Ryan, like all Ayn Rand acolytes, is a CL at heart. His passion in life has always been to shrink the size of government for the benefit of the wealthy and to the detriment of the poor. He succeeded in making his views the orthodoxy of the GOP in spite of their unpopularity with actual voters. I suppose you could call that an “accomplishment,” although it meant that the GOP had to lie about its platform every election, and actually governing against the economic interests of its constituents proved very difficult in practice.
Ryan became Speaker with a large reservoir of goodwill within the party. Was he a success? Well, he failed miserably in uniting the factions, although that task may be beyond the ability of any mere mortal. He failed in his attempts to remake the welfare state. He could have treated Trump as a third-party president, not a real Republican, but he chose to embrace and enable him, instead. His one creative idea on taxes, the BAT, went down early. His only real success was with the mindless tax cut that was passed last year. It will be modified over time, because it isn’t really working at any level.
I won’t miss him. Will you?