Paul Ryan, a Drama in One Act

There’s never been a better time to be a theater critic writing about politics, at least since 1865. For a substantial portion of the conservative movement — the portion that hosts radio programs and cable-news shows — conservatism is no longer moving the country away from socialism and central planning and toward free markets and constitutional governance; it is about drama.

Witness today’s absurd spectacle, with Paul Ryan, who is not running for president, holding a much-watched and much-remarked-upon press conference to announce that he . . . is not running for president.

The storyline is always the same: The wicked, wicked Establishment vs. We the People (Who Invest in Physical Gold and Doggie Vitamins). But with a sufficient commitment to imagination and sufficient tolerance for intellectual dishonesty, a bit of drama can be wrung from the slowest of news days: Colorado selects delegates the same way this time as it did last time around — to the barricades! Republican convention to require a majority of delegates for nomination, just like it did in 1976 — treason and treachery! Etc.

(Never mind that the 1916 convention went to the third ballot.)

It isn’t that extraordinary things don’t happen, it’s just that they are extraordinary. It is very difficult to imagine that if Donald Trump were to go into the convention with an actual majority of delegates that he would be denied the nomination. If he does not have a majority of delegates, and is not able to secure a first-ballot nomination, then party leaders and conservatives will exert a great deal of pressure for delegates to support another candidate, in all likelihood Ted Cruz. A vast festival of political simony may be expected. Some party leaders do not like Senator Cruz, personally, while many conservatives believe him to be, at least on the matter of policy and principle, something close to ideal.

The idea that some nefarious Establishment is going to come sweeping out of the shadows, possibly led by Bill Kristol, and force upon the Republican convention a candidate who is not even in the race (Paul Ryan, James Mattis, etc.) is, and always has been, implausible. For one thing (and I do not think that my friend Bill Kristol would object to my saying so) it wildly overstates the influence writers and intellectuals have on Republican party decisions. You wouldn’t know it listening to Andrea Tantaros, but, if conservative magazine editors were calling the shots, then there would not have been a John McCain nomination in 2008, and there probably would not have been a Mitt Romney nomination in 2012.

The two most likely outcomes are these: The Republican party, in a fit of populist madness, nominates Donald Trump, who goes down in ignominious defeat against Hillary Rodham Clinton, very possibly taking down a large part of the Republican congressional caucus with him — a development for which many of the most famous names and faces in purportedly conservative activism will be directly to blame. Alternatively, the Republican party might nominate Ted Cruz, a deeply principled but prickly conservative who will face a difficult but not impossible task in bringing independents and moderates into his camp to defeat Mrs. Clinton, who is, luckily for Republicans, one of the least likeable political figures since Richard Nixon.

Other outcomes are not impossible, but they are extraordinarily unlikely. Something, though, has to fill up those three-hour radio shows and cable-news panel brawls, preferably a tale of betrayal and resentment.

Even if one has to be invented.

I suppose that it is here relevant to note that I spent a couple of years attending every performance of Macbeth I could get to, an experience that I describe here. A note to the ladies and gentlemen in the entertainment wing of the conservative movement: “McConnell” doesn’t have quite the resonance of “Macbeth.”