From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Thanks for listening. If you're not already a subscriber, please do sign up at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

This week, populism or traditional

conservatism? What's the future of the Republican Party? Is the GOP moving beyond Trump and back

towards the kind of establishment-led conservatism that dominated in the post-Ragan years?

Or is there a new path that fuses elements of the Trump-era populism with more

familiar tenets of conservative philosophy? Or maybe the future is just more Donald Trump?

With me to talk about this is Paul Ryan, former GOP Speaker of the House, and Mitt Romney's

running mate in the 2012 presidential election, once himself seen as something of a radical,

a Tea Party supporter,

Ryan was very critical of Donald Trump. Ryan stepped down from politics after just one and a half

terms as Speaker. Now mixing life in business while teaching economics at Notre Dame and spending

more time with his family, Ryan remains an important thinker in conservative circles. Paul Ryan

joins me now. Speaker Ryan, thanks very much for being here. Yep, good to be here. Thanks for having me. So I'll talk about the future of the Republican Party, the future of conservatism, which are a passionate exponent, passionate believer. Let's talk first of all if we can about the kind of the real immediate politics. We've just seen, obviously, the shenanigans, should we call them in the House of Representatives, when the divided Republicans took 15 ballots to get to elect a speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

You have a lot of direct experience, obviously, of being speaker, having been speaker yourself.

What do you think that episode tells us about the condition of the Republican Party?

And again, about the party in Congress, you experienced that yourself directly.

There is this sense that there's this kind of hardcore, whatever you want to call them,

who now kind of somehow hold the party to ransom and can control and do things.

What's your sense of what it tells us and what we can expect from that Republican majority in Congress,

fragile as it is?

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