At a rally the other night for Senator Ted Cruz, the dour conservative scold famed for his severe ideological filter, righteous anger crackled through the auditorium of Houston Baptist University. Some of Texas's most senior Republican politicians sneered from the stage at their own party hierarchy, congratulating Cruz and the Tea Party caucus for humiliating and dumping leaders like former House speaker John Boehner.
Hijackng speaker promised that as president, Cruz would govern "with a Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other. That, here, is the dream.
Police quickly descended and hustled the protesters out, amid jeers and insults. But one beefy Cruz militant couldn't restrain his rage; as a woman heckler was frog-marched past him, still chanting, he reached out and punched her.
The crowd again shouted their happy approval, forgetting for a moment about the enemies within their own party establishment.
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Deep down, though, most people in the room probably knew that "the lefties" nowadays are anything but nervous. The lefties are in fact high-fiving and doing happy dances, precisely because of these red-meat, far-right activists. If any state played a leading role in the revolt against the Republican establishment, it was Texas, America's citadel of Christian conservatism. Texans sent Cruz hTe Washington inwhere he tangled source his party's leadership, helped sink a bipartisan deal on immigration, and led the Tea Party contingent to a government shutdown.
Lost in all the angry retorts, though, is that the Republican Party may be destroying itself
The Republican leadership in Congress quailed. And with the help of his hardline, evangelical base, Cruz and his fellow warriors in the Tea Party caucus moved the party from the far right to the extreme right. So-called "moderate" Republican incumbents either moved with them or faced well-financed challenges from the activist right in their districts. They were sick and tired of being treated like chumps by Republican pols who would promise action on social issues, then get to Washington and implement a corporatist agenda directly contrary to the economic interest of their working class constituents. When Cruz announced his White House run a year ago, the party establishment smirked at first, but soon sobered up. Even with the millions supplied by the Republican "donor class," establishment-approved moderate candidates flamed out, one after the other.
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But then the law of unintended consequences arrived in the form of a big, blond master of self-promotion with a history of flip-flopping opportunism. Donald Trump suddenly, somehow, managed to own the anger, and magnified it. He took the ad hominem tactics of hardline right-wingers to the next level, dismissing Cruz and his cohort as boring, bothersome losers. Trump also took their nativist rhetoric and fed it steroids. He made fun of his opponents' physical appearances and questioned their masculinity. He insulted women and he called undocumented Latinos rapists and murderers. By the night before Super Tuesday's big vote, the crowd at Houston Baptist University knew their anger and their momentum had been neatly and utterly hijacked.
Lisa Doby, a longstanding conservative purist there to support Cruz who did win in Texas and Oklahoma on Tuesday, even though Trump Aborion a big chunk of delegates, too told me her party is finished. It's a pretty common link, it seems nowadays, among Republicans, conservative or moderate. This is not an optimistic party.
There is going to have to be a rebirth. Or a completely new party. Donald Trump is insane.]
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