What should we make of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday? Ryan, who has spent his career positioning himself as the Republican Party’s ideas leader, devoted most of his remarks not to policy but to politics.

In a poignant moment, Ryan said something you don’t hear often from politicians – “I was wrong” – when he apologized for having rhetorically split the nation into “makers” and “takers,” adding: “I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point.”

Such comments suggest admirable integrity and a capacity for growth. But Ryan has been stymied by the same anti-government Republicans who undermined his predecessor, John Boehner. The House is about to leave for recess with no apparent progress on meeting an April 15 deadline for approving a federal budget.

The vision Ryan sketched Wednesday was nonetheless uplifting. In a “confident America,” he said, “we don’t lock ourselves in an echo chamber, where we take comfort in the dogmas and opinions we already hold.”

Yet Ryan leads a party that’s trapped in precisely the kind of ideological lockdown he describes. A telling example: Republicans broke longstanding tradition and barred the White House budget director from testifying on the administration’s annual budget request.

With extremists in his party, including Ted Cruz, massed on one front, and Donald Trump poised on another, Ryan is on perilous ground. Yet he seemed confident of finding a way out. “Instead of playing the identity politics of ‘our base’ and ‘their base,’ we unite people around ideas and principles,” he said.

This is a statement of politics in the ideal, and it’s a good destination for Ryan to keep in mind. But he and his troops have little likelihood of reaching it until their party takes a sharp turn away from dogma toward moderation.

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