What is also true, however, is that the larger political and economic context has changed markedly since the 1990s, when Ryan cut his teeth at Empower America, the Kempite think tank that served as a launching pad for many young supply-siders, and when he first ran for Congress in 1998. In those heady days, center-left thinkers imagined that we were at the start of The Long Boom, and the center-right dreamed of Dow 36,000. The baby boomers had yet to start retiring en masse, and the then-ascendant New Democrats were almost as enthusiastic about entitlement reform as the Gingrichite right. The Soviet collapse and the dotcom boom seemed to vindicate libertarian economic prescriptions, pulling the entire political spectrum rightwards. A tight labor market promised to mitigate the potential downsides of nudging welfare mothers into work. Globalization and automation were still in their infancy, and it briefly seemed as though the U.S. would have a boundless appetite for low-skill labor from Mexico, which had been devastated by the peso crisis. To Ryan, it must have seemed as though there were no problems his brand of compassionate conservatism couldn’t solve.

By the 2000s, however, many of Ryan’s causes were already losing favor on the right, long before Trump entered the fray. Consider the grassroots Republican resistance to President George W. Bush’s push to modernize Social Security, to use the term of art preferred by Bush-era conservatives, and to couple a large-scale amnesty with increases in future immigration levels. The 2008 financial crisis, meanwhile, made mincemeat of the supply-side optimism that had long been Ryan’s credo, and which increasingly lost ground to a more zero-sum politics pitting makers against takers—a formulation that, for a time, he took up as his own.