There is a mistaken idea popular among liberal pundits that we are presently witnessing a race to the bottom between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and that the craving for authority driving Trump’s popularity among primary voters is the same primal force behind Cruz’s candidacy. On this account, Trump and Cruz are appealing to the same voter—Trump is besting Cruz because he is better at playing the fascist. Trump understands populism, while Cruz does not; Trump can evoke and articulate our ugliest xenophobic fears (The wall will be 30 feet high! Fifty feet high!), while Cruz ineffectively appeals to his track record of combating the Gang of Eight. (Who are they again?) Trump speaks in the vernacular of a third-grader, bad versus good, winners versus losers; Ted Cruz, despite his best efforts to impersonate a good ol’ boy, winds up showing off his Ivy League credentials and alienating his own base. Despite, or perhaps because of, his nerdiness, he just can’t figure out how to become the demagogue the Republican Party so ardently desires.
Many have tried to understand and explain Ted Cruz’s appeal to Republican voters, but it can be difficult to make sense of it. How is it that a Senator so thoroughly and utterly despised by so many of his colleagues can be a serious contender for the GOP Presidential nomination? How can someone so thoroughly odious, objectionable, and desirous of dismantling the Constitution in favor a strict, dogmatic Christian theocracy be considered serious Presidential timbre?
Many have said- and I concur with this assessment- that Ted Cruz represents a far more significant clear and present danger to America than Ted Cruz. It’s a danger both simple and complex. Cruz lusts for power, and he’s demonstrated a willingness to do and/or say whatever is required to achieve his desired end. He’s a holier-than-thou, sanctimonious sociopath whose Prime Directive is his own self-interest and self-aggrandizement.
Describing Cruz as being beyond discussion of mere good and evil might seem hyperbolic, but even that doesn’t begin to address the malevolence and supreme self-interest that drives the junior Senator from Texas.
Cruz and Trump are in fact appealing to different segments of the Republican Party, and they know it. Trump is the candidate of the disoriented, the confused, the needy; Cruz is the candidate of the dogmatist, the moralist, the convicted. Trump gets the voters who fear and adore; Cruz gets the voters who hate and resent. Trump is all show; Cruz means what he says. Trump wants to be everybody’s boss; Cruz wants to be everybody’s master. Ted Cruz is much, much more dangerous than Donald Trump.
Compare and contrast the words of Trump and Cruz, and you’ll very likely agree that Trump is all about Trump. He’s in it to maximize whatever benefit he can squeeze from running for President. I find myself wondering if he even believes half the stuff he says. Most of it is so outrageous and over the top offensive that it’s difficult to take him seriously.
Ted Cruz is deadly serious. A skilled debater at Harvard and a gifted lawyer, Cruz understands that words have meaning. He crafts his positions in ways that appeal to the darker angels of those inclined to hate and resent. Where Trump is flash and circus clowns, Cruz says nothing he doesn’t mean. It’s true- Trump wants to be the boss, but Cruz wants to rule the world…and he’ll say and do whatever it takes to achieve that.
I began with an uninformed repugnance for his views, with which I had only a vague familiarity; then I got to know him, a little bit, as an unlikely presidential candidate, a probable third or fourth place finisher; I watched the dark horse win in Iowa; and somewhere along there I came to understand that, in my opinion, no one currently running for president would be worse for the country than Ted Cruz. Not necessarily because there’s something wrong with his policies, though I consider them to be completely misguided. But because there is something frightening about this person, and there is something frightening about the way he can make people feel.
Cruz is the perfect combination of Niccolò Machiavelli and Frank Underwood- able to slit your throat and leave you expressing gratitude for it with your last dying breath. He’s learned that what others may see as a handicap is for him a virtue. Cruz may be hated by virtually all of official Washington and the GOP leadership…but he wears that opprobrium as a badge of honor.
Being hated is a mark of entitlement.
Friedrich Nietzsche made the argument about the triumph of “ascetic morality” and the Christian reevaluation of values 140 years ago in On the Genealogy of Morals. Imagine you feel oppressed by a culture and a political system that has consistently ignored you and the things you care about. (For today’s conservative, these values might include the definition of marriage as being “between a man and a woman,” the idea of an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, or that life begins at conception.) Now imagine someone promised to overturn all of the prevalent values of the day in favor of your own, opposing values….
These were the deep psychological roots of the Christian revolution that began over 2,000 years ago (and may now be coming to an end). Were it not for Paul, “We should scarcely have heard of a minor Jewish sect whose master died on the cross,” Nietzsche elsewhere observed. It was Paul and his astonishing insight into the psychological needs of the powerless of his time that accomplished this transvaluation of values, the very same psychological needs that Cruz hopes to tap into now. Of course Ted Cruz was despised by the ruling elite: so was Jesus.
By claiming the mantle of the oppressed, Cruz has cause to present himself as pure of heart and ideology. He’s swimming against the current, spitting into the wind, or whatever cheesy metaphor one wishes to employ. He’s not looking for personal gain, he’s looking to restore America to those who should rightfully own it- good, God-fearing, Bible-believing, American-loving, terrorism-hating patriots.
At least that what it looks like at first glance. Scratch the surface and what you’ll see is a power-hungry zealot and theocrat who wants to rule the world.
[I]mportantly, like them, he was being ignored. Suddenly all of us were part of the same group, the Americans who no one else cares about, the Americans who know what’s right and wrong, but no one listens to them. This is the dialectic of Ted Cruz: either you are bullied, or you are the bully. The bully tells you what’s what; the bullied are morally superior.
By speaking the language of the powerless, Cruz provides a road to reclaiming America for those who feel disenfranchised and marginalized for their principled Christianity.
That this invented, purely fictional victimhood is total bullshit matters not at all, because Cruz isn’t speaking to you or to me. He’s speaking to those who feel God has withdrawn his approval from America because America has evicted the Almighty from the public square.
Ted Cruz understands exclusion. He’s been excluded, just like you’ve been excluded, and just like God’s been excluded. All Cruz wants to be is the person who restores the power to those who’ve been on the outside looking in…but once he’s in power we’ll discover just what kind of despot he is.
