Can Ted Cruz Grovel His Way To The Presidency?
Not while Tucker Carlson is the GOP’s kingmaker
There’s a character trope that runs through English comic fiction: the ambitious groveller. The two most memorable examples of the species are Uriah Heep, in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, and Kenneth Widmerpool, in Anthony Powell’s 12-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. Ambitious grovellers like Heep and Widermerpool combine the seemingly contrary tendencies of self-abasement and the will to power. They actively court humiliation and emphasize their lowly, humble position as a way to worm their way into positions of trust and authority.
It was Ross Douthat, I think, who first noticed that Ted Cruz was “American conservatism’s own Kenneth Widmerpool.” Writing in The New York Times in 2016, Douthat gave a crisp account of Widmerpool:
A dogged, charmless, unembarrassed striver, Widmerpool begins Powell’s novels as a figure of mockery for his upper-class schoolmates. But over the course of the books he ascends past them — to power, influence, a peerage — through a mix of ruthless effort, ideological flexibility, and calculated kissing-up.
Enduring all manner of humiliations, bouncing back from every setback, tacking right and left with the times, he embodies the triumph of raw ambition over aristocratic rules of order.
The Widermerpool-Cruz analogy became even more fitting later that year; in the 2016 Republican primaries, Donald Trump completely humiliated Cruz in the most painful and personal ways possible, not just through electoral victory but also nasty personal attacks aimed at Cruz’s loved ones (suggesting that Cruz’s father helped assassinate John F. Kennedy and that Cruz’s wife was ugly). In response Cruz not only endorsed Trump but really became one of his most loyal lap-dogs.
Cruz’s latest exercise in self-degradation involves apologizing on Tucker Carlson’s show. For over a year, Cruz has repeatedly called the January 6 riot a terrorist attack. This was an affront to Carlson for very specific ideological reasons. As Greg Sargent of The Washington Post notes, Carlson frequently calls Black Lives Matter and Antifa terrorists but insists that right-wing political violence isn’t terrorism. Carlson’s project is to redefine the January 6 riot as a legitimate political protest and preserve using the concept of terrorism as a political cudgle with which to rhetorically clobber his ideolocial opponents.
In furtherance of this goal, Carlson decided to sic his audience on Cruz, who then went on Carlson’s show to beg for forgiveness. Like a stern taskmaster, Carlson kept berating the apologetic Senator to make sure the lesson stuck.
The chief lesson of the whole affair is the power that Carlson now has. He’s become a kingmaker, like Rush Limbaugh had been during his last few decades and like Trump now. Carlson has the power to stir up the GOP base against a politician to make sure they toe the line.
I suspect this also means that Cruz’s strategy of groveling to power won’t work. The kind of dominance politics that Trump and Carlson play requires that a presidential candidate be a bully not a victim. Cruz is earning neither forgiveness nor respect. In life as in art: Uriah Heep and Kenneth Widermerpool both ended up as losers in the end.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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The notion of beta and omega predators in a wolf pack becomes more salient in the Social Darwinian environment of American conservatism. It's not 'dog-eat-dog' as much as it is 'eat-or-be-eaten'...
An obsequious panderer like Ted Cruz exists simultaneously on the fringe and in the mainstream, offending no one by living on scraps and carrion until the alpha of the moment in the pack self-immolates, when the submissive bogarts the alpha predator position in the ensuing chaos by being the least objectionable to the other members through a familiarity bred from low level contempt, instead of becoming the best suited based on his actual achievement and constituency-building..