The Trumpistas it’s are mistaking anything that is respectable for elitism. We’ll just have to muddle through it.

Now, is Paul Ryan actually a conservative intellectual politician, or just a booster of Republican ideas, parroting the higher-brow justifications from the usual academic sources? What insights have we learned from him that compare to the output of, say, a Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

Yglesias recently wrote, “Paul Ryan is demonstrably brilliant at suckering credulous journalists into testifying to his own brilliance, but he’s not much of a poker player,” and I’ve got to say, I have a similar impression of the man. I’m happy to be proven wrong, however.

As for what Ryan and other conservative intellectual politicians should do, the first principle must always be political survival or one is not doing the other principles any good. And that means compromise with – and embrace and defense of – the desires and interests of the not-always-respectable or litmus-test-passing voters. That’s exactly what didn’t happen on the road to Trump’s nomination.

In the 70s, even mainstream economists thought it was natural for the government to set a wide variety of prices using price controls. (At least, that’s what I hear people say. I was a young child then, so I don’t really remember.) By the 90s, right and left basically agreed with Friedman’s economic views. (That I do remember.) Of course, Friedman was helped by a gifted politician communicator in Reagan. The Left has also been helped by a gifted communicator in Obama, but their ideas are not gaining widespread acceptance, except among themselves, because the ideas themselves are so flawed.

The right confluence of conservative intellectuals and politician communicators can win over both intellectuals and non-intellectuals. Of course, this will probably not happen in the presidential contest, but Paul Ryan could still be very influential as House Speaker. His advantage is that he is both an intellectual and a politician so he does not necessarily need to wait for the right partner to come along. One positive sign for Ryan is that he was able to become Speaker, and effectively leader of the Republican Party, without campaigning for it.