his
third with a porn star is tweeting that Jim Comey is a “slimeball.”
• The
president’s personal PR team over at Hannity HQ is calling Robert Mueller the
head of a crime family.
• The CBO just
announced that we’re in store for trillion-dollar deficits for as far as the
eye can see.
• The president
is tweeting taunts about how his missiles are shinier toys than Putin’s.
• The
president’s nominee for secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a once passionate and
thoughtful defender of Congress’s sole right to authorize war, is now invoking
law-review articles as justification for a president’s right to wage war on a
whim.
• The
president’s lawyer’s office was raided by the FBI (not Bob Mueller’s team, by
the way) after getting a warrant from a judge and following all of the onerous
protocols of the Justice Department, and the former speaker of the House — and
avowed historian — is insisting that the Cohen and Manafort raids are morally
equivalent to the tactics of Stalin and Hitler. I’m pretty sure the Gestapo
didn’t have “clean teams” to protect attorney-client privilege (particularly of
dudes named “Cohen”), and last I checked the KGB wasn’t big on warrants.
• On Monday
evening, the president convened a televised war council and spent the first ten
minutes sputtering about how outraged he was by an inquiry into a pay-off of
his porn-star paramour.
And people are shocked that Paul Ryan isn’t comfortable
in Washington?
Steve Hayes is right that Ryan was “always more a
creature of the conservative movement than of GOP politics. His departure
punctuates the eclipse of that movement within the party.”
The GOP will never be the same. We’ve known this
instinctively for a while. But Ryan’s departure removes all doubt. He was too
good for the job — and the party.
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