Trump’s confidence is considerable, but it involves peddling fear—is inseparable from fear—and the other candidates are palpably scared of him.
.. Obama tried, in his speech, to illustrate something that has, so far, eluded the candidates running to succeed him: how to talk back to Donald Trump without sounding petty, scared, resentful, or otherwise miserable.
The Brutalism of Ted Cruz
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.
.. 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.
.. 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.
.. It became clear then, why right-wing conservative Republicans felt the need to explicitly add the adjective to their name – it certainly is not inherent in it. In fact, the phrase is oxymoronic. Imagine having to say “compassionate liberalism” – redundant.
.. Republicans are going to be faced with a choice—do they want their party’s message carried by a member of the Vengeance-is-Mine wing? It could win, in an election where angry sells and people may be looking for change, and therefore might be willing to throw the dice. But, I don’t think even most of the party, much less the rest of the country, would be especially happy with the results. You can only rule with that type of an approach, you can’t govern. The American people will not like rulers.
.. I keep thinking of Wiesel’s concentration camp character’s statement in Night that Hitler is the only one he trusts, because he is the only one who didn’t lie to the Jews.
.. And that platform is built exclusively on appeals to the very basest of human instincts: greed, selfishness, fear, prejudice, resentment, bigotry, ignorance, and aggression. Cruz and Trump merely express in plainer language what all the GOP candidates for president espouse as policy positions.
.. In advertising, the basic wisdom used to be: “sex sells.” Among conservatives, the basic wisdom is: “fear sells.”
Fearful people do not practice compassion and mercy.
.. As an evangelical, I am appalled by how most evangelicals act politically. Our faith never calls for us to use the force of government to impose our faith on others. We are to do it by example and win people over. We are to be the salt of the earth, not the gunpowder. We are to be a light unto the world, not a nuclear blast.
Behind Saudi Arabia’s bluster is a country that feels under grave threat
Yet condemnation without understanding is futile. It is not enough to say that this is simply the result of the ascendancy of a new set of inexperienced senior princes. The reasons for Saudi – and Iranian – actions are structural.
.. Consider the context. Saudi Arabia feels with good reason more threatened than at any time in its modern history, at least since the subversive Kulturkampf of the 1950s and 1960s from Nasser’s Egypt.
This stems from five sources: first, the challenge of Sunni and largely Salafi jihadism; second, the sustained ideological and material challenge of the Islamic Republic of Iran; third, the collapse of large parts of the Middle East state system following the Arab spring; fourth, a sharp fall in global energy prices; and fifth, a sense that historical alliances – notably but not only with the United States – are fraying.
.. The Saudis liked it when pragmatists such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami became president in Iran. But experience confirmed that security policy remained in the hands of hardliners. And the apocalyptic populism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brought back the threat of an exported revolution.
.. Now the Saudis face a period of sustained low energy prices at a time when the costs of a newly interventionist and expeditionary foreign policy are rising dramatically and when the need to restructure the economy to create perhaps an extra four million new jobs by 2020 has become urgent.
.. To Iran it was: Saudi citizens owe loyalty in tribal fashion to their king, not to foreign religious leaders or to some ideal of transnational Islamism, and we shall not tolerate interference.
.. If we think that a large part of the reason for states lashing out is the fear in which they exist, then doing something to address that fear is a large part of the answer. In this case, that principally demands showing that we mean to enforce the Iranian nuclear deal rigorously – not hold off on additional measures against provocative missile testing (for instance)
Republicans Turn Up Heat in Iowa, Setting Aside Good for Bad and Ugly
“When America needed a bold plan of action from our commander in chief, we instead got a lecture on love, tolerance, and gun control designed to please the talking heads at MSNBC,” Mr. Rubio said. “The result of all of this is that people are afraid. And they have every right to be.”
.. He then offered his own diagnosis: “The reason why is, in 2008 we elected as president in America someone who wasn’t interested in simply fixing the problems in America. We elected someone as president in 2008 that wanted to fundamentally change America.”