Born a Decade Too Late

Paul Ryan is being roundly condemned for any number of sins, both real and imagined. On the left, the House speaker is being pilloried for his supposed devotion to the cause of enriching the already well-off at the expense of the poor and his failure to protect the interests of unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors, despite his insistence that he would do just that. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, fiscal doves and fiscal hawks alike are damning Ryan for the hypocrisy of railing against the dangers of deficits during the Obama years, while ushering in law policies that will massively increase them under President Donald Trump. Among Trump loyalists, he is denounced as a creature of the much-loathed Republican establishment, who has undermined the president’s agenda at every turn. Meanwhile, some of his erstwhile conservative admirers are dismayed by the fact that Ryan,