Ted Cruz can’t be hashtagged away

Ted Cruz is not a joke. He’s not a clown. He’s not going to laughed, snarked, Daily Showed, or hashtagged away. He’s a serious and dangerous demagogue. He may never be President but he’s trouble. He makes trouble. He likes making trouble. That’s his path to power.

You probably recall how back in December Cruz’s troublemaking prevented the Senate from adjourning for the holidays when it should have and created an unlooked for opportunity for the Democrats. Cruz and fellow Republican Mike Lee of Utah wanted to introduce some symbolic gesture against the President’s plan to halt deportations of millions of immigrants. Cruz loves immigrants because they’re so much fun to hate on. The move, however, gave Harry Reid and the Democrats time to confirm a whole batch of the President’s nominees for various offices in a rush, including now---thanks to Cruz---Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a monster in the eyes of the NRA and other Right Wing pressure groups because he has the temerity to point out that guns kill people and that’s bad for their health.  Angry Conservatives howled and smug Democrats snarked up one side of the internet and down the other. Ted Cruz Shoots Self in Foot, Declares Victory was the headline on a post by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Cute, but he hadn’t shot himself in the foot. He’d stabbed his fellow Republicans in the back. But he’d done himself a favor. Something he’s very good at, along with making trouble.

In fact, like I said, making trouble is how he does himself favors.

Cruz isn’t running for President. Not in the sense that he’s running with the expectation of winning even the nomination. He’s running to get ratified a position he already holds, leader of the most angry, frightened, and hate-filled and fueled segment of the Republican’s angry, frightened, and hate-filled and –fueled base. And they don’t care about the fallout of any trouble Cruz makes. They’re just happy to see him making trouble.

Trouble for the President. And trouble for the Republican Party leadership whom they loathe and despises as much as any liberals and for many of the same reasons.

A thing to keep in mind about the Republican Right. They’re often right about what’s wrong with the country. They’re just almost always wrong about whom to blame and how to fix it.

At any rate, they love Cruz’s troublemaking.

They might not like it that what Cruz did got Murthy confirmed. Well, they like it in that it gives them something else to be angry and resentful about. They’re anger and resentment junkies and the need a regular fix. And it allows them to feel persecuted and indulge their paranoia---Obama’s coming for our guns! But what they really like, what they love, is that Cruz is in the Senate doing his utmost to stop any more of the ravening and pestilential hordes from crossing the borders and to get the hordes already here chased back. Surgeon Generals come and go, but once you let THEM in, THEY’RE here to stay!

So after he announced he was running for President---first candidate officially in the race---my online reading filled with laughter and snide-ery at how Cruz had somehow showed himself up for a fool again. He’d demonstrated incompetence in using social media. What a joke! What a clown! And this boob thinks he can be President?

Showed himself up for a fool? In whose eyes? Nobody who’s at all likely to vote for him in the primaries or who will turn out enthusiastically to vote for his re-election to Senate in 2018. In their eyes, Cruz is a hero.

The boob thinks he can President? No. Not in 2016. He thinks he can influence whichever candidate the Republicans run for President. He thinks he can write whole planks of the Party platform. He might think he can be the nominee for Vice-President. But that would be gravy. He doesn’t need that to position himself for a strong run in 2020. What he knows, though, is that he’s doing what he needs to do to make himself to the Republican Right what Elizabeth Warren is to the Democratic Left. The champion and voice of the hardcore base in the Senate. It doesn’t matter that he’s not getting anything of substance done. It matters that he’s making trouble on their behalf.

By the way, it’s the same for many of Warren’s most ardent fans. It’s enough for them that she’s causing trouble on their behalf. That’s what they want her to do in the run for President they’re trying to force her into. That running for President would get in the way of her being able to make trouble in the Senate and that if she somehow won the nomination and then was elected President she wouldn’t be as able to make as much trouble as she is in the Senate doesn’t seem to occur to them. They want her to make trouble now for trouble’s sake. To them making trouble is an accomplishment. And that’s how it is for Cruz’s supporters. What they really want is a spokesman for their rage.

Gail Collins used her op-ed column in the Times today to give an interactive quiz on Cruz that makes fun of Cruz generally and of his disingenuous portrayal of himself as a man of the people who came up the hard way in life particularly. It’s a funny piece. It does nothing but make liberals feel superior.

Cruz’s supporters don’t read the New York Times. They don’t need to. They know it’s a pack of lies. To them, the fact that a Times columnist is making fun of their hero is more proof he’s doing the right things. They don’t care that his resume seems to show he’s not really one of them. His troublemaking is all they need to know whose side he’s on.

Besides, they don’t want their leaders to be one of them. They want their leaders to assure them they are among the elect. Scott Brown’s wearing a barn coat and driving a pickup wasn’t done to show he’s a regular working class Joe. It was done to show that working class Joes who drive pickups and wear Carhart jackets and overalls to work are like Scott Brown, better than their neighbors. It’s snob appeal by stealth. It doesn’t signify that Ted Cruz didn’t really come up the hard way. It signifies that having come up the hard way doesn’t disqualify you from being in the same league as Ted Cruz,

You still get to lord it over those others and boss and bully them to your heart’s content.

It’s your country, after all.

Among the many important lessons to be gleaned from Rick Perlstein’s Invisible Bridge is not to underestimate the Right’s chosen heroes. Before he became President and for a long time after and still to many incredulous and self-deluded liberals today Ronald Reagan was and is a clown and a joke. As late as 1972, nobody in the know was taking Reagan seriously as a possible future contender for the nomination, never mind President. But Reagan was doing what he had to do, making himself the champion and voice of the angry, frightened, hate-filled and –fueled Republican Right.

Another lesson is that anger, fear, and hate are infectious.

Democrats take comfort in demographic trends that seem to show the Republican Party is on its way to irrelevance. The party’s base is too old, too white, too reactionary to sustain itself into the future.

In the 70s, polls showed the country was generally liberal.

Things flipped all at once.

The infection took hold. We’ve been trying to fight it off ever since.

Ted Cruz is the opposite of a cure. He’s an agent of re-infection.

It’s not funny.

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Comments

[JD]

Can't say I agree with you about Senator Warren. I think she's trying to do good in the Senate, not making trouble. I don't want her to run for President because she's better positioned where she is.

[Davis X. Machina]

Things flipped all at once

What's instructive is to look at how things flipped.

Angry and engaged minorities roll apathetic, loosely-affiliated majorities all the time in politics. It's probably the rule and not the exception.

Look at Congress....

[Emigrant Aid Society]

We mock our enemies at our peril.

A baker's dozen of years ago I spent a good deal of time with my friends in the left blogosphere, making silly jokes and cutting remarks at the expense of GWB. It seemed at the time like good clean fun and a harmless community building exercise, but upon reflection I suspect that we might have been able to beat him in 2004 if we had been more diligent about laying down the prerequisites for electoral victory. We did, after all, flatter ourselves that with the internet we were going to change the world.

Humor can be liberating, but when all you do is mock you run the risk of mistaking your jokes for reality.

[Racer X]

Great article. Warren does need to stay in the Senate. Cruz will pull the GOP further to the right. However despite the worship from the right - the truth is that Reagan was a joke and a clown and very worthy of his title of "Worst American Ever.