Paul Ryan ally doubts speaker will ever fully endorse Trump

NEW YORK — He has been called an “intellectual prodigy” and is one of the most influential thinkers and writers in conservative Republican politics.

Yuval Levin, founding editor of National Affairs magazine, is also an informal adviser to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the most prominent Republican national leader to decline — at least so far — to endorse presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Levin also worked as a White House policy adviser to former President George W. Bush and has since been part of a movement within Republican politics to move the party toward a solutions-oriented disposition, in contrast to many in the party whose main goal has been to block the agenda of President Obama and the Democrats.

Levin’s new book, published Wednesday by Basic Books, argues that American politics is paralyzed by nostalgia. Both conservatives and liberals, Levin writes in “The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism,” too often try to recreate the past rather than finding creative solutions to the world as it now exists.

Levin spoke with me in the Yahoo News New York studios as part of an ongoing series of interviews about ideas shaping the national political conversation. We also spoke about whether Ryan will endorse Trump. Levin said, “It doesn’t seem like [Ryan] is inclined to embrace [Trump] completely and endorse him. I think he may have to vote for him.”

Amid reports Wednesday — sourced to comments from Trump advisers — that Ryan is moving closer to endorsing Trump, a Ryan spokesperson told me, “There’s no update and we’ve not told the Trump campaign to expect an endorsement.” The Ryan spokesman also rejected the idea that Ryan feels his lack of endorsement of Trump has been harmful to the GOP. “He’s also not told anyone he regrets anything,” the Ryan aide said.

Two other Ryan sources told me Wednesday morning that there was no imminent endorsement of Trump in the works. And Ryan’s office released a video Wednesday that continued to radically contrast his approach to political leadership with Trump’s, though of course there was no mention of Trump’s name in the video. But it showed Ryan exhorting his party to speak to the American people “in a way that’s inclusive, that’s optimistic, that’s aspirational, that’s focusing on solutions.”

The transcript of my conversation with Levin has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Jon Ward: Your book could also be titled “We Cannot Go Back,” I think. You write of the ’50s and ’60s: “That time existed — it was not a dream — but it was not the paradise that some now suggest. It was made possible by circumstances that are no longer with us.” When you write that, are you telling Trump voters in the Rust Belt that no matter how many threats and tariffs Donald Trump throws out there, those factories are not coming back?
Yuval Levin: I think so. And not just Trump voters, but a lot of people in our politics behave as though the solutions to our problems involve first and foremost finding a way to go back, to go back to that midcentury, mid-20th-century American dream that in different ways is at the heart of so much of our political rhetoric now. I think the challenge we have is finding ways to go forward, to see how things have changed, to see what we might learn from that American golden age, what we might want to bring back in terms of a balance between prosperity and dynamism. But we can’t go back to the society we were. No society ever can. That moment in American life was also especially unusual for our country. Going back, which is what Donald Trump wants to do, but is also what Hillary Clinton wants to do and what Ted Cruz wants to do, is really not the right way to think about how to solve problems in politics.

What was so different and unique about the circumstances that created that?
The America that came out of the second world war was very unusually cohesive, united. United by war, by depression, but also by a half-century of social and economic and political forces that were driving everybody to be more like everyone else in American politics. Almost from the moment that the war ended, there began a kind of loosening of that — a liberalization — in the culture first and economics and politics, that over time has meant that those very same forces in American life, rather than driving everybody to be more like everyone else, now drive everybody to be more like himself or herself. Individualism is really the driving force in American life now, and that’s good and bad, but our politics is not very good at seeing either the good or the bad. We just see what we’ve lost, and that’s no way to think about how to build for the future.

One of the interesting things in the book, I thought, was that you feel that individualism has been good for higher-income, higher-educated people but not so much for people with less money and less education. Why is that?
Well, I would say it has been good for everyone in certain ways, but the price we paid has been a much heavier price for people who have less education, who have less economic opportunities. In a sense, what’s been good is that we have more options, more diversity, more dynamism, more choices in every part of life. We are a wealthier, healthier society, not just the wealthiest Americans. But what’s bad is, again and again, a kind of breakdown: a breakdown of family structure, a breakdown of social institutions. People who are wealthy and educated in our society are just better suited to dealing with those kind of breakdowns. It’s just easier for them to handle.

Higher-income people are more conservative now.
Yeah, higher-income people live very differently now then lower-income people, in some surprising ways. They are not just very conservative; they are more religious, which I think a lot of people would not expect. Their families are much more traditional, divorce rates are very low, out-of-wedlock birth rates are almost zero. If you’re a college-educated woman, you’re not having children out of wedlock. So a lot of the social problems we have are very deeply tied together with the kind of breakdown of cohesion that we have seen since the middle of the last century. Naturally, it has been harder to deal with the cost for people who have less resources and less of a foundation for success — that’s not surprising. But it’s a very important fact of American life that we have to keep in mind.

Why do you think that exists, that gap between cultural practice, between people with money and people without money?
Well, I think in a lot of ways what we have seen in the last half-century is what first began as a kind of diffusion, a breakdown of cohesive institutions, that over and over in different parts of American life became different forms of polarization: polarization of income, polarization of political views, polarization of social practices. I think that the wealthier, better-educated parts of our society recoiled a little from the cultural revolution that started in the ’60s, pulled back. It was easier for them to do than it could be for people lower down the income scale or with less education. They just found it easier to recover a certain kind of way of life that looks in some important ways like a more traditional way of life. It is much harder for people with less income and less education to do that, and so, again, it’s polarized the way we live, just as life styles have become polarized in so many other ways.

Now, going back to those manufacturing plants in the Rust Belt. A writer for the National Review named Kevin Williamson wrote in March that some of those towns that have been hard hit by the death of manufacturing in America, his quote was that they “deserve to die.” What do you make of that?
Well, look, I think that they deserve to live, but the question is how can they thrive without going back? I think that when Donald Trump goes to Pittsburgh and says, “Believe me, we’re going to bring steel back,” he’s just lying in the way politicians lie to voters. That’s not what a recovery is going to look like in a lot of those towns.

Why is he lying?
Look, the global economy is the reason why steel left Pittsburgh. By the way, it happened 40 years ago. And Pittsburgh has recovered, and places like it have recovered — not by bringing steel back but by trying to find ways to thrive in the 21st century. Pittsburgh has done that. A lot of places in the Rust Belt have not done that, as well. I think that they can learn from 21st-century successes rather than looking for ways to roll back all of the trends that have given us 21st-century America, whether that’s immigration or whether that’s globalization or trade. It’s not that there are not downsides to these things; it’s just in thinking about how to deal with them, we have to think about how to do it from here, not about how to go back in an impossible way.

You talk in your book about an idea named subsidiarity, which I believe is a Catholic doctrine.
The term is Catholic. I like to think it’s a Jewish idea, but the term is a Catholic term, that’s true.

It’s basically the idea that any authority should be at the most local level possible. A friend of mine recently said, “I feel like I want to spend most of my time and energy focused on local things: local problems, local solutions. But the media I consume is mostly telling me that I should care the most about what is happening at the national level.” How do you think that person, my friend, should process that?
Well, in a sense I think they are both right. I think he should want to spend most of his energy at the local level. I think our political system now is structured in a way that means that most questions are addressed at the national level, or at least most of the big questions we face. That’s why what is required, in part, is a change of how we do business in politics. I think our political system needs to recognize that it’s going to be easier to solve problems from the bottom up then from the top down. That’s one of the things it means to be a fragmented, fractured society. And so Washington does have to give up some power. At this point, I think your friend is right, that a lot of the things he’s concerned about are being debated and worked out and thought through at the national level. I think fewer and fewer of them should be, and more power should be channeled downward toward where people actually live with one another face to face and can address problems in a way that’s well-suited to how they live them. That’s going to require a kind of reform of how we understand what politics is and what it does in our country.

Now, you don’t just sit in an ivory tower and write books. You are an informal advisor to Paul Ryan, you know him. Do you think that at some point — as you have watched him sort of do this dance with Donald Trump — do you think at some point he is going to have to embrace Donald Trump completely and endorse him? How do you see that playing out?
Well, it doesn’t seem like he is inclined to embrace him completely and endorse him. I think he may have to vote for him, looking at the options he has and the alternatives he has and the obligations he has as the leader of the party in Congress, maybe the leader of the party in general. Ryan is resisting that because he is a conservative and Donald Trump in a lot of ways is really making a mockery of what conservatives throughout Paul Ryan’s lifetime and mine have been trying to work for. It’s not hard to see why it’s hard for him. But he also faces intense pressures that someone like me who just writes his opinion for a living just cannot possibly fathom.

You said he will have to vote for him probably. Does that mean an endorsement?
I don’t know how it ends up being worded. But when you say you are going to vote for someone, that is probably an endorsement. It’s hard to say. Look, Ryan has certainly resisted that, and I think that is to his great credit, and so far he has managed to do it. But, obviously, he is going to be under intense pressure. He is speaker of the House; he is going to be the chairman of the Republican convention most likely. He is in a tough spot if he doesn’t want to support the party’s nominee.

And at this point, in July, second week or so in July, you have a lot more states that require signatures to get on the ballot there, which is a big barrier for anybody that would want to run as an independent candidate, to give an alternative to Trump or Clinton. Do you see that happening at this point?
I think it’s possible. There are certainly some people working for it. But the obstacles to that are very high and I wouldn’t bet a lot on it happening right now.

Even though it does seem to me that there is a lot of determination?
And I think there is some demand too, but there needs to actually be a candidate. There needs to be someone who is willing to ruin their life in that particular way, and so far that person has not turned up.

So, it would be a quixotic quest and not a realistic thing?
Look, you never know. This is not the year to make confident predictions of any kind. But, obviously, in our system that’s so heavily weighted to favor a two-party structure to elections, it is hard to imagine a third-party option winning the election.

And would you ever consider voting for Donald Trump?
No, I don’t think I could. Like I said, I am a conservative. What I believe about America, what I believe about politics, about government is exactly what Donald Trump is making a mockery of throughout this campaign. I also think, just as a matter of character, as a matter of temperament, he is not suited to be president. I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton either, so I’m in a place where I haven’t been as a voter, but it happens.

Let’s end on this. I think a good question to ask you here is that a lot of people, a lot of Trump voters, are frustrated that the government is both impotent and incompetent in different ways, at least in their view. They want somebody to come in and fix the problems, and knock heads and get things done. They see Donald Trump as doing that. What do you say in response to that? Obviously, you don’t agree with it, but what is the alternative?
You know, my view of this — and this is really the argument of the book too — is that American government in the way we have thought about it since the progressive era isn’t going to work in the 21st century. And in order to get a government that works, we have to think differently about how American government ought to operate. Not in an entirely new way. This idea that government should work from the bottom up, the idea of federalism — even of subsidiarity — has always been part of the American way of thinking about government. But it’s not part of the progressive way about thinking about government. And as long as our politics is a debate about how big the progressive welfare state should be, which is basically what it has degenerated into, I don’t think we are going to find those solutions. And I don’t think someone like Donald Trump who says, “It’s not working because everyone is an idiot and I could come in and make it work,” is persuasive at all. I think voters who want a government that is more functional and speaks to their concern in the 21st century should see the value of a government that channels power downward toward the public. That’s the argument that conservatives ought to be making. In some ways, it’s the argument we do make, but not nearly enough though.