Bad Choices, Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
And yet on this issue Cruz seems in line with today’s Republican Party, beginning with Donald Trump, its front-runner in the Presidential race. With broadcast and social media still filled with images of the bombing victims at the airport and in a subway station in Brussels, Trump and Cruz each launched a push for votes in the next round of primaries and, it seemed, for the low ground in the fight against terrorism.Already the GOP is being lumped in, wrongly, dishonestly, with Trump's ideology, and Ted Cruz' political opportunist instincts are not helping matters. Now, granted, it doesn't take much to send members of the media straight to the fainting couch where the GOP is concerned. But, while there were issues with the wording of Cruz' police in neighborhoods idea (patrol and secure) the overreaching idea that keeping Muslim communities engaged is a strong one.
In his quieter moments Cruz' would undoubtedly like to have that comment back. Say what you want about the man, he's hardly an authoritarian thug whose just waiting for a chance to place the Constitution in a paper shredder like Ms. Davidson is alleging here.
The problem is Trump.
Because Trump comes out with his typical answers which make one realize that they don't have either the correct decoder ring, or a level of ignorance needed to decipher them. "Belgium is no longer Belgium" is not only shallow, it's rote, silly, and a juvenile way of looking at a very real, very complex problem. As Kevin D. Williamson wrote in the link at the top, Trump honestly believes that there are simple solutions to complex problems that only he has the guts to implement.
Trump has also brought into the light a rather seedy underbelly of the GOP. Namely, Nationalist Whites who feel that the country is passing them by. They have been all but abandoned by the Democrats, have found a home with the GOP, and have found a leader in the Bronzed Ego. That they are the ugly counterpoint to the ugly result of decades of racial identity politics played by the Democratic Party (and, to be fair, responded to by Republicans) is never mentioned. Nor is it mentioned that groups such as this exist in pretty much every racial category.
This is not an attempt at moral relevance, but a reminder that both parties have fostered an awful lot of hate since they both bungled and mangled the civil rights debate. Instead of creating freedom and equality, both parties came together and crafted a framework for hate and recrimination that continues today. The legislation and good intent of the '60s created Donald Trump, Angry White Blue Collar Voters, Black Lives Matter, LaRaZa and pretty much every other modern racial problem you can think of.
Trump understands this, and he's using it to his advantage in the same way that Her Highness understands it, and is using it, on the Democratic side. The difference is, of course, that the media doesn't care about the angst and hate when it comes from the left, it's only an issue from the right.
For the Democrats, this will not be a problem until they run out of other people's stuff to promise to the groups they are keeping on the string. For the GOP however, it's cracked the party and appears to be threatening to drive what's left of it off a cliff. In many ways, the GOP is now paying for it's utter lack of anything close to a minority message stemming back to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
The problem with Trump is that he has revealed the GOP to, in part, still be the party of the Angry Caucasian Man. It's something they tried to move past with candidates such as Rubio and (to a lesser extent) Cruz, but seem to be unable to shake. Of course, the Wall Street arm of the GOP wanted Jeb(?) Bush and look where that got them?
The problem with Trump is that him being popular among a plurality of GOP voters is painting every conservative with the same nasty brush. Yes, a lot of this painting is being done by intellectually dishonest people, but that doesn't matter to the unquestioning majority of the electorate who are reading their work.
The problem with Trump is that the GOP is associated with him at all.
