Paul Ryan, Voltaire and the Presidential Debate

Suddenly, Voltaire — yes, yes, our own Voltaire — has made his entrance into the U.S. presidential campaign.

This happened incidentally, when the conservative intellectual Paul Ryan, recently thrown into the spotlight after announcing his candidacy for vice president on Mitt Romney’s ticket, confided in People magazine about his interest in the French philosopher.

“What do you read for fun?” asked a reporter, who had managed to slip onto the Romney bus in Virginia. “I read policy. Fun? Fun is biographies. And I listen to lectures from the Great Courses in the car wherever I go. I’m listening to a great one on Voltaire right now. I enjoy studying the Enlightenment, which is 18th century debate.”

The interview didn’t escape comedian Stephen Colbert, who on his Comedy Central show immediately mocked the young Republican congressman’s philosophical passion. “Yes, the Enlightenment was a fascinating debate back in the 18th century. About whether science and reason had a role to play in the public sphere. A debate to the Republicans rages on to this day,” he quipped, referencing a fundamental contradiction between the devout Catholic Paul Ryan and the viscerally anticlerical philosopher, who was called a deist and who believed in the existence of a watchmaker who managed “the world clock.”

The French site, Rue 89, has roughly surmised — with its typical nuance — that Ryan’s “ode” to Voltaire seems like a “joke” given that he is the “darling of the tea party and his devoted cohort of creationists, homophobes, sexists, intolerants, and supporters of expeditious criminal justice…”

Ryan’s interest in Voltaire, and his penchant for intellectual materials, seems to me to be good news for the American public debate. After all, how many politicians in Congress can say the same? This little detail about Ryan adds to information already published on the profile of this “intellectual right-winger,” the new GOP darling. Many papers published over these last few days, including the arguably left-leaning New York Times and Washington Post, have also highlighted Ryan’s intellectual voracity and his profound economic and cultural ideas. A fanatic since adolescence of the romanticist and essayist Ayn Rand, a Russian-Jewish intellectual immigrant who fled the Russian revolution and in doing so developed a visceral hatred of socialism and the State, Ryan has read all of the major American economic liberalist authors from Friedrich von Hayek to Milton Friedman to Adam Smith. These men have shaped his world view and the anti-state convictions that formed the crux of his fiscal austerity program. This makes him one of the leading thinkers of the Republican Party today.

“When I’m having a discussion with Ryan, I’m talking to someone who knows the material as well as, if not better than, I do,” confessed the director of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to the New York Times. “He’s a guy who, unlike 98 percent of members of Congress, can sit in a conference room or around the dinner table with six or 10 people from think tanks and magazines and more than hold his own in a discussion,” stressed William Kirstol, the editor in chief of the right-leaning Weekly Standard, who was one of Ryan’s earliest supporters.

This cerebral side isn’t the best thing to share with the American political world, where voters have a tendency to decry intellectuals and to prefer men of action. Ironically, on this point Ryan resembles Barack Obama, another intellectual who is often accused of being “too intellectual” and readily admits to preferring policy making to politicking. The two men were thus rather well-situated at first, before they clearly outlined their disagreements about the budget and the best way to reduce the deficit. Too bad there isn’t an Obama-Ryan debate scheduled to occur during the campaign, which will include three Obama-Romney debates and one Biden-Ryan debate.