Over at Salon Magazine, columnist Jarret Ruminski takes on Senator Cruz, while fretting as do I that Americans could repeat a horrible mistake in 2016.
Labeling Cruz the "High Priest of the American Civil Religion" he makes this troubling comparison...
...voters (and the Supreme Court) elected a cocksure, right-wing adopted Texan, long on discredited ideology but short on wits, who plunged the United States into a sinkhole of economic and foreign policy chaos from which it has yet to fully emerge. The American political attention span is notoriously short.
He then examines the Yankee Doodle Dandy construct, what sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967 termed "Civil Religion in America", that infests the American psyche (and, with differing hagiographies and myths, those of other nations too I suppose) and allows idiots such as Carl Rove and George W., but hopefully never Cruz, to pull at the heartstrings of a large percentage of Americans whose critical thinking, such as it is, flies from their heads when the band strikes up the
Star Spangled Banner.
Citing Religious scholar Richard T. Hughes, Ruminski examines six core myths that Americans live by: the myth of the Chosen Nation, of Nature’s Nation, of the Christian Nation, of Manifest Destiny, of the Capitalist Nation and of the Innocent Nation and how Cruz both exploits and adulterates them in his speech at Liberty University:
Cruz had the myth of the Chosen Nation down pat when he claimed that America is “an indispensable nation, a unique nation in the history of the world.” As for the myth of Nature’s Nation, he evoked America as the cultivated political garden of God Himself that, “from the dawn of this country, at every stage… has enjoyed God’s providential blessing.” The myth of the Christian Nation? Cruz parroted the now standard (but historically bogus) right-wing claim that the U.S. “was founded upon” the idea that rights come from a very specific “God Almighty.” Cruz’s reference to the myth of Manifest Destiny was more veiled, but he name-dropped key historical figures such as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (no doubt for good bipartisan measure) and, of course, Ronald Reagan to reiterate his point that God has blessed every step in America’s development. The myth of the Capitalist Nation came via his railing against standard conservative government bogeymen like “regulators,” “tax collectors” and Obamacare that despoil the purity of the Free Market. Finally, Cruz touted the myth of the Innocent Nation when he claimed that political change will only come from “lovers of liberty” who realize that “God isn’t done with America yet.” Bless their liberty-loving souls.
I fear that I have run up against the limits of fair use here, but Ruminski offers many more fascinating insights, as well as a link to Bellah's thesis, at Salon and I encourage all to give them a hit and read the whole thing for themselves.
In my own diary I linked to above some pooh-poohed the threat that I, and perhaps Rosza, think Cruz embodies. Though he broke Godwin's Law like a three time loser rolling the First Federal on main-street, perhaps the final commentator in that thread, bobbymerf, has the truth of it:
I don't think the average American voter today is any smarter than the average German voter in the 1930s.
Ergo, Cruz could certainly be our next President.
You might not like this scenario, but history is full of examples of people making really bad decisions.
(Thanks to bobbymerf, I hope you don't mind me quoting you.)