Are Enough Texans Mean Enough, Sad Enough, Disconnected Enough To Reelect Ted Cruz?

On Monday, David Brooks wrote an essay for The Atlantic, How America Got Mean. Americans are lonely, sad and disconnected, and we’ve also become mean, rude, cruel, murderous and less charitable. “The words that define our age,” he wrote, “reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces. We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on? Over the past few years, different social observers have offered different stories to explain the rise of hatred, anxiety, and despair.

• The technology story: Social media is driving us all crazy.

• The sociology story: We’ve stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.

• The demography story: America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country, a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.

• The economy story: High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.

He agrees, to some extent with all of them, but doesn’t feel any tell the full story. After all, “social media has bad effects, but it is everywhere around the globe— and the mental-health crisis is not. Also, the rise of despair and hatred has engulfed a lot of people who are not on social media. Economic inequality is real, but it doesn’t fully explain this level of social and emotional breakdown. The sociologists are right that we’re more isolated, but why? What values lead us to choose lifestyles that make us lonely and miserable? The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.”

He went on to tell a story about a society lacking in shared moral values— “helping people learn to restrain their selfishness;” “social and ethical skills (How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively); and “helping people find a purpose in life… a meaningful existence.” Our leaders aren’t exactly exemplars in these areas. “In a culture devoid of moral education, generations grow up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world… After decades without much in the way of moral formation, “ he wrote, “America became a place where 74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber.”

The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.

Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal— or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.

Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.

Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war— red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.

This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me. Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.

The politics of recognition doesn’t give you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging— but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.

If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum— but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level— only 8 percent did the same in 1990.

Post-Trump, I can’t imagine a worse person to heal America’s sense of sadness, disconnection and meanness the Ron DeSantis. Oh, wait! Ask anyone in the Senate, on either side of the aisle, who is the meanest asshole among them and you get a very clean consensus: Texas Republican Ted Cruz. Virtually no one can stand him. So much so that Sean Trende was moved to write a piece yesterday, Could Ted Cruz Lose Reelection? The numbers are in his favor. The PVI is R+5. Trump won both times he ran— 52.2% to 43.2% in 2016 and 52.1% to 46.5% in 2020. Last time Cruz faced the voters he was up against a well-financed political rock star, Beto O’Rourke— and Cruz won anyway, 4,260,553 (50.9%) to 4,045,632 (48.3%). That 2.6 point margin was the closest U.S. Senate race in Texas since 1978.

This cycle, there is no Beto in the race. And yet… Cruz may still struggle with reelection. Why? Over the past decade, Texas has become, “in many ways one giant suburb. Texas’ metroplexes are gigantic and their cities, relatively small.

• Houston- 2,264,876 (Metroplex- 7,066,131)

• San Antonio- 1,479,493 (Metroplex- 2,550,960)

• Dallas- 1,259,404 (Metroplex- 7,573,136)

• Austin- 966,292 (Metroplex- 2,227,083)

This suburbanization of Texas in the past few decades, wrote Trende, “yielded benefits for Republicans at a time when the GOP was the party of white suburbanites. It is part of why Texas shifted to the Republican Party relatively early and quickly (in the 1960s), and it is partly why its dominance lasted as long as it did. It’s also a large part of why, until fairly recently, the idea of Blue Texas seemed like a recurring Democratic fever dream. Yes, Hispanic population growth was happening, but it would take a long time before that growth could hope to overwhelm Republican dominance of Texas. But with suburbanites across the South abruptly shifting their voting patterns in the late 2010s and beginning to vote like their northern peers, the cost/benefit calculus for the GOP shifted abruptly. What once disproportionately helped the GOP in a state like Texas now hurt it disproportionately. Hence, the state shifted from one that Mitt Romney carried by 16 percentage points while losing nationally by four points, to one that Donald Trump carried by just five and a half points while losing by four nationally.”

We can’t say for certain that Cruz will win, but the real possibility that white suburbanites could shift further toward the Democrats, which would impact Cruz’s chances disproportionately, is a sword of Damocles hanging over Cruz’s head.

Three final points are worth keeping in mind. First, Ted Cruz is still Ted Cruz. The two-term senator has never been terribly well-liked, even among members of his own party. He’s loathed by the left, which guarantees that his opponent will be well-funded and that the media will give coverage to that opponent. He is still the same man who came very close in 2018 to becoming the first Republican to lose a statewide race in Texas in two decades.

…Second, his likely opponent, Colin Allred, is a charismatic former Baylor football standout/NFL player-turned civil rights attorney. As mentioned above, he will almost certainly not hurt for money. And as also mentioned above, there will be a push to try to make him into Beto 2.0 (ignoring O’Rourke’s ill-fated presidential and gubernatorial runs). Most importantly, Allred has demonstrated that he can win in the suburbs, which is the key in Texas.

Finally, we can’t ignore Donald Trump. As of this writing, Trump remains the clear favorite for the GOP nomination, and is running well against Joe Biden in the polls. At the same time, to say there are storm clouds on the horizon is an understatement. Trump may well be running for the presidency with a criminal conviction hanging over his head. The U.S. economy may be going full speed ahead in 2024, making it difficult for any challenger to win. There are any number of other potential missteps at the top of the ticket.

Which is to say that this may well be another 2018 environment for Cruz. Given the shifts in Texas over the past four years, he seems unlikely to survive such an environment.

Regardless, Cruz definitely can win this election. But, unlike most other Texas races, his fate is in many ways out of his hands. There are enough things that could go wrong for him that the race should be considered genuinely competitive at this point.

Photos by the fabulous Rupublicans