Philosophical Apprentice comments.

The first paragraphs of Stephens diatribe against Paul Ryan offers:

Shortly after last year’s midterms, when Republicans failed to take the Senate and eked out only a thin majority in the House, Paul Ryan gave an interview to ABC’s Jonathan Karl in which he described himself as a “Never-Again Trumper.” It’s worth recalling what Ryan and other Republicans said about Donald Trump the first time he ran to see what a sham this feeble self-designation is likely to become.

In 2015, Ryan, the House speaker then, denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as “not conservatism,” “not what this party stands for” and “not what this country stands for.” Then-Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana privately complained that Trump was “unacceptable,” according to the G.O.P. strategist Dan Senor, before he accepted the vice-presidential nomination. Ted Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” for insulting his wife, Heidi, before declaring that “Donald Trump will not be the nominee.”

They all folded — and they all will fold again. Their point of principle wasn’t that Trump had crossed so many moral and ethical lines that they would rather live with a Democrat they could honorably oppose than a Republican they would be forced to dishonorably defend. Their point was simply that Trump couldn’t win. When he did, they became powerless to oppose him.

Seven years later, they’ve learned nothing.

In his interview with ABC, Ryan said he was “proud of the accomplishments” of the Trump years, citing tax reform, deregulation, criminal-justice reform, and conservative Supreme Court justices and federal judges. So why oppose Trump in 2024? “Because I want to win,” Ryan said, “and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20 and now in 2022.”

Should The Reader be at all surprised that Politics, as practiced, is about the ability to adapt to an ever-changing landscape… call it hypocrisy if you must, yet the ability to adapt and change, with the shifting political tides, defines political careers across the political spectrum.

This set of imperatives fails to register with Mr. Stephens, who is for want of a more accurate descriptor is a Straussian, of a particular kind, unmasked by Nicolas Xenos.

Mr. Stephens in this ‘essay’ dons the robes of Tomás de Torquemada, to expose Ryan as one of many, who have come to terms with the ‘Trump Phenomenon’. Yet this ‘Phenomenon’ is about a completely failed Political Class: The Republicans and The New Democrats.

The Neo-Cons had their political moments with the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both murderous and ignominious losses, and the monument’s to America’s failed hegemonic ambition: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and its many ‘black sites’…

Stephen’s, in the robes of Torquemada, seeks to strike, from inconvenient political memory, these crimes, by pointing to Paul Ryan, as a dubious political hack. Note that Ryan, demonstrated a kind of political wisdom, in abandoning his powerful position, as the in order too… he cultivated a possible status as a ‘wise political elder’?

Philosophical Apprentice