Paul Ryan Quotes
Progressives deliver everything except progress.
Ryan, Paul. "Speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference." American Conservative Union, 6 Mar. 2014.
His indictment was rejected by the American voters when they rejected Ryan and Mitte Romney in the election of 2012. This quotation illustrates one of the problems of ideology in politics. Ryan “indicted” everything about progressivism in effect saying to the voters that there is not one progressive idea or analysis that might be useful or even important to the body politic. The same thing happens when ideologues on the left claim that there is nothing of value in conservative thinking. In reality many of the greatest facets of America can be traced to progressive ideas and many to conservative ideas. The United States has been an amalgam of political ideas taken from the entire range of human thinking the world over.
The liberals of the Republican party had been the powerful and often dominant wing of the party since Theodore Roosevelt had instituted his reformism. Rockefeller was trying to maintain its preeminence inside the party against the then new Republican extremists led by Barry Goldwater. He lost at the convention, as Goldwater was nominated as the Presidential candidate. He was trounced in the general election because of his extreme form of Conservatism. However, while the extreme right wingers lost the election, they had won control of the Republican Party that defined Republicanism for decades thereafter as a conservative movement. They would make “liberalism” a dirty word, and the party did not concern itself with human need much thereafter while fighting the change and globalization that was beginning.
From the mid-1960s when he served President Lyndon Johnson, the Republican Party moved much to the right while the Democrats tended to stay the same. As a result, Moyers who had a long career as a commentator and journalist appeared to be more left wing although he kept the same views.
Paul Davis Ryan is the 54th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
