What Does Ted Cruz Look Like?
On multiple occasions, I’ve sat down to drinks with politically aware friends, and the same question has come up: “What does Ted Cruz look like?” A hand goes up and makes a faint pointing gesture, and you can tell a grand pronouncement is supposed to follow, but then. . .nothing. Ted Cruz looks so tantalizingly like something we all know — some Jungian archetype or the star from an Eighties sitcom — that our sense of recognition needs something to latch onto, something to grasp and say, “This! This! This!“
The impulse is not terribly intellectual. Who or what someone looks like usually says little about their politics, and one would like to think that we as a nation have evolved enough that a brilliant thinker and communicator could resemble the afterthought slurry at the bottom of a busboy’s tray and still get elected president. But we know that’s wrong. We are still a shallow people, and we get shallow candidates. And if someone is going to spray platitudinous market-study-speak at us to get elected as the Fingerlican or Tastycrat candidate, then we will still want to figure out who they are by what they appear to be. Even more so with someone like Cruz.
Ted Cruz is an ideologue and a grandstander who has conflated loudness with leadership and hardline orthodoxy with sophistication, and the end result is a remarkably shallow candidate. He’s got an Ivy League education and has argued before the Supreme Court, and the latter at least is not something you get to do if you’re a moron. But Ted Cruz the candidate is not Ted Cruz the jurist. Any of us could reproduce his policy platform by grabbing bumper stickers of conservative catchphrases and planks from the last 25 years and assembling them in a rough order. For all his erudition, he sure seems to be using it wrong — like taking a state-of-the-art racquet and decades of practice and firing 150 mph serves into the net again and again.
Ted Cruz is called a Tea Party intellectual, and that’s fair in ways he probably doesn’t intend. He nimbly cites classical references, philosophy, Austrian economics and far more of America’s founding documents than your average politician, then draws boilerplate conservative conclusions unreflective of the process of study: America is objectively the greatest moral force on earth; government always creates bad outcomes; capitalism only rescues and elevates people; this country was founded by Jesus, with a gun. His name dropping great works is meant to suggest that the truths he espouses are more profound and unalienable for his having returned to them after immersing himself in the rest of the world’s knowledge. Instead, it seems like he just wasted his time. All that effort to end up where he started, with books in his library metaphorically no different from the ones in Gatsby’s. Or, to quote from A Fish Called Wanda:
“Apes don’t read philosophy.”
“Yes they do, Otto, they just don’t understand it.”
What Does Ted Cruz Look Like?, Page 1 of 3