David Brooks is a conservative of the old type, and a Jew. He's got nothing against evangelicals per se (see last paragraph) and acknowledges their historical contributions to America (which are quite real, but I won't go into it here), but Cruz is something else again. "Tribal blood-and-soil European conservatism" is what brought us centuries of persecution of Christian orthodoxy against a whole variety of Christian sects, Christian persecution of Jews, and laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Serb against Croat was nothing new, and on and on in the blood-soaked European soil.
As is the wont of inauthentic speakers, everything is described as a maximum existential threat.
The fact is this apocalyptic diagnosis is ridiculous. The Obama administration has done things people like me strongly disagree with. But America is in better economic shape than any other major nation on earth. Crime is down. Abortion rates are down. Fourteen million new jobs have been created in five years.
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But Cruz manufactures an atmosphere of menace in which there is no room for compassion, for moderation, for anything but dismantling and counterattack. And that is what he offers. Cruz’s programmatic agenda, to the extent that it exists in his speeches, is to destroy things: destroy the I.R.S., crush the “jackals” of the E.P.A., end funding for Planned Parenthood, reverse Obama’s executive orders, make the desert glow in Syria, destroy the Iran nuclear accord.
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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.
Evangelicals and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism — when they have answered hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.
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