× Expand Gage Skidmore

In the classic film Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean barely manages to bail out of a speeding car just before it goes over a cliff and explodes into a fireball when it hits the rocks below.

Speaker Paul Ryan is taking the James Dean route. He is bailing just before an impending catastrophe in the November midterm elections. Many Republican heads are likely to roll due to public revulsion against their program and the besieged, corrupt presidency of Donald Trump. As it is, more than three dozen GOP House members and three GOP Senators are already leaving at the end of their terms, the highest number in decades.

Ryan’s decision to leave the House will remove one of America’s most pernicious political figures, whose mild manner belies the icy calculations of a man long driven by the doctrines of the goddess of greed, Ayn Rand. Those doctrines, for Ryan, have translated into massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich, coupled with sweeping assaults on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.

The House Speaker’s decision to retire will remove one of America’s most pernicious political figures, whose mild manner belies the icy calculations of a man long driven by the doctrine of greed.

Republicans are infuriated by Ryan’s looming exit. “I think this is the captain abandoning the sinking ship,” fumed former Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia. “Members are pissed. I think this is going to cause some angst.” Another Republican wailed, “This is a titanic, tectonic shift. This is going to make every Republican donor believe the House can’t be held.”

The ambitious Ryan, who had already run as his party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2012, clearly does not want to take the blame for Republican defeats that would diminish his chances for a future presidential run. Ryan shamelessly transformed himself from a Trump critic in 2016 into a craven lapdog once Trump was elected.

Ryan’s two decades in the House have been distinguished by his stone-hearted neglect of the most vulnerable Americans, including those in his southeastern Wisconsin district wracked by deindustrialization. Ryan fought to slash food stamps, school lunches, unemployment compensation, and foreclosure assistance, all in the name of not allowing our already threadbare safety net to become, in his words, a comfy “hammock.”

Instead, Ryan slavishly devoted himself to padding the thrones of big donors like the Koch brothers in bestowing ever-larger tax cuts for the top 1 percent and Corporate America, packing in incentives for offshoring more jobs from factory towns like those in his district.

Paul Ryan rose to prominence by building an image as a policy wonk obsessed with cutting deficits (despite phony budget proposals that never added up). Yet he was a central player in piling on $1.5 trillion to federal debt with the recent tax cut package heavily skewed to corporations and the ultra-wealthy. No problem, as Ryan sees it: the escalating deficits provide a rationale for his long-term goal of cutting “entitlements” and driving a stake into the heart of the Affordable Care Act.

Ryan’s embrace of lavish incentives for those on top and hard-edged austerity for the rest reflects an unmistakable racial tinge and contempt for society’s marginalized. In his 2014 book, The Way Forward, Ryan painted Detroit (83 percent black) as a dystopia created by government overspending.

“When I look at Detroit I see a warning about what our country might face if we do not rethink how we are governing ourselves,” he wrote.

Ryan’s exit will likely spur the exodus of even more Republican incumbents, who see his move as a sign of rapidly dropping confidence in the GOP’s chances. And his departure will give the Democrats perhaps the best chance ever for electing a progressive representative in Ryan’s district. Retrograde Republicans and the late neo-conservative Democrat Les Aspin (pro-Reagan arms buildup, pro-contras in Nicaragua) have held the seat for almost all of the past sixty years.

Ryan’s exit will likely spur the exodus of even more Republican incumbents, who see his move as a sign of rapidly dropping confidence in the GOP’s chances.

The only Republican candidate now vying for Ryan’s seat is Paul Nehlen, a notorious white supremacist and anti-Semite. But Ryan’s exit will certainly attract other GOP contenders, who can count on plenty of funding from the Republican establishment and the GOP’s billionaire donors. Among the potential candidates are several current state lawmakers, including Representative Robin Vos, the Speaker of the state assembly.

In contrast, the Democrats have two strong progressives vying for the First District nomination: ironworker union leader Randy Bryce and teacher unionist Cathy Myers. Both have taken stands in favor of single-payer healthcare, immigrant rights, and economic justice, with Bryce stressing the calamitous impact of corporate globalization. At this point, Bryce—a burly, mustachioed (Twitter handle: #Ironstache) guy who seemingly stepped out of a Bruce Springsteen song, as several observers have opined—appears to have the inside track.

Bryce has benefited from imaginative ads and a high national profile with numerous appearances on MSNBC. He has raised a robust $4.75 million and snared an impressive list of endorsements, including Bernie Sanders and key in-district forces like the United Auto Workers and Service Employees International Union.

Regardless of who wins the August 14 Democratic primary, progressives have a remarkable opportunity to flip the district from a fervent free-market fundamentalist to someone who can help lead Congress in the direction of Medicare-for-all health care and other programs advancing social and economic justice. Hopefully, he or she will be joined by dozens of new Democratic colleagues from across America with similar perspectives.

So goodbye and good riddance to Paul Ryan, at least for now.

Roger Bybee, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, is a freelance labor journalist and labor-studies instructor based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and previous editor of the Racine Labor weekly.