A series of headlines:
Disgusting.
This post is in: Republican Venality, Sociopaths
This post is in: Cruz-ifiction, Election 2016, Excellent Links, Republican Venality, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Flash Mob of Hate
He gets a little too lit’ry in spots, but professor of philosophy Clancy Martin has an excellent TNR essay on “the virtues of being Ted Cruz”:
… 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.
But I only realized this after following Ted Cruz for a month or two. 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…
At 4:30 p.m. on the eve of the caucus in Marion, Iowa, a side door opened to the assembly room of Grace Baptist Church, and Ted Cruz entered along with a chunky bodyguard and his thirty or so of his team members in their signature dark navy blue jeans. Cruz stood quietly as the pastor introduced him. He wore a blue zippered sweater over a button-down shirt, brown leather work boots, and new-looking Levi’s jeans. A few people in the first pew, near the door where Cruz stood, rose to shake his hand. Some handed him campaign posters to autograph. One parishioner passed up a leather-bound Bible and Cruz took time to write something long in the front pages. A second Bible was handed to Cruz, who again paused to write something thoughtful. More posters and more Bibles were passed up, and Cruz didn’t have time to write a message in each Bible, so he started simply signing them on the page that was held open for him: on the fly page, where a book’s author would sign…
Cruz took the stage. In the friendly, intimate atmosphere of the small church, he was comfortable. I’d been to many Ted Cruz events in the past couple of months, and it was the only time I’d seen him genuinely at ease. He seemed happy and not at all exhausted from the grueling schedule of his 99-county Iowa tour. Though rested, his face had an unfortunate lizard quality to it—adult Ted Cruz can never overcome the Komodo dragon quality of his skin and chin—but he wasn’t repellent. He spoke with the almost squeaky register he adopts in a religious setting, waving his arms evangelically when appealing to Christian scripture and stabbing his finger down in his debater’s manner when making a political promise. He didn’t have the chip-on-my-shoulder-but-quick-on-my-toes expression that he wears during televised debates, and he was neither obsequious nor smarmy, two typical Cruz styles I’d come to expect since following him.
“When I’m president you can bet there’s going to be some changes in Washington! On day one in the Oval Office we’re going to prosecute every member of Planned Parenthood who has committed criminal acts!”
“Yes!” the husband of the woman in the tall leather boots shouted, pumping his fist in the air and rising to his feet…
“If we get a president who appoints a left-wing judge…” Cruz said.
“Stone him!” came a voice from the crowd.
“I’m a true conservative!” Cruz shouted. Suddenly I understood something about Ted Cruz and his followers that I hadn’t clicked into before: The proof of Cruz’s merit, as a candidate, was that he he ought to be at the bottom. The proof of being “a true conservative” is that everyone is against him. 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. For Nietzsche, this meant the value of being wealthy would be reversed into the virtue of being poor; the value of being proud would be upended by the virtue of humility; the celebration of the body would be transvalued into the virtue of sexual restraint. Having power, on this account, would mark the powerful as morally blameworthy; being powerless, by contrast, was a guarantee of righteousness…. 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.
It was only natural, indeed desirable that the media and the entire Republican Party had consistently fought against Ted Cruz, and he against them: He represents morality, which is the opposite of everyone at work in Washington today, everything we see in our degenerate age. But you, the voter, know what the truth is and so does God. That’s why Ted is winning against all odds. You feel resentment about the way this country is headed? So you should! Because the values represented by our leaders—even the values represented by the Republican Party—are the opposite of your values. You feel excluded, you feel ignored? You feel bullied, even hated? So do I!…
***********
At the Iowa fairgrounds, there was a run-up of speakers that felt cobbled together: Cruz’s Iowa campaign manager, the nephew of a member of Duck Dynasty, anti-immigration Congressman Steve King, and Heidi Cruz, enjoining us with a wife’s earnest but obviously furtive, unconvinced, and unconvincing optimism to “fall in love with Ted, like I did.”
Then Glenn Beck appeared—the crowd had been whispering he might be coming—and there was a widespread shift of disorientation in the room. Everyone went wild…
Nietzsche argued in Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist that the greatest creative moment in Christianity—perhaps even the greatest creative moment in the history of human thought—was when the priest class realized that their power could come from celebrating the powerlessness of the mob. Misery loves company. Aesop’s fox and the sour grapes. Thanks to the internet and its overnight millionaires and twentysomething billionaires, the cresting of American luxury, the likes of which has never been seen before in human history, there are a lot of very sweet looking grapes being dangled in front of the electorate that are just out of reach.
There’s an unsurprising and familiar symmetry between love and hate, and Beck exploited it effortlessly. When we love or hate, we establish ourselves as equals. We neither revere nor despise, we neither worship nor condescend. For people like us, for the good honest folk in Iowa, for Christians who care about the way this country has gone so far astray, Beck explained, Cruz was one of them. And importantly, 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…
This post is in: Election 2016, Excellent Links, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Republicans in Disarray!
Nothing particularly new, but Frank Rich has a lovely Monday morning pick-me-up in NYMag – “Can we please retire the notion that Donald Trump is hijacking someone else’s party?”:
… The Republican Elites. The Establishment. The Party Elders. The Donor Class. The Mainstream. The Moderates. Whatever you choose to call them, they, at least, could be counted on to toss the party-crashing bully out.
To say it didn’t turn out that way would be one of the great understatements of American political history. Even now, many Republican elites, hedging their bets and putting any principles in escrow, have yet to meaningfully condemn Trump. McCain says he would support him if he gets his party’s nomination. The Establishment campaign guru who figured the Trump problem would solve itself moved on to anti-Trump advocacy and is now seeking to unify the party behind Trump, waving the same white flag of surrender as Chris Christie. Every major party leader — Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Reince Priebus, Kevin McCarthy — has followed McCain’s example and vowed to line up behind whoever leads the ticket, Trump included. Even after the recurrent violence at Trump rallies boiled over into chaos in Chicago, none of his surviving presidential rivals would disown their own pledges to support him in November. Trump is not Hitler, but those who think he is, from Glenn Beck to Louis C.K., should note that his Vichy regime is already in place in Washington, D.C.
Since last summer, Trump, sometimes in unwitting tandem with Bernie Sanders, has embarrassed almost the entire American political ecosystem — pollsters, pundits, veteran political operatives and the talking heads who parrot their wisdom, focus-group entrepreneurs, super-pac strategists, number-crunching poll analysts at FiveThirtyEight and its imitators. But of all the emperors whom Trump has revealed to have few or no clothes, none have been more conspicuous or consequential than the GOP elites. He has smashed the illusion, one I harbored as much as anyone, that there’s still some center-right GOP Establishment that could restore old-school Republican order if the crazies took over the asylum…
Did the pillars of the Establishment fail to turn back the Trump insurgency because they have no balls? Because they have no credibility? Because they have too little support from voters in their own party? Because they don’t even know who those voters are or how to speak their language? To some degree, all these explanations are true. Though the Republican Establishment is routinely referenced as a potential firewall in almost every media consideration of Trump’s unexpected rise, it increasingly looks like a myth, a rhetorical device, or, at best, a Potemkin village. It has little power to do anything beyond tardily raising stop-Trump money that it spends neither wisely nor well and generating an endless torrent of anti-Trump sermons for publications that most Trump voters don’t read. The Establishment’s prize creation, Marco Rubio — a bot candidate programmed with patriotic Reaganisms, unreconstructed Bush-Cheney foreign-policy truculence, a slick television vibe, and a dash of ethnicity — was the biggest product flop to be marketed by America’s Fortune 500 stratum since New Coke…
For all the Republican talk about “personal responsibility,” the party’s leaders have worked overtime to escape any responsibility for fanning the swamp fevers that produced Trump: They instead blame him on the same bogeymen they blame everything on — Obama and the news media. What GOP elites can’t escape is the sinking feeling that a majority of Republican voters are looking for a president who will repudiate them and, implicitly, their class. Trump refuses to kowtow to the Establishment—and it is precisely that defiance, as articulated in his ridicule of Romney and Jeb Bush and Megyn Kelly and Little Marco, that endears him to Republican voters and some Democrats as well. The so-called battle for the “soul” of the Republican Party is a battle over power, not ideology. Trump has convinced millions of Americans that he will take away the power from the pinheads on high and return it to people below who feel (not wrongly) that they’ve gotten a raw deal. It’s the classic populist pitch, and it will not end well for those who invest their faith in Trump. He cares about no one but himself and would reward his own class with extravagant tax cuts like any Republican president. But the elites, who represent the problem, have lost any standing that might allow them to pretend to be part of the solution…
***********
Apart from the schadenfreude of enjoying a good rant over breakfast, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?
Monday Morning Open Thread: The GOP’s Nekkid ‘Establishment’ EmperorsPost + Comments (148)
This post is in: Cruz-ifiction, Election 2016, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Assholes, Flash Mob of Hate
Donald Trump announces he wants all protesters at his rallies arrested. An "arrest mark" will "ruin the rest of their lives," he says.
— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) March 13, 2016
sure, maybe a little wrist tattoo while he's at it. https://t.co/xBltU0tiTm
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) March 13, 2016
Meanwhile, per the NYTimes:
BALLWIN, Mo. — A brief accounting of Senator Ted Cruz’s arguments against Donald J. Trump on Friday evening:
— He “affirmatively encourages violence.”
— He “disrespects the voters.”
— His campaign is “facing allegations of physical violence” against a reporter.
— He has created an environment that all but ensures future clashes.
And so, Mr. Cruz was asked on Saturday morning, can you still support Mr. Trump if he is the Republican nominee?
“My answer is the same: I committed at the outset,” Mr. Cruz told reporters, before a rally inside a high school gymnasium here. “I will support the Republican nominee, whoever it is.”…
On Saturday, when asked again about Chicago, Mr. Cruz began by criticizing “protesters that resort to violence” in a bid to “silence speech that they don’t like.”…
Asked again to explain the prospect of eventually supporting Mr. Trump anyway, Mr. Cruz walked away to begin his rally.
Yeah, Cruz would accept Trump’s VP offer in a heartbeat. A racing, accelerated heartbeat:
Ted Cruz in Missouri, via my colleague @katiezez pic.twitter.com/ilasK48ftt
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) March 12, 2016
Woman at Cruz rally yells: "Obama's the enemy within.
Cruz: he will soon be the enemy without— Katie Zezima (@katiezez) March 12, 2016
Open Thread: Not Much Daylight Between Trump & CruzPost + Comments (117)
by Betty Cracker| 259 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Politics, Religious Nuts 2, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Republicans in Disarray!, Assholes, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
In the future, the fatuous neocon twits who make a living stoking working class racial resentments and ginning up religious hysteria in the service of lower corporate taxes and industrial deregulation will probably be called “Romney Republicans.” A moniker will be required to divide “respectable” Republicans from the Trumpean rabble, and maybe they’ll settle on that name.
But all post-Eisenhower Republicans consciously exploited dangerous racial and social fault lines so they could loot the national treasury on behalf of the wealthy and connected. There’s nothing respectable about using that cheap bit of misdirection. They couldn’t sell bullshit like “trickle-down economics” on its non-existent merits, so they sold downscale white folks an endless line of ooga-booga instead.
But now Trump is telling the rubes they can have dessert without eating their vegetables, and he’s expanded the menu to include new villains, such as job-offshorers and lying establishment politicians. And why would anyone gnash down “profits for me and parsimony for thee” when they can skip directly to dessert and openly (and literally) bash minorities, gays, uppity women, Muslims, etc., while having their economic pain validated?
Stung by Trump’s success in separating them from their meal tickets, some in the Romney wing are unsparing in their criticism of a once-prized constituent segment. Via valued commenter Arm the Homeless, here’s a sample of the primal scream of one such specimen, The National Review’s Kevin Williamson:
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. If you want to live, get out of Garbutt [a blue-collar town in New York].
I think “the whelping of human children” is my favorite line. I’m trying (and failing) to recall a time when a prominent conservative writer expressed that level of contempt for fellow white Republicans. It doesn’t seem like a good strategy. Maybe smarter neo-cons will try to co-opt Trump. For all his railing about trade and theatrical rage at companies that offshore jobs, Trump’s tax plan and healthcare schemes are hardly distinguishable from those of, say, Paul Ryan.
I don’t rule out the possibility that a racist demagogue like Trump could win the presidency, but, in the absence of a cataclysmic event like a Paris-style terror attack or sharp economic downturn between now and November, I think it’s unlikely. Still, now that the power of Trumpism has been demonstrated at scale, it won’t go away. Romney Republicans will have to come up with a better answer than “move,” or their wind-up Marcos will keep losing to the Trumps. And that won’t be good for business.
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Post-racial America, Republican Venality
You know what also struck me about Maddow’s timeline clips? The longer he’s on the trail, the hoarser and puffier and more exhausted Trump looks. For all his braggadocio, Trump doesn’t look like a well man.
For further discussion:
I know it wasn't by design, but well meaning people have given Trump the perfect narrative, walked into his trap. Now he gets to play victim
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) March 12, 2016
Shutting down a rally is the weakest, most soft of fake "victories" when it also ups Trump's ratings. His ratings give him all his power.
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) March 12, 2016
The only way to destroy Trump's power – and it IS power – is to destroy his news ratings. Only way to do that is to put on a better show.
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) March 12, 2016
On Donald Trump (Not) Appearing in ChicagoPost + Comments (300)
This post is in: Election 2016, Hillary Clinton 2016, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republican Venality, Republicans in Disarray!
As it turns out, most Americans are smarter than the average Trump voter https://t.co/PBWLfdqlop
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) March 9, 2016
Clinton beats Trump on all of Trump's best issues pic.twitter.com/ddasiFu5pC
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) March 9, 2016
While on the other side of the argument…
Is Cruz… also excusing violence at Trump rallies on the grounds that people are really mad at Obama?
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) March 11, 2016
Cruz: You can't just yell at enemies. You need yelling and violence
— Daniel Larison (@DanielLarison) March 11, 2016
Trump: Gosh, I sure hope I haven't encouraged violence!
Tapper: Here are your quotes doing exactly that.
Trump: Those protesters were bad!
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) March 11, 2016
Also — and this really can't be stressed enough — Trump called the Tiananmen Square protests a "riot." https://t.co/lk3kCLEFOb
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) March 11, 2016
I’m gonna quote one of those candidates, too: “We win. They lose. That’s my strategy.”
***********
Apart from the running #facepalm tally, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up a long ragged week?