This past week witnessed a deployment of firepower not seen since the bombardment of the Normandy coast prior to D-Day. I am talking, of course, about the national scourging of Ted Cruz that followed exposure of his Margaritaville excursion to sunny Cancun, Mexico, in the midst of a deeply destructive Texas deep freeze. Cruz is a long-loathed politician, and his enactment of an updated “let them eat cake” lifestyle deserves all the mockery and disdain it’s received.
But while hitting Cruz for his repugnant abdication of responsibility and deranged lies about why he was making the trip (he infamously sought to blame his daughters) is good for the cause of holding our political leaders accountable, the best commentary I’ve seen links his southern sojourn to the wider failure of an anti-government mindset that finds its home in the Republican Party. Jared Yates Sexton has written the best of the pieces I’ve seen, in which he notes that the disaster that befell Texas “is the result of decades of vilification of government and shared society, a building rejection of basic human needs and the very process by which we are supposed to come together, resolve our differences, decide on courses of action, and somehow, someway make this reality better.” In Cruz’s behavior, he sees a politician of a piece with this degraded political world, who “is not senator to help people, he’s senator to build his brand and find exposure.” By Cruz’s own terms, his behavior is normal:
When we look at Cruz in disgust and see him as a shuffling pariah, what we see is the literal embodiment of a system that has been corrupted and repositioned away from the pursuit of the public good and a festering, poisonous infection.
[. . .] What Ted Cruz did wrong was to act authentically.
I think Sexton is correct about how Cruz views his position — he clearly did not see his responsibility in this moment of crisis as exerting his political powers on behalf of his constituents. Instead, what prevailed was an attitude of indifference rooted in his belief that nothing in particular was wrong, just as he had seen nothing wrong during Texas Republicans’ long war on government and social goods, or for that matter in the Trump-inspired insurrection on January 6th. To act as if the results of GOP mismanagement constituted a crisis would be to admit the existence of that crisis and the failures of governance that made it possible. Cruz’s ability to deny the severity of what had happened, to not anticipate the political blowback to his callous vacationing, is emblematic of an entire political party that is unable to change course, that cannot admit its catastrophic errors: a party that’s truly on Cruz control.