- Ted Cruz is cold, dark, calculating, intelligent, ideological to the fingertips — and therefore very troubling. I cannot shake the image of him trolling suffering Middle Eastern Christians for the sake of boosting his appeal to Evangelicals. I see him and an insult Churchill directed to a rival comes to mind: “He would make a drum out of the skin of his mother to sing his own praises.”
- And Cruz’s line about how he’s going to carpet bomb the Mideast to rid it of ISIS — really? You’re going to wipe out tens of thousands of innocent people for this cause? Cruz’s lines attempting to link ISIS’s success to the material decline of the US military was outrageous — as if ISIS succeeded because the US wasn’t spending enough money on defense. But it tells us that a Cruz administration will mean a windfall for defense contractors.
That doesn’t make the Reformation right, of course, but one does see how it was all but inevitable. Once the break happened, it proved impossible to contain the forces unleashed. “Sola scriptura” proved an impossible standard for building a new church, because various Reformation leaders had their own ideas about what the Bible “clearly” said.
.. At the same time, the rise of science, and the blind obstinacy of the Roman church in unnecessarily holding on to Aristotelian categories for understanding the natural world, created the false belief that religion is opposed to science.
.. He also makes it clear that the secular liberal narrative of uncomplicated Progress because of this is hopelessly naive. The Enlightenment tried to build a binding public ethic around Reason, but ran into the same problem that the Reformation did: who decides what counts as “reasonable”?
.. As Kierkegaard says, the trouble with life is it must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.
..Dostoevsky wrote that a person “cannot live without worshipping something.” Anyone who denies God must worship an idol—which is not necessarily a wooden or metal figure. In our time we have seen ideologies, groups, and leaders receive divine honors. People proud of their critical and discerning spirit have rejected Christ and bowed down before Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or some other secular savior.
.. Liberty, too, is likely to vanish; it becomes a heavy personal and social burden when no God justifies and sanctifies the individual in spite of all personal deficiencies and failures.
.. To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished? To what extent are those savings already severely depleted?
.. Even idealists whose good intentions for the human race are pure and strong are still vulnerable to fate because of the pride that causes them to act ambitiously and recklessly in history.
.. They identify as religious, even if they are backslidden. They support the traditional family, even if they come from and create broken homes. In other words, they are people who aspire to be more like social conservatives, though they lack the material and spiritual resources to become like them.
.. The crisis of authority and decay is by no means a top-down phenomenon. The institutions of American life — government, law, academia, religion, business, the market, the family and so forth — are in a crisis more severe than many of us have understood till now.
Rubio: Republicans can’t win without expanding beyound white base
The argument that there are simply not enough Republican voters today to elect a Republican president is one that is not usually uttered in public by Republican candidates. And it is essentially the opposite of the theory being put forward by Mr. Cruz, who says he can win by expanding the white vote.
.. “If an extra 10 million evangelical Christians show up on Election Day, we will not be up at 2 or 3 in the morning wondering what happened in Ohio or Florida; they’ll call the election at 8:37 p.m.,” Mr. Cruz told Glenn Beck in an interview last year.
Before Rise as Outsider, Ted Cruz Played Inside Role in 2000 Recount
The race installed Mr. Cruz as a creature of the Republican establishment — but also helped initiate his divorce from it. He made plenty of enemies among party operatives, according to interviews with over a dozen former colleagues, though for reasons that had little to do with ideology.
“I was far too cocky for my own good,” Mr. Cruz wrote in his book, “A Time for Truth,” explaining how the burned bridges probably cost him a desired job in Mr. Bush’s White House, “and that sometimes caused me to overstep the bounds of my appointed role.”
.. In fact, former colleagues say, the Ted Cruz of 2000 is entirely recognizable in the candidate now aspiring to the presidency himself, fusing hyper-intelligence, crackling ambition and a laundry list of impeccable insider credentials that he once ticked off more readily.
“He thought he should get the No. 1 policy job in the White House, and he was extremely ambitious,” said Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s former spokesman. “In Ted’s case in 2000, it backfired.”
Mr. Cruz had landed on the Bush campaign by way of Princeton, Harvard,a Supreme Court clerkship and a stint at a Washington law firm. If anyone was unaware of his résumé, Mr. Cruz was vigilant about correcting that.
The Undead Religious Right: Why I Cannot Support Ted Cruz
.. James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World argued that the Religious Right’s political approach has been shaped by a Nietzschean will to power, which aims to enforce its will through “legal and political means or to threaten to do so,” rather than persuading others or negotiating compromises.
.. For evangelicals,“injury—real or perceived—leads the aggrieved to accuse, blame, vilify, and then seek revenge on whom they see as responsible.”
.. Such an anti-politics of resentment, alienation, and disenfranchisement is at the heart of Trump’s appeal, even if the issues that he has been most vocal on are not traditional social conservative concerns.
.. In Cruz, conservative evangelicals have the embodied promise of a younger, chaos-light candidate who is firmly and securely one of their own—that is, one who shamelessly subordinates the religious life to the pursuit of political power.
.. Cruz’s unsavory use of the religious life for his own advancement, however, is the playbook that the Religious Right has written for itself, creating a vicious cycle that identifies the evangelical world with such shameless politicking.
.. Pandering is the litmus test for politically conservative religious ‘authenticity.’
.. But electing Falstaff or the politician most eager to imitate him would be an apocalyptic, anti-political judgment that our political order is beyond repair. That is hardly the ‘good news’ that the name ‘evangelical’ is meant to signify—but then, evangelicals are some of the only American’s remaining who use ‘apocalyptic’ non-metaphorically.
.. The only small consolation the Religious Right might have is that the exhausted, cynical anti-politics that Cruz has so effectively tapped into may at last finally die with a bang this cycle, and not with a whimper.