PAUL RYAN AND THE TRUMPIANS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL OP EDITORIAL

Paul Ryan and the Trumpians

Ryan and the Freedom Caucus do a deal to avoid the political wilderness.

By Daniel Henninger 

Photo: Chad Crowe

 

Two weeks ago, the House Freedom Caucus—about 35 members of the Republicans’ 247-seat majority—was on the brink of blowing up the party’s chances of winning back the White House.

 

In the months preceding the October eruption, the broader American electorate had spent every day coming to grips with the possibility that the GOP’s presidential nominee would be the mercurial ex-host of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

The possibility loomed that the Freedom Caucus, after ending John Boehner’s Speakership and tanking Kevin McCarthy’s chances of succeeding him, would convince American voters that the Republicans were a party that preferred internal party chaos to governing the country.

This Thursday, with a strong majority of the Freedom Caucus in support, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin becomes House Speaker. Concurrently, Mr. Boehner, like a condemned but honorable Roman consul, released Mr. Ryan from the deadly politics of the debt limit and budget. The departing House leader knows that Mr. Ryan’s denunciation of the deal was strictly business.

A useful cliché holds that every cloud has a silver lining. If so, the resolution of the Speaker standoff in the House (none dare call it “compromise”) offers the chance of a way forward into 2016 for the Republicans’ feuding tribes.

We may assume Paul Ryan did not spend the past week re-reading “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift’s satire of 18th-century British politics, whose myriad disputes look a lot like American politics in our time.

After the McCarthy shipwreck, Paul Ryan, like a Gulliver captured by the Lilliputians, washed up on the floor of the House of Representatives, and immediately found himself tied down by the pesky Freedom Caucus. One might call them the Trumpians.

In Swift’s original, the Lilliputians are having an intense intraparty dispute over whether soft-boiled eggs should be cracked at the large end or small end. Lilliputians were either Big-Enders or Little-Enders, just as some have separated Republicans into “Conservatives” or “Establishment.” Mr. Ryan spent two weeks untangling the Freedom Caucus’s concerns, such as whether to revive the Hastert Rule and other procedural details.   

 

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, in a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, said, “We’re cooked as a party for quite awhile if we don’t win in 2016.” He said the GOP risks becoming a party that wins midterm elections but isn’t up to winning the presidency so that it can govern.

Paul Ryan and two-thirds of the Freedom Caucus have just shown they wish to govern rather than fight each other. Can the same be said for the party’s base? That’s not clear.

One day after the path cleared to the Ryan Speakership, a sub-faction of conservatives said they were furious at . . . the Freedom Caucus! You’ve heard of road rage? Politics now seems to have its own instant-anger phenomenon—radio rage. That’s fine. The political raging on the radio is entertaining, a testament to the market system. The best reaction to the “sellout” charge came from Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a Ryan supporter in the Freedom Caucus, who was asked if he feared the pitchforks back home. No, replied Mr. Buck, “I’m the guy with the pitchfork.”

The Republican electorate is a cauldron of anger, principle, desperation and personal agendas. No one understands exactly what is going on inside the base, and that now includes Donald Trump, the great disrupter, who this week said he was mystified by Ben Carson’s rising appeal.

Remember Charles and David Koch? Until Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina shot past the Republican field, the enraged left—led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama and now Hillary Clinton—bellowed that the Koch brothers’ “dark money” and Citizens United were wrecking “our democracy.” So much for that.

Charles Koch opened up to The Wall Street Journal this week about the GOP’s primary fight and gave some good, free advice to the party’s Trumpians, Carsonians and Tea Partiers: “Typically, what happens when voters are frustrated is they give the government even more power.”

What Mr. Koch no doubt sees is that if enough irreconcilably unhappy voters in a divided party don’t vote next November, then Hillary Clinton, a born-again progressive, will win because Democrats will salute her and vote.

A left-dependent Clinton presidency, the third Obama term, guarantees four and maybe eight more years of weak, socially destructive economic growth. That will bring public demands for more government than any conservative has ever dreamed of. You’ll see executive orders on steroids.

The agreement between Paul Ryan and the Freedom Caucus was not a presidential election.

But it was a reality check on the uses, and limits, of political anger. It opens a way forward for Republicans who don’t want to spend a very long time crying and complaining in the wilderness.