Paul Ryan’s Old Order Outrage Whatever happened to a conservative rising star? American Spectator, Jul 15, 2019, Jeffrey Lord
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Take a look at those Ryan comments again. They are bristling with the trademark Old Order sense of intellectual and moral superiority. There is Ryan snarking that Trump “didn’t know anything about government. … I wanted to scold him all the time.†Ryan had to be there at the president’s side, you see, “to stop him from making bad decisions.†It never occurs that maybe, just maybe, it is Washington’s Old Order — in which he had now become a central player — that routinely made bad decisions. Which in turn is exactly why millions of Americans voted for Trump in the first place.
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Back there in 2012, shortly after another Old Order Republican — Mitt Romney — lost the presidency to President Obama, Forbes contributor Ralph Benko wrote a piece in Forbes titled
The End Of The Karl Rove Death Grip Signals A Reagan Renaissance, in which Benko opened by saying — correctly — this:
Liberals do not grasp the distinction between Ronald Reagan and (either) George Bush. This blind spot creates a massive confusion and hazard to their ambitions. Obama defeated neither the Reagan Narrative nor Team Reagan. Team Bush appropriated, and then marginalized, both. Obama beat Team Bush, not Team Reagan. The implications are huge. …
In an intra-party succession barely noticed by the mainstream media the Bush forces supplanted the Reagan forces within the GOP. Keepers of the Reagan legacy tended to end up at positions of respect and influence within the conservative movement. For example Reagan intimate, counselor, and attorney general Edwin Meese III long has held a prestigious office with the Heritage Foundation, the flagship of the Washington conservative establishment. Even though Meese was a General in the Reagan Revolution, though, his influence on a Bush cohort-dominated GOP — one that chiseled Reagan onto Rushmore while ignoring Reagan’s philosophy — is constrained.
The enormity of (and surprise at) the defeat of Romney is a huge setback — and perhaps fatal — to the Bush Mandarins’ hegemony over the GOP. If so, the potential re-ascendency of the Reagan wing of the GOP will prove very bad news for liberals and excellent news for the Republican Party. The Reagan wing now can resurge. A resurgence already has begun.
And, indeed, that is exactly what happened, with Donald Trump leading the resurgence inside the GOP of a Reagan-style rebellion against an exhausted GOP Old Order Establishment.
At the time, Paul Ryan was included in the Benko article as a future Reagan-style star. Yet in fact, in reality, as Ryan went back to his House job after that failed venture as the moderate Romney’s running mate, Ryan wound up being entangled in the Old Order as an emergency draft to replace the decidedly Old Order GOP Speaker John Boehner when Boehner finally resigned both his speakership and his House seat. Ryan was reluctant to take the job, but finally did so as a “unifying candidate.†It was downhill into the depths of the Old Order from there. ....
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https://spectator.org/paul-ryans-old-order-outrage/
