Growing up, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was the face of the Republican Party brain trust. The man with a fiscal plan to get us out of the hellacious, out-of-control spending splurges involving both parties. From Obama's stimulus, Obamacare, Joe Biden's COVID relief, and George W. Bush's wars and Medicare Part D, the latter of which we haven't paid for yet, unsurprisingly, have all contributed to the debt, deficit and added trillions to our already outrageous unfunded liabilities within our social safety net. Ryan was happy being on House Ways and Means, but then-Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) decided to leave this town, a wise choice. No one was qualified to take the mantle, and Ryan begrudgingly took the gavel. That's when Ryan's star began to fall.
Trump made numerous errors as president at an administrative level, namely not cleaning house at the Department of Justice, but listening to Ryan on an omnibus spending bill is in the top five. The former president was about to veto the package because there was no funding for a border wall, an ultimate 2016 campaign promise. It would have shut down the government in 2018. Ryan reportedly promised to get financing for that immigration enforcement measure later, prompting Trump to sign the bill, something he didn't want to do and vowed it would never happen again. But Ryan didn't follow through on that promise, instead deciding not to run again for re-election and doing next to nothing to help candidates in the midterm elections that year. It was essentially a resignation.
One thing is certain: Ryan wouldn't be equipped to be in today's Republican Party. A lot has changed since 1999, his freshman year. Ryan isn't a culture warrior, a role we must adopt because the left has run amok for too long. The former House Speaker admitted that he's more concerned about policy, being the wonk he is, and not interested in the "polarizing" aspects of these cultural fights.
Paul Ryan: “I’m not a culture war guy…” pic.twitter.com/VqMGu47BHX
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 13, 2023
There was a short time when one could think that social and fiscal issues differed. It's more complicated, as is our society. Often, when you peer through the numbers and the policy, you'll find that these two issues are intertwined. Also, we tried ignoring the culture and sticking to the legislation, but the "Paul Ryan" way only led to school boards being overrun by cultural Marxists, men thinking they could compete in women's sports, and modern medicine going to extraordinary lengths to erase the biological characteristics unique to womanhood to accommodate transgenders.
Perhaps, if we were more attentive and aggressive, we could have drowned the "woke" left seeds before they sprouted into these monsters of aberration and political nonsense that have taken hold within the Democratic Party. There are cultural norms worth defending, like barring biological males from participating in women's sports, prohibiting minors from undergoing what is arguably child mutilation surgeries and pumping them with hormones and puberty blockers to satisfy the transgender lust embodied by their parents.
Culture wars are tiring, but that's everything now. If we have the right to free speech, there will be various opinions, some bizarre and heinous. It should be tiring; that's America. To quote fictional President Andrew Shepherd, "America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad 'cause it's gonna put up a fight." As long as we have a constitutional right to free speech, assembly, and association, the wacko left will be on the battlefield. It's always been a street fight, and as a former face of the party, maybe that's why we're a bit behind. One of our former leaders, Ryan, opted to become an ivory tower policy wonk and let his surroundings burn to ash below.
To show how things have become out of control, it's conservatives who have become the new feminists by fighting to protect women's sports and scientific study that does indeed show biological differences between men and women; it's not a social construct. And no, you can't identify however you want. Women have been relegated to "birthing people" or "non-men" in liberal circles. The right has taken up this role through no effort of our own, but here we are, the protectors of women and science. Maybe we could have stopped this nonsense if some folks weren't afraid of "polarizing" issues.