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The Atlantic: Ted Cruz, Leninist
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/ted-cruz-leninist/280074/Suppose you thought that the Republican coalition is fracturing, that traditional Republican leadership can no longer hold the party together, and that the leadership is too willing to capitulate to its political opponents on the left.
Suppose you are also convinced that Obamacare will be a total disaster. Once in place, constituencies will form that will make difficult to repeal, yet it will make most ordinary Americans deeply unhappy. Obamacare will be the big-government equivalent of crystal meth: an addictive substance that destroys your health. When the public finally realizes, it will abandon the Democrats in droves and look for an alternative.
If you think both these things are true, then what Ted Cruz is doing makes some sense. Cruz wants to take over the Republican Party. He could try to organize the Tea Party as a third party, but that is a risky proposition, and it could easily fail. Representational systems like the one we have in the United States, which lack proportional representation, are generally unkind to third parties. It's true that the Whig Party fell apart in the early 1850s and was succeeded by the Republican Party, but since that time no third party has won a majority of either house of Congress or the presidency.
So the prudent move is to take over the existing GOP's operations and transform it in the image of the Tea Party, with the goal of becoming the dominant party once again. That is why Cruz is attacking his fellow Republicans for being weak-kneed and insufficiently devoted to the conservative cause, rather than doing what you would think a hard-right politician should be doing -- attacking liberals and Democrats. He is deliberately fracturing the Republican Party so he can take hold of the largest piece of it.
Suppose you are also convinced that Obamacare will be a total disaster. Once in place, constituencies will form that will make difficult to repeal, yet it will make most ordinary Americans deeply unhappy. Obamacare will be the big-government equivalent of crystal meth: an addictive substance that destroys your health. When the public finally realizes, it will abandon the Democrats in droves and look for an alternative.
If you think both these things are true, then what Ted Cruz is doing makes some sense. Cruz wants to take over the Republican Party. He could try to organize the Tea Party as a third party, but that is a risky proposition, and it could easily fail. Representational systems like the one we have in the United States, which lack proportional representation, are generally unkind to third parties. It's true that the Whig Party fell apart in the early 1850s and was succeeded by the Republican Party, but since that time no third party has won a majority of either house of Congress or the presidency.
So the prudent move is to take over the existing GOP's operations and transform it in the image of the Tea Party, with the goal of becoming the dominant party once again. That is why Cruz is attacking his fellow Republicans for being weak-kneed and insufficiently devoted to the conservative cause, rather than doing what you would think a hard-right politician should be doing -- attacking liberals and Democrats. He is deliberately fracturing the Republican Party so he can take hold of the largest piece of it.
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