Psst... It’s Totally Okay Not to Be a “Culture War Guy”

Paul Ryan is taking some ridiculous criticism from the right over some recent remarks.

The other day, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan appeared on a CBS morning show to talk about the Trump indictment and other political topics mostly related to the GOP. As time was running out in the closing minute of the segment, co-host Nate Burleson asked Ryan to comment on the politics of Republican lawmakers pushing legislation on things like “banning books”, “trans rights”, and “anti-woke.”

“Is that a good approach, a good strategy?” Burleson asked.

“I’m not a culture war guy,” Ryan confessed, adding that he finds the political genre “really polarizing.” “Look, on some of these issues, I’ll side with the anti-woke crowd, but to me, I’m worried about the debt crisis. I’m worried about the future of our country, and China. There are big policy problems that we need to tackle if we want to have a great 21st century for this country.”

It was boilerplate stuff from the former congressman. Ryan was always a big-picture policy wonk with a strong focus on fiscal matters. His interest and leadership in those areas during the Obama era earned him the respect of Tea Party types (at least for a while) and establishment figures alike. Such issues are clearly still his passion.

But as we’ve all come to learn over the past eight years or so, traditional Republican positions are no longer highly regarded within the GOP. The evolution of Tea Party populism into the MAGA movement completed the pariahdom of a number of Republican leaders who, like Ryan, demonstrated insufficient personal loyalty to Donald Trump. Despite serving for years as a political ally to Trump, and handing him arguably the greatest policy achievement of his presidency (with the 2017 tax bill), Ryan has remained largely despised by MAGA Republicans. He left public office in 2019.

As the interview wrapped up, Ryan talked about how most of his work these days is with think tanks, with an emphasis on poverty and upper-mobility.

“What I worry about,” he reiterated, “are the big policy challenges that are going unresolved, or made worse by Joe Biden. So that’s why I want [the GOP] to win this election, so we can actually fix these big policy problems. Culture war politics is good primary-election politics. It’s very divisive, but it’s effective politics… I’ll grant you that. But for me, I’m an old Jack Kemp guy. I believe in inclusive, aspirational politics.”

In other words, Ryan is the same guy he’s always been, advocating for federal fiscal reforms and other items he sees as existential, and mostly staying above the fray on the culture battles covered daily on cable news. Only now, he’s doing it as a private citizen instead of an elected representative, where’s he’s kept a much lower public profile.

But on the occasions when he does turn up in front of a cameras, like he did on CBS the other day, I still find myself marveling at the level of derangement he provokes from the modern right. All it effectively took was him saying that he wasn’t a “culture war guy” to draw outrage from a number of right-wing media personalities.

“Paul Ryan denounces GOP efforts to protect kids from racially divisive & sexual material,” NewsBusters’ Curtis Houck reported, posting a video clip showing Ryan neither talking about the issue Houck described, nor denouncing anyone over it.

“I grew up idolizing him as many 30something conservatives,” Houck further lamented — incomprehensibly so, being that Ryan’s views and priorities haven’t changed since whenever Houck was in his thirties.

The website Twitchy joined the fun, blasting Ryan for “scolding the GOP for protecting children from adults who want to indoctrinate them with divisive, racist garbage and adult themes…”

Again, Ryan did no such thing.

“What has happened to Paul Ryan, you guys?” Twitchy similarly asked.

Again, nothing.

The Daily Caller ran this headline: “Paul Ryan Thinks Young Kids Being Given Porn In School Libraries Is Somehow A Fake Issue”.

It’s hard to believe that was the genuine take-away from “media reporter” Nicole Silverio, again considering that Ryan said nothing about kids, pornography, or school libraries. He also didn’t cast any issue as fake. Perhaps a headline writer is to blame for that one.

Apparently concerned by “RINO” Ryan expressing earlier in the interview that he believes Ron DeSantis (along with several other non-Trump GOP primary candidates) is worthy of the Republican nomination, a Twitter account for the DeSantis campaign torched the same straw-man, tweeting, “The Establishment can cry all they want, but there is NOTHING ‘polarizing’ about fighting the sexualization of our children.”

The presumptuousness in all of this, of course, borders on perversity. Actually, I’d say it probably crossed that line, almost making the left’s classic depiction of Ryan “pushing granny over a cliff” quaint and comical in comparison. I mean, in which language does someone making a general statement about culture war politics, while expressing support for the “anti-woke crowd,” translate to a condemnation of the protection of children from sexualization?

Answer: the language of overheated political tribalism.

“There's no interest in fixing what's actually broken,” decried Jedediah Bila, responding to the Ryan interview. The former Fox News and The View co-host added, “This is the face of establishment Republicans who don't give a shit about you.”

I’m not sure which planet Bila lives on these days, but if she can stare at our nation’s spending, inflation, and debt situations, along with our foreign relations with consequential allies and bad actors, and find nothing “actually broken” about any of it, I want to move to that planet.

Right-wing columnist David Marcus, who recently fretted over the thought of being insufficiently supportive of Donald Trump through the former president’s latest legal challenges (while freely acknowledging that Trump would abandon him for a McDonald’s hamburger), tweeted, “Sorry, but not being a ‘culture war guy’ is disqualifying in today’s GOP. As it should be.”

As it should be? Really?

Is it true that anyone associated with the GOP, including private citizens like Ryan, only serves a useful purpose to the party if they’re actively taking up arms in the latest culture battle, whenever and wherever it unfolds?

Is there really no room for federal-policy types who are focused on big-ticket fiscal and geopolitical issues? How about on economic opportunity? With $32 trillion in national debt, chronic high inflation, and growing challenges abroad, I feel like there is, indeed, room.

Conversely, there’s no deficit of politicians and media firebrands lighting up news-commentary segments each and every night with wide-eyed monologues on the topics people like Ryan are less interested in talking about. These folks are a dime a dozen, and have been for some time, loudly waging the culture war and “owning the libs” through three blown election cycles in a row.

One would think some contrary conservative political views might be worth entertaining, or at least tolerating. Instead, Ryan (who’s barely a blip on anyone’s political radar these days) is being assigned egregious viewpoints he has never expressed, and framed by righties as part of the problem… not just with the GOP but American culture itself. And it happened this week in response to him merely showing himself to be the same person he was back when these same people mostly liked him.

Rather than asking, “What happened to Paul Ryan?” perhaps a better question these folks should be asking of themselves is, “What happened to me?”