Cleveland, July 2016. Ted Cruz (b. 1970) stands at the lectern of the Republican convention and will not say the words the hall came to hear. He congratulates the nominee on winning. He talks about freedom. He tells the delegates to vote their conscience and stay true to the Constitution. He does not say the name. The men near the front understand before he finishes the sentence, and the floor turns. The boos roll up from the New York delegation and spread. Security walks Heidi Cruz (b. 1972) out for her safety while men shout at her. Cruz stands in it. He has the cadence of a champion debater who has just delivered the closing argument and watched the jury rise up to convict his client anyway. He keeps the principle and loses the room. Both at once, in front of cameras, by choice.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the lens. A man builds a hero system to deny that he dies. He needs to feel that he counts in a drama larger than his own short life, that he earns a place that outlasts the body. The hero system tells him what counts and how to win at it. Watch a man under pressure and you see what immortality he reaches for. Cruz reaches for one thing his whole life. He reaches to be right.
Two terrors press on him. The first is the ordinary terror, the fear of vanishing without a mark. The second is sharper and his alone. It is the terror of being merely clever. Smart and unloved. The boy who wins every argument and empties every room. Cruz organizes his life so that the second terror cannot touch him, and the design is elegant, and it does not work.
Start with the subtraction. Rafael Cruz (b. 1939) leaves Cuba, leaves Batista’s jails and then Castro’s revolution, and lands in Texas with a hundred dollars sewn into his underwear and no English. Years later, married, a small son at home, he leaves again. He walks out on the family and flies to Houston to live the life he wants. Then a man at a Baptist church brings him to God, and Rafael comes back. He returns born again, forgiven, restored, the prodigal who was received without a hearing. The boy grows up inside that story. The lesson under the lesson is that belonging is not safe. It can be withdrawn and it can be granted, and the grown men around him talk about grace, about a love you receive because God gives it and not because you argued your way to it.
Ted draws a different lesson. He decides belonging will be earned. He memorizes the Constitution as a teenager and recites it for civic groups around Houston. He learns the founding the way other boys learn batting averages. He goes to Princeton and wins at debate at a level that frightens his opponents. He goes to Harvard Law and clerks for William Rehnquist (1924-2005). He argues before the Supreme Court nine times as Solicitor General of Texas. Every credential is a brick, and the wall they build says the same thing. I am right, and because I am right I cannot be sent away. He turns the father’s grace into a courtroom. He will not be received. He will win.
This is where the sacred words start to bend, because the words Cruz lives by mean one thing inside his hero system and other things everywhere else. Take courage. Cruz treats courage as the willingness to be right alone. In 2013 he holds the Senate floor for twenty-one hours against a government funding bill, against his own party’s leadership, and at one point he reads Green Eggs and Ham aloud to his daughters watching at home. The performance draws contempt from the men around him and devotion from the men who send him money. To Cruz the contempt confirms the courage. The lonelier the stand, the truer the brief. He writes a memoir and calls it A Time for Truth, and the title carries the whole theology. Courage is dissent recorded against the room, filed for a vindication that comes later.
That is not what courage means to the combat medic. To the medic courage is staying when every animal signal says run, and staying not to be right but to drag the wounded man back by his vest. The medic earns his immortality inside a brotherhood that will say, for the rest of their lives, he did not leave us. Being right has nothing to do with it. There is no argument to win. There is only the man bleeding and the choice to stay.
It is not what courage means to the hospice nurse either. She sits with the dying through the long afternoon when there is no fight left and no victory available and no record being kept. Her courage is presence without triumph. She wins nothing. She witnesses. The immortality she reaches for lives in the family who remember that someone held their father’s hand at the end, and it asks her to surrender the very thing Cruz cannot release, the need to come out ahead.
The Talmudic scholar shares more of Cruz’s shape and reveals the trap inside it. He preserves the minority opinion in the text. The ruling went against Rabbi Eliezer, and the page keeps Rabbi Eliezer anyway, his dissent carried forward for two thousand years so that some student in a far century might read it and say he was right after all. Here courage is being right against the room and trusting the centuries. Cruz wants this. He wants to be the dissent that history vindicates. The trouble is that the scholar accepts the ruling while he records the dissent. He bows to the majority and keeps his argument alive inside the bow. Cruz cannot make that peace. He needs the vindication now, in the room, from the men who booed, and a hero system that needs to win the present cannot wait the way the page can wait.
Freedom splits the same way. For Cruz freedom is the Constitution held as a fixed text, liberty as the chain that binds the government and frees the man, the exile’s inheritance from a father who lost a country to a strongman. Liberty is law. The fence around power.
The Carthusian monk hears the word and means the opposite. His freedom is obedience. He surrenders his will to the rule and the abbot and to God, whose pronoun he capitalizes and whose service he calls perfect liberty, and he finds his release from the tyranny of his own appetites by handing the appetites away. To him Cruz’s liberty, the liberty to want and to keep and to be left alone, sounds like a fresh prison.
The balsero hears it in the body. He is the Cuban who put to sea on a raft of inner tubes and lashed boards, ninety miles of open water toward Florida, freedom as the thing you might drown reaching for, freedom you can taste as salt. Rafael’s freedom. To the balsero, liberty is not a brief about the commerce clause. It is the absence of the man who can take your son and your house and your tongue, and you weigh it against the sharks because the other shore is worse. Cruz inherits this freedom and translates it into citations, and the translation gains a senator and loses the salt.
Even the word fight, which Cruz wears as a brand, comes apart on contact. He sells himself as a fighter and means a man who never folds an argument. The aikido master means the opposite by the same word. His fighting takes the force of the larger man and turns it past him so that the attacker throws himself to the mat. Strength used against strength is failure. The chess grandmaster means a third thing, the win seen twenty moves out, the sacrifice of a piece now for a mate the opponent cannot yet read on the board. Cruz fights like the first man and admires himself for it, and the men who beat him fight like the other two.
So the sacred words are not shared currency. Courage, freedom, fight. Each one means what it means only inside the hero system that issues it, and Cruz’s system issues a hard and lonely version of all three, a version where the prize is to be proven correct and the proof requires an audience that will not give him the verdict.
Then comes the test the design cannot survive. Donald Trump (b. 1946) descends the escalator and runs a campaign on a different theology. Trump does not argue. He does not need to be right, and he does not pretend to be, and the crowds love him for it in a way they never love the man with the memorized Constitution. Trump offers an older immortality than Cruz’s, the immortality of the dominant animal, vitality that needs no brief. He calls Cruz “Lyin’ Ted.” He spreads a story about Rafael and the Kennedy assassination. He mocks Heidi’s face next to a photograph of his own wife. He goes at the father and the wife, the two people the whole hero system exists to protect, and he wins.
Cruz fights him with the only weapons he owns, the better argument, the cleaner record, the sharper recitation, and the weapons fail because Trump is not playing the game where those weapons score. The room does not want the man who is right. It wants the man who is alive. Cruz stands at the convention and keeps his principle, vote your conscience, and the room throws him out.
And then, months later, he endorses. The man who called Trump a pathological liar and a serial philanderer and worse campaigns for him, raises money for him, becomes one of his most reliable votes, flies to see him, defends him through two impeachments and after January 6. The hero system built to make belonging unwithdrawable folds in front of the one rival it cannot beat, and Cruz defects into the rival’s system to stay near the source of life. He decides he would rather be close to power and wrong about Trump than be right about Trump and finished. Becker tells us why. A man will trade almost anything, including the thing he calls his honor, to keep his place in the drama that lets him feel he counts.
How much of this does Cruz see. He is far too smart to miss it, and the tell is the over-explanation. He writes a legal brief for his own conduct. The endorsement was about the Supreme Court, about the country, about the cause above his personal grievance, about putting the movement before his pride. The brief is good. Parts of it are true. A senator can serve the cause he believes in while the man who runs it disgusts him, and reasonable people make that trade. The brief is also exactly what a man produces when he needs to keep his self-respect and his proximity to power at the same time, and the polish is the proof of the strain. The man who reads Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor knows when he is performing. He knows what he traded. He has decided the trade keeps him alive in the only register that pays him, and he has filed the paperwork that lets him not look at it straight.
Three coordinates, to close.
The shape of the hero. Cruz is the man who would win the argument against death if death would take the stand. He treats every withheld thing, the verdict, the nomination, the love of the room, as a brief he can win with the right citation delivered with enough force. He learned as a boy that belonging is granted and withdrawn, and instead of trusting the grant the way his father’s church taught, he resolved to compel it. He prosecutes the universe and waits for the ruling in his favor.
The unnamed rival. Trump is the named rival, the one the cameras caught. The unnamed rival is older and closer. It is the boy in the back of the class who was loved without being right, the father who walked out and came home and was forgiven without a hearing, the grace that Rafael received and Ted refused to receive and tried instead to earn. Cruz’s true opponent is the unearned thing. He cannot litigate his way to it. He has spent a life trying, and the harder he argues the further it moves.
The cost the ledger cannot price. Lindsey Graham (b. 1955) makes the joke that everyone repeats. If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial were in the Senate, no one would convict you. The joke is cruel and it is the bill. Every brief he won and the room that emptied anyway. The colleagues who respect the mind and cannot stand the man. The wife walked out of an arena under guard while he kept his principle for one more night and surrendered it before the next election. He built the whole apparatus to make himself impossible to send away, and he is the man his peers would pay to see gone. He wanted to be right because he believed right was the price of love. He paid it in full, every year, and the love did not come, and the ledger has no column for the thing he was buying.
