When the nation someday tries to understand the tortured history of the
Affordable Care Act, which the House voted to repeal more than fifty
times before actually doing so, students of history will surely dwell on
the important contribution of Paul D. Ryan, the Speaker of the House,
who will not be treated kindly. Part of the reason is his facility for
the language used in Washington—a modern tongue that outsiders find
mildly incomprehensible and which, in translation, reveals depths of
emptiness and chilliness. Ryan’s words come in an unending stream
spoken earnestly, and confusingly, to enough television cameras that
some listeners are persuaded that he has something thoughtful to say,
and that they should ignore the disturbing single-mindedness.

As the Senate lurches to take its turn on a repeal bill, its mysteries
finally unveiled by the sly Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and
described in alarming detail by my colleague Amy Davidson, the nation can witness the spectacle of elected officials, all with access to
first-rate health care—their insurance generously subsidized by
taxpayers—discussing ways to scale down, or eliminate, protection for
millions of Americans who don’t hold public office and can only hope
that they, or their families, don’t get expensively sick.

Ryan, like other repeal enthusiasts in Congress, hasn’t had to worry
about that as much since he was first elected to Congress, in 1998, at
the age of twenty-eight. Before that, he’d worked as a legislative
intern for the former Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten, and then for Empower
America, a conservative policy group founded by, among others, Jack
Kemp, the former congressman from western New York, who was fascinated
by economics and whom Ryan regarded as a mentor. Before Kemp served nine
terms in Congress, he was a star football player for the Buffalo Bills,
an aspirational sort of job for many Americans. Ryan’s career is not one
with which most Americans—at least those who don’t hold some public
office, with generous benefits—can identify.

Some of the economic ideas proposed by Ryan were once described by the
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in a lucid moment, as “right-wing
social engineering.” Ryan, not long ago, gave more proof of that in an
extraordinary interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who did an
admirable job of trying to coax Ryanese into English. The interview
began with Carlson asking about the “Better Way” House version of the
repeal bill, and the rationale behind eliminating a tax (on net
investment income) that, Carlson noted, “only kicks in on couples making
more than a quarter million dollars per year.” The colloquy continued:

A little wonky, and a lotta doubletalky. When Ryan talks about revenue
being taken out of the “economy” and going “for government,” he’s saying
that “government,” of which he is very much a part, and of which he is a
beneficiary, is something disconnected from the nation, rather than an
imperfect entity springing from the motto “e pluribus unum”—from the
many, one—the idea that Americans, for all their differences, are one
people. In the service of President Donald Trump, Ryan, like so many
others, has come to resemble Lepidus in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,”
as described by Marc Antony: “This is a slight unmeritable man / Meet to
be sent on errands.”

Ryan’s lack of traditional work experience may help the Wisconsin
ironworker Randy Bryce, an Army veteran with a strong interest in health
care who recently announced his very long-shot goal of defeating Ryan in 2018. Perhaps by then Bryce, and others, will try to stop using popular,
easy labels and try, instead, to answer a fundamental question: How much
do America’s elected officials really care about the people they
represent? The Jack Kemp I knew when I lived and worked in Buffalo, whom I once wrote about, cared a great deal. He was a man of contradictions; a
compassionate, Laffer-curve conservative—David Frum once noted that Kemp
called himself “progressive, conservative, radical, and revolutionary”—committed to racial justice and improving the lives of
impoverished Americans. He was Ryan’s mentor, perhaps, but Ryan seems to have learned very little of what Kemp valued most.