Liberals' Obsession with Ted Cruz Rooted In Anger over His Betrayal of His Class

He rose to the top of the New Class -- but he is most decidedly not of the New Class. He rejects their tribal signifiers and shibboleths, which are chiefly expressed through taste in politics, and thus rejects them.

By denying the thing that grants them worth -- their aristocratic tastes -- he denies their worth.

And they're rather pissy about it.

Henry Adams said that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds. For the left, over the past year it has seemed at times to be the systematic organization of hatred of Ted Cruz.

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Cruz is different — a Princeton and Harvard man who not only matriculated at those fine institutions but excelled at them. Champion debater at Princeton. Magna cum laude graduate at Harvard. Supreme Court clerkship, on the way to Texas solicitor general and dozens of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cruz is from the intellectual elite, but not of it, a tea party conservative whose politics are considered gauche at best at the storied universities where he studied. He is, to borrow the words of the 2009 H.W. Brands biography of FDR, a traitor to his class.

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Democrats and liberal pundits would surely dislike Cruz no matter where he went to school, but his pedigree adds an extra element of shocked disbelief to the disdain. “Princeton and Harvard should be disgraced,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell exclaimed on MSNBC, as if graduating a constitutionalist conservative who rises to national prominence is a violation of the schools’ mission statements.

It almost is. Princeton and Harvard aren’t quite the École Nationale d’Administration, the French school that trains that country’s political class, but they are close.

In a Washington Post column a year ago, Dana Milbank noted Cruz’s schooling and concluded almost entirely on that basis that his tea party politics must be a put-on, that he is, underneath it all, an “intellectually curious, liberal-arts conservative.” Note the insulting assumption that an interest in books and ideas automatically immunizes someone from a certain kind of conservative politics.

You know, this style of analysis -- through the prism of class, class loyalty, class privilege -- is rising and yet it still isn't quite risen. It has two advantages: It is populist in spirit, and thus helps animate voters to take their country back from the Institutional Class which believes in its own Right to Rule, and, if that's not enough, it's also True.

I'm not quite sure why this isn't catching on more.

Oh right, because the GOP is fundamentally dumb.

For more on this, Andrew Stiles of NRO runs down the Cruz hysteria on the left.

After quoting a series of shrieks, he notes that Ted Cruz, oddly enough, enjoys no force field of protection due to his race.

It’s worth noting that people launching these attacks on Ted Cruz are the same people who instantly impute malign or racist motives to almost any criticism of President Obama. (In the world of MSNBC, for example, it is apparently racist to point out that the president plays a lot of golf, or even to refer to him as “Obama.”)

Cruz, on the other hand, is fair game.

I'm scratching my head at that. Why, it just makes no sense. I just can't figure out why this should be the case.

but he is most decidedly not of the New Class. He rejects their tribal signifiers and shibboleths, which are chiefly expressed through taste in politics, and thus rejects them. By...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 02:08 PM

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