Better dead than Ted?

Over the past week or so, the members of the Republican establishment have confirmed what many observers had suspected for some time: they really don’t like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).  Indeed, they despise Cruz so much that they’d rather see their party nominate Republican-come-lately Donald Trump.

The stock explanation that most Republicans give for their loathing of Cruz is simple; they just don’t like the guy.  They think he’s smug, arrogant, and prickly.  Worse yet, they’re convinced that the electorate would dislike him too, meaning that his nomination would be an absolute disaster for the party, handing the Democrats not just the White House this fall, but a great many otherwise winnable down-ticket races as well.  Retired Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), a onetime prickly GOP nominee in his own right, put it this way last week, “I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress.  Nobody likes him . . . . If he’s the nominee, we’re going to have wholesale losses in Congress and state offices and governors and legislatures.”

{mosads}The problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t make much sense.  Obviously, if Cruz manages to collect enough votes to win the nomination, then somebody likes him, a plurality of Republican voters.  What Dole meant, of course, but didn’t want to say is that he doesn’t like Ted Cruz.  And his wife doesn’t like Ted Cruz.  And his former colleagues don’t like Ted Cruz.  Like Pauline Kael, Dole doesn’t know how Cruz could possibly win, since no one he knows can even stand the guy.

But is that true?  Does no one like Ted Cruz?  Or is there something else going on here?

Naturally, this is a complicated question, but one that can probably be summed up in just one word: ethanol.

You see, while the Republican establishment was going public with its preference for Trump, Cruz was taking heat for his opposition to ethanol subsidies.  Iowa’s Republican Gov. Terry Branstad lashed out at Cruz, declaring that he wanted somebody – anybody! – other than the Texas senator to win his state’s caucus.  Cruz, for his part, held firm in his opposition, asserting that Branstad’s hostility served as proof that he and he alone could truly threaten the underbelly of the political establishment.  And in this, Cruz was probably right.

Both Trump and Cruz have campaigned as “anti-establishment” candidates.  Both have claimed that they would aggravate and disrupt business as usual in Washington, turning the government back over “the people.”  Both, in short, have run as populists.  And, for the most part, both represent a serious threat to the partisan establishment.  But only one of the two has run as a conservative populist, which is to say that only one of them likely represents a threat not just to the partisan establishment, but to the massive federal government as well.

As a conservative, what Ted Cruz believes, but which Donald Trump does not, is that there is a third force operating in the political realm, one which transcends the two parties and which cares little about the worries of the people and their parties.  This third political force – call it what you will:  a corporatist confederacy, the administrative state, the collusion of big government and big business – is both enormous and well-entrenched, which means that it is largely resistant to partisan concerns and deeds.

Cruz believes that the government created and bequeathed to the nation by the Founders has been undermined and perverted by the administrative state.  Moreover, he believes that anyone who wishes to reform the republic and return it to its constitutional principles will have to fight more than one battle. He will have to fight the rest of the elected officials in Washington, whose power and prestige is tied directly to their offices.  He will have to fight a hostile and treacherous bureaucracy that is unwilling to give up any of its power and which is no longer bound by any pretense of professionalism or impartiality.  And then there is the media, the state governments and bureaucracies, and a host of millionaires and billionaires who have invested countless years and countless dollars in a federal racket designed and augmented to create rents, kill competition, and make the very rich even richer.  In short, he will have to fight against at least half of the country, and the most powerful half at that.

Donald Trump has done Republican voters an enormous favor, bringing vigor, daring, and populist energy to this campaign.  But his record suggests that he is unlikely to try to dismantle the Administrative State or ameliorate its deficiencies.  Cruz, by contrast, has specifically targeted corporatist Washington (and Des Moines) and has shown himself willing to suffer political barbs in the process.

A President Cruz might not have much luck dismantling the administrative state, but he’s sure to give it a try.  And that, in short, is why they hate him most of all.

Soukup is the vice president and publisher of The Political Forum, an “independent research provider” that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community, with an emphasis on economic, social, political, and geopolitical events that are likely to have an impact on the financial markets in the United States and abroad.  He is also the fellow in Culture and Economy at the Culture of Life Foundation.