The Tea Party has been a major force in American politics for nearly a decade now, stretching back to the victories that it brought Republicans in the midterm elections in 2010. Ryan did not create the movement, but he did more than any other sitting politician in Washington to welcome it into the Republican fold, to insist that it shared with the G.O.P. establishment an ideological core: that its fury was just atmosphere, and that at its essence was the same stringent set of beliefs—about small government and low taxes—that Ryan himself had grown powerful professing. When the acrimony between the upstarts and the old guard split the House caucus and deposed Boehner, Ryan was the one figure who could repair the breach—who could look at the Tea Party and see his own image—and so he became Speaker of the House. With the rise of Donald Trump, he tried to repeat this maneuver. The new President was bestowed a chief of staff (Reince Priebus) and a press secretary (Sean Spicer) selected from the ranks of Ryan’s Wisconsin allies. And Ryan began insisting to the public that this new regime was headed not toward serial, incandescent feuds but toward tax reform, Obamacare repeal, and entitlement reform—that the order was regular, that the Republican Party was not materially changed. [...]
The country will be better off now that Ryan has less influence. The major accomplishment he claimed on Wednesday morning was the tax bill that he and his colleagues passed last year, a piece of legislation loaded with giveaways to corporations and the wealthy, and which will only escalate the country’s profound inequalities. Whether his party will be better without him is not as clear. In Washington, insiders believe the next Speaker will be either the transactional House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, of California, or the more stringent conservative Whip, Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, who last year was shot in an assassination attempt at a congressional baseball practice. Ryan was adept at finding euphemisms for his party’s aims, even as many members of his caucus devoted themselves to making a cult of victimized white men. They now find themselves under pressure—facing protests and electoral challenges—from coalitions organized largely by high-achieving women.
