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The Brutalism of Ted Cruz
by David Brooks | Jan. 12, 2016
In 1997,
Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This
was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors
incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense
lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years.
Eventually, the
mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general
of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz
took thecase to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison
for the full 16 years.
Some justices
were skeptical. “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your
state?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. The court system did finally let
Haley out of prison, after six years.
The case
reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running
strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and
public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be
considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s
behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism:
an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the
spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.
Traditionally,
candidates who have attracted strong evangelical support have in part
emphasized the need to lend a helping hand to the economically stressed and the
least fortunate among us. Such candidates include George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee
and Rick Santorum.
But Cruz’s
speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint
of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long
list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is
speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he
sets is jarring.
Cruz lays down
an atmosphere of apocalyptic fear. America is heading off “the cliff to oblivion.” After one Democratic debate he said, “We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every
day, and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most
vigorously.”
As the
Republican strategist Curt Anderson observed in Politico, there’s no
variation in Cruz’s rhetorical tone. As is the wont of inauthentic speakers,
everything is described as a maximum existential threat.
The fact is
this apocalyptic diagnosis is ridiculous. The Obama administration has done things
people like me strongly disagree with. But America is in better economic shape
than any other major nation on earth. Crime is down. Abortion rates are down.
Fourteen million new jobs have been created in five years.
Obama has
championed a liberal agenda, but he hasn’t made the country unrecognizable. In
2008, federal spending accounted for about 20.3 percent of gross domestic
product. In 2015, it accounted for about 20.9 percent.
But Cruz
manufactures an atmosphere of menace in which there is no room for compassion,
for moderation, for anything but dismantling and counterattack. And that is
what he offers. Cruz’s programmatic agenda, to the extent that it exists in his
speeches, is to destroy things: destroy the I.R.S., crush the “jackals” of the
E.P.A., end funding for Planned Parenthood, reverse I’s executive orders, make
the desert glow in Syria, destroy the Iran nuclear accord.
Some of these
positions I agree with, but the lack of any positive emphasis, any hint of
reform conservatism, any aid for the working class, or even any humane gesture
toward cooperation is striking.
Ted Cruz didn’t
come up with this hard, combative and gladiatorial campaign approach in
isolation. He’s always demonstrated a tendency to bend his position — whether
immigration or trade — to what suits him politically. This approach works
because in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges court decision on same-sex
marriage, many evangelicals feel they are being turned into pariahs in their
own nation.
Cruz exploits
and exaggerates that fear. But he reacts to Obergefell in exactly the
alienating and combative manner that is destined to further marginalize
evangelicals, that is guaranteed to bring out fear-driven reactions and not the
movement’s highest ideals.
The best
conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of
charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan
belligerence. He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of
proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz
conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than
the pluralistic American kind.
Evangelicals
and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when
they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism — when they have answered
hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They
have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal,
fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.
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