Tea Party Extremists? You Bet!

The word from the Democrats at this time of partial government shutdown is "Tea Party extremists" and "fairness."  And any Republican or conservative automatically winces.

Because we conservatives are not extremists, and we are not warring on fairness.  Are we?

Of course we are.  We want to reverse the century of progressivism, of administrative free stuff.  And you know what they call that?  Extreme.  And not just unfair to present government dependents, but cruel, unjust, and mean-spirited.

There is a word to describe who we are: Revolutionaries.

Anyone that wants a revolution is an extremist.  You are sidling up to that famous line in the Declaration of Independence, to "pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."  And indeed most of the signers of the Declaration did lose their lives and their fortunes to the American Revolution.

Jeffrey Lord makes things clear this morning.  It's a battle of the crusades he writes.

Mr. Obama and his friends are on a crusade to turn America ever further left than it was when they took charge...

For conservatives, this shutdown and the response to Obama is about nothing less than the life of America itself. A crusade to restore America to the constitutional republic it was designed to be.

But here is the point.  We, the conservatives and Tea Party extremists are the progressives, striving to create a new thing.  The Obamis and the liberals are the reactionaries, reverting back to the old thing.

OK.  What do I mean?

I mean that identity politics and the big man handing out the free stuff -- and 40% of Americans think that Obamacare is free -- is the old way.  You can see it in the story of chimpanzee culture described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn where the males conduct continuous border wars to enlarge the troop's territory.  The result is the free stuff, the food and fruit that is free for the taking for the females.  And the bigger the territory the more baby chimps that grow to maturity.

You can see the old way operating in Homer's Iliad.  Homer's warrior culture was a simple culture of loot and plunder.  And the plunder included well-born women.  The conflict at the heart of the Iliad is the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles over the woman Briseis.  Here's the Wiki story:

Briseis, a daughter of Briseus, was a princess of Lyrnessus... When Achilles led the assault on that city during the Trojan War, she was captured and her family (including her father, mother, three brothers, and husband) died at his hands.[2] She was subsequently given to Achilles as a war prize to be his concubine. In the Trojan War, captive women like Briseis were regarded as objects to be traded amongst the warriors.[3]

That's nice.

The other interesting thing about the Iliad is that the warriors assume, as a matter of course, that they must sacrifice cattle to gain the favor of the gods.  Whenever some warrior wins a fight, it is assumed that the gods are on his side, and the action of the Iliad is constantly interrupted while the gods decide who is to win the next round of the battle on the plains of Troy. 

Isn't that pretty well how Democratic politics works?  You need to "pay to play."  The name of the game is getting in power and using the power of government to hose pensions and subsidies at your supporters.  You use the tribal loyalties of "identity politics" to divide off your constituents from the overall nation, encouraging people to think of themselves as African-Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, rather that 100% Americans.  Wise experts decide who will win or lose.

But conservatives are different.  We are the heirs of a new thing that started around 3,000 years ago.  Karl Jaspers called it the Achsenzeit or Axial Age.  The new idea was that each individual had a personal covenant with God.  The relationship with God was no longer the supplicant buying favors with sacrifice, but a contract with God.  God is no longer playing favorites between the Greeks and the Trojans, as the mood takes him.  He is saying: here are the rules which both you and I should observe.

The Axial Age heralds the entry into history of what I call the People of the Responsible Self.  When you have a covenant with God then you are responsible for your life.  You cannot say, oh well, I would have been OK but the exploitation done me down.  You cannot say the capitalists or the Jews or the rich or the bankers are to blame.  You are responsible for your life, even in the face of evil and overwhelming power.

My guess is that this revolution in human consciousness was confined to the early cities.  It's in the city that each actor is individually responsible.  It's in the city that contract comes to the fore.  It's in the city that you start to deal with people who are not your kin.

And my guess is that the expansion of the new idea reflects the growth of the city.

But the revolution in consciousness is not easy.  It really is a complete turning over, the revaluation of all values.  That means it is an incredibly hard thing to do.  That's why, as soon as the Industrial Revolution got started, movements of reaction like Marxism and Fabianism began, each with a nostalgia for the comfort of the tribe, and the constant demonizing of the Other that is necessary in the eternal border wars of the hunter-gatherer and agricultural ages.

Only, of course, the old ways don't work any more.  They were perfect for the hunter-gatherer tribes with their hard-won territory, and the feudal states with their vulnerable grain stores.  You had to stick together and above all defend those borders.

We know the old ways don't work because the Soviets conducted an actual experiment in class tribalism and, after unimaginable cruelties, disintegrated in 1990.  We have Argentina, a perennial basket case of charismatic leadership and class warfare lurching from one devaluation to another.  We have Detroit.  We have Chicago coming up.  In the industrial age you simply can't operate on the old patronage/clientage model.

But we humans are still programmed to love that free stuff, and politics is still run on the old Homeric model: join with me and get your share of the spoils.  And so it is with the authoritarian welfare state.

We Tea Party extremists, we revolutionaries, we Few: we want to reverse the backwards lurch to the tribalism and serfdom of the authoritarian welfare state.  We are the People of the Responsible Self and we long for freedom, the freedom to do the responsible thing rather than kowtow to the knout of the welfare-state enforcement officer.

And that is why the battle is joined.  It's a fight to the finish between the nostaglic tribalism that goes under the name of "identity politics" and the universal freedom and responsibility of the thriving citizen in the thriving city.

Call me an extremist for the new way, the Way of the People of the Responsible Self.

Liberalism Starts Shutting Down

Back in the old days liberalism was a plaything of the educated youth.  Angry young men like Karl Marx saw the suffering of the hungry 1840s in Germany and declared that there had to be a better way that didn't put such a heavy burden on the workers. The Pre-Raphaelites and the Fabians sneered at the atomism of individualism and its reduction of every value to the materialistic "will it pay?"  These young men and women looked at the world and found it to be unjust.



Youth is always good at coming up with sweeping, idealistic theories, temples of reason, to show the way to the glorious future of peace and justice.



There's just one little problem.  That government is force.  Government is always an army looking for a war to fight.  In the 19th century you can argue that government had a mandate to fight against the cruel working conditions in the mines and the factories.



In those days, without a doubt, the rich were fat and idle, and the poor were thin and overworked.



But now?



Now we have Obamacare just rolling out, and, surprise surprise, the insurance exchange websites don't work.  And women are greeting their husbands in tears because their health insurance premiums have gone up.  That's because, necessarily, Obamacare is a war.  It's a war on... well what, exactly?



Government tends to get into two kinds of war.  There are wars for justice, noble efforts to blow away the accretions and cruelties of the ancien regime.  And then there are wars of loot and plunder, evil efforts to descend on ordinary people and hated minorities and strip them of their wealth and assets.



The government army always marches under the flag of justice but is often really engaged upon a orgy of plunder.



That's how to understand modern liberalism in general and Obamacare in particular.  The whole point is to distribute loot among the Democratic voting base.  That how you explain the waivers.



That's even how you explain the government shutdown.  The Dems need to frighten their supporters every now and again to make them realize how much they need their tribal leaders.



Hey you guys!  Without us you would be nothing!  Richard Fernandez thinks that the Democratic position in the shutdown saga is weaker than the Dems are letting on.

 Like any Ponzi scheme they need money to keep the pensions, the promises, the whole system of rewards going. Like a Ponzi setup, an ever-enlarging Big Government has only two modes: a brilliant tomorrow or total failure.

The Dems don't have any room to negotiate, for "a step back in the ever forward drive for bigger government means not smaller government but the cliff."  Why, if the Dems concede something to the Republicans this time then the GOP will be back for more concessions next time.  Where will it end?



So the grand visions of the 19th century have collapsed into the grubbing  attempts to borrow money to keep "the whole system of rewards going," to keep the troops from deserting.



It has been ever thus.  The king starts out on a magnificent campaign to conquer vast new lands, but eventually starts to run out of money.  For a while he can keep the army together by looting the countryside and by exhortations.  But eventually, without more money, the army melts away and the glorious campaign comes to nothing.



That's the advantage of capitalism for government.  When you have a thriving economy the government can tax and borrow to fund unimaginable wars, foreign and domestic.  But you want to be careful not to gum up the works with stupid regulation and wasteful subsidies.  Because then you might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.  And you might frighten away the widows and orphans that you need to keep buying the government's bonds.

Shutdown: Looking Past the Tactics

Government "shutdowns" are said to be bad for Republicans.  And that's probably true in the short-term sense.  Our liberal friends in the mainstream media tend to report the news in liberal terms.  Thus a government shutdown means that women and minorities will be unable to get the benefits they need, and therefore Republicans are taking bread from the mouths of babies.



But long term it doesn't seem that big of a deal.  Sean Trende shows that the government shutdowns of 1995-96 didn't seem to annihilate the Republicans when it came to the 1996 elections.  True they did manage to lose some House seats, but mainly in Clinton-leaning districts.



So let's focus on the donut, and not upon the hole.  That's what supply-siders Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore do.  They note that the big Democratic spending occurred in 2007-10, when Congress was Democratic.  Since 2011, with Republicans running the House, spending has come down, rather more than we might think.  Although Republicans seemed to lose the August 2011 debt-ceiling crisis and the December-January fiscal cliff crisis, in fact they won, because they got substantial cuts in spending.  That's good for the economy, as Laffer and Moore point out.

The federal government’s main activity now is to redistribute resources, mostly from producers to non-producers. When the money the government takes from workers and producers is used to pay people and companies not to work—food stamps, unemployment benefits, bailouts, Solyndras, Obamacare health subsidies—it’s a double-whammy.

It's not good for the economy when government takes stuff from some people and gives it to others.  Why not?  Because when you give money to people, whether 19th century Russian heirs or 21st century "disability" recipients, they don't need to get out and get a job.  Where "job" is defined as doing something useful to other people for which they are prepared to pay money.



But look at the list above: "food stamps, unemployment benefits, bailouts, Solyndras, Obamacare health subsidies."  Add in too-big-to-fail banks and grants for studying global warming, and you'd define the current over-under Democratic coalition.  And the Obama years have been very good for them.



But the ordinary middle class has not done well.  If you want to start a business, the regulatory hail-storm has beaten you back.  If you want to retire, the Crash of 2008 made you sell at the bottom and now you can't even get a decent interest rate on your savings account.  If you are a middle-class college graduate you are buried in student debt.



In the 2000s the Democrats did a fine job encouraging "social liberal economically conservative" voters away from the Republican party.  That was easy when the economy seemed to be OK and you could always get money from the mortgage ATM.



But now, after nearly eight years of the over-under Democrats hosing money at their base, the "social liberal" question seems to be less important.  The fact is that if you are an unorganized individual, not a green energy capitalist, not a union member, not a welfare-state dependent, you are tearing your hair out right now.  You are wondering: can I ever retire?  Will I ever be able to start a business?  Will my children be able to afford a decent education?  Will they find decent careers?  Will the government come after my savings, like they have in Cyprus and Poland?



The fact of politics is that you may not like the other people in your party coalition, but you put up with them because the alternative is worse.  Libertarians may not like fundamentalist Christians, but when it comes to smaller government, what difference does it make?



And so I suspect that all the sound and fury of the government shutdown will signify nothing.  The fact of the matter is that if you are a member of the People of the Responsible Self these Obama years are the times that try men's souls.



Come 2014 and 2016 the People of the Responsible Self won't be worrying too much about the niceties.  We will just want Obama and Pelosi and Reid gone.

The Bible on Nairobi

If you want to understand what is going on with the Nairobi shootings, at the Westgate Mall and at the Gujba College of Agriculture dorm, then the first stop is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's coming-of-age memoir, Infidel.  Because she was there.



Born a Somali in Mogadishu during the Marxist rule of dictator Siad Barre, Ayaan's childhood took place on the cusp between the old tribe and clan world of her grandmother and the exploding Islamism in the cities, including Nairobi, where Ayaan spent her teenage years.



The complete meltdown of the Barre regime in the early 1990s meant that hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled to the border with Kenya, and many of them like Ayaan managed to get into Kenya.  If you want to know how quickly the everyday world descends into disease and hunger when people have to flee their homes for their lives, then read the book.



The refugees ended up in Nairobi, and the young 'uns went to school.  They might be Christian schools left over from the Brits.  Or they might be madrassas run by the Muslim Brotherhood.



The point that comes out of Ayeen's childhood and her book Infidel is not that the cynical Arabs are poisoning young minds with their mullahs and their money.  It is that the young minds, pitched out of the tribal world into a modern-ish metropolis, are eagerly looking for something to make sense of their lives.



Religion, whether transcendental or secular, is the way that humans make sense of their lives.



Marxism is a religion just like the rest.  It promises heaven on earth, if only we can liquidate the evil bourgeoisie and the capitalists.



Ayaan herself went through numerous religious stages, and being a girl, this involved constantly figuring out what to wear.  She designed for herself a shapeless garment that she calls a hidjab.



And Nairobi was full of proselytizing preachers.

The charismatic Christians were no less aggressive than the fundamentalist Muslims in those days.  The whole country [Kenya] was falling apart and perhaps people were grabbing for certainties... Shabby street-front churches began to sprout where once there were grocery stalls.

But at the same time, good Muslim girls like Ayaan were going to movies and reading English novels, everything from Jane Austen to trashy romance novels.



Of course there is violence and war in the streets in places like Nairobi.  That's what happened during the industrial revolution in the west.  And guess when Marxism reared its ugly head?  In the mid 19th century when "thousands [of Germans] were driven from their homes by unemployment and unrest."  It was obviously a big thing in Germany because the Germans are the most numerous ethnic group in the US.  They didn't up-sticks because they felt like a vacation.



In all the worry about Islam we easily forget that there is another religion that is spreading throughout the world like wildfire.  Christianity.  And its most virulent form is the Pentecostalism that began in 1906 in a street-front church in Asuza, California.



We don't hear too much about the Christian side of this partly because liberals aren't interested.  And partly because it is a girl thing.



Think about it.  Men are fighters and women are lovers.  Islam urges a global holy war against the infidels, and Christianity says that God loves you, and that God sacrificed his Son for you.  So who do you think would be attracted to Islam, and who would be attracted to Christianity?



We know about Ayaan Hirsi Ali because she ended up in Holland, ended up going to college, ended up the proximate cause of the murder of film-maker Theo van Gogh, and she ended up writing a book about it.  She also ended up marrying historian Niall Ferguson.



But there are hundred of millions of people emerging out of the tribal nomad world and the feudal agricultural world into the modern world, and their lives are not a fairy tale.  Ayaan's own sister, Haweya, just gave up and died.



The question is: what shall be done?  You can argue that the colonial era was a crime.  But then the Marxist dictators are an abomination.  And the mullahs are flying millions of innocents into a box canyon.



You can say that Bush was a fool to imagine that he could plant democracy in Iraq.  But then the Obama turn to the Islamists looks like pure liberal folly.



Maybe we should get back to basics.  Maybe we should get back to individualism, responsibility, limited government, civil society, and goodwill.  That's what we say we believe in, after all.

The Coming Death of the Liberal God

There's no point in all this defunding-Obamacare politics, writes Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, because universal health care is not just a program, but a a great political idea, perhaps the foundational idea of liberalism.

What the GOP's Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional vote.



As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.



If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.



No matter what Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies do, ObamaCare won't die.

So, writes Henninger, all this Ted Cruz stuff is missing the point.  You don't kill a great foundational belief by defunding it.

But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.

No, Henninger writes, instead of tilting at windmills Republicans and conservatives should be coming up with "the policy ideas" that will replace Obamacare.



Dear me.  These journalista types really do lose it sometimes.  The point is that all politics is conducted at the level of the symbolic defund Obamacare movement.  Did President Obama give speeches telling us all about the policy ideas of Obamacare?  Not at all.  He made great symbolic promises, as in: if you like your doctor and your health plan, you can keep it.



What Ted Cruz and lamentably few others is doing is committing sacrilege on a liberal idol.  That's how you start a new religion.  You show that you can profane the old gods and live to tell the tale.



Let's go to Nicholas Wade in his Faith Instinct.  There is only one way for a god to die, he writes.  "Gods die when people no longer worship them."



But expecting today's liberals to stop worshipping their secular gods and believing in their foundational liberal faith because it doesn't work is a mug's game.



In fact, Nicholas Wade is not quite right about the death of gods.  Gods only die when the last believer dies.



Today's liberals will go to their deathbeds thinking "if only" about Obamacare.  If only those racist, sexist, homophobe, anti-choice fascists and their evil hate speech had been stopped in time with proper freshman orientation programs.  And so on.  Because if Obamacare had been done right then we would have universal health care and we would live forever.



But the new generation will not believe in universal health care.  They will remember the disaster of Obamacare.  And so the ranks of the true believers will slowly dwindle away.



The question for Republicans and conservatives is how to do the politics.  The first thing to do is to show that universal health care is not a sacred vision but an ordinary government program advocated by the usual canting politicians and run by the usual corrupt administrators and special interests.



Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, they told Dorothy and friends.  Of course.  Because you wouldn't want her to find out that there is no health care god.  There are only politicians and activists offering free stuff in return for your vote.



But the politics of Obamacare is not just about exposing the god that failed so that the proselytizing liberals fail to find new converts.  It is also about rallying the conservative base, and showing the uncommitted moderates that all the cool kids think that Obamacare is so over, so "whatever."



We conservatives need new leaders that will raise a new standard high for freedom and for dignity, the right of ordinary Americans to be who we are and not the serfs of the authoritarian welfare state.  You don't do that by advancing new policy ideas.  You do it the Les Mis way by jumping on the barricade and singing "Who Will Join in our Crusade?" and getting people all riled up.



That is what Ted Cruz is doing and that is why the Republican base is getting all riled up.  The next question is perhaps the bigger one.  Can Cruz build the organization to fight and win a decisive presidential election that will cow liberals into retreat and empty the pews in their Church of Secular Liberalism?



That's what we have elections for.

Marx vs. Mises

There I was, lying in bed at three in the morning, in between sleep periods, and I had a thought.

Marx's fundamental argument is that wage labor is alienating.  What starts out as social, working for use, ends up as commodification, labor for exchange.  Under capitalism the worker mindlessly churns out labor for the market instead of for the use of himself, his family, and his neighbors.  Labor becomes a commodity, bought and sold on the market, instead of a personal thing.

In reality, of course, people have been laboring in exchange for thousands of years.  Labor in exchange didn't just start with the industrial revolution.  We know that trade took place even in the ancient world.  After all, how did those Homeric warriors get their goodly bronze armor and spears?  From a copper mine in the back yard?  I expect that the truth is that the guys mining the copper were not even wage slaves but actual slaves, war plunder, working for food if they were lucky.

And we know that, e.g., the Ericksons in treeless Iceland a thousand years ago were raising sheep on their grasslands and weaving wool on hand looms in their sod-insulated houses.  The finished textiles were transported by long-ship to the wool markets of NW Europe.

So the dramatic revolution in labor proposed by Marx is at best a gross exaggeration.  What is true is that the industrial revolution provoked a massive systematization and mobilization of labor unthinkable in former times.  And system is domination.

But then comes Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and his argument that socialism was impossible because it couldn't compute prices.  And without prices you can't figure the cost of anything.

Notice the bigger point Mises is making.  If you don't know the cost of things then you are at risk of wasting valuable resources.  And the most valuable resource is human labor.  What is worse?  Commodifying labor with market-set wage rates, or wasting human lives doing pointless and wasteful things?

We know the answer to that because we have the example of the Soviet Empire.  The result of 70 years of socialism was enormous and tragic waste.  There was a prodigal waste of natural resources, as the Soviets mindlessly mined and laid waste to the land of the Soviet Union.  And there was tragic and brutal waste of humans, from the relatively mild waste of ordinary workers that "pretended to work for a government that pretended to pay" them to the utterly cruel waste of prisoners worked to death in the labor camps and the Kolyma goldfields.  In those days the London Economist used to write about "subtracting value" in the economies of the Soviet empire.

It's all very well to assert that in the best of all possible worlds workers would be happily working for their own needs in Arcadia.  But no human has ever lived in such a world.  Every human group has always had to fight for its food and shelter, and thus every human has been subjected to the need to fight for the welfare of the community.

The reality of human labor was, in the hunter-gatherer days, that all work product was the property of the whole community, so the individual laborer did not own the product of his labor.  The reality in the agricultural age was that the product of the individual labor was probably owned by his liege lord.

It is only under capitalism, in a system of labor in exchange, that the individual laborer has a chance to own most of his production.  And if the laborer looks around him he can find, with a bit of effort, that if he upgrades his skills a little he can produce a more valuable product and earn more wages.

There is no doubt that the price system is a hard master.  It's a system and all systems are dominatory.  The price system is constantly peering over the worker's shoulder asking if his is really making the best use of his talents.  And worst of all, when a worker's skills become superseded by some new invention or automation, the worker must either work harder, find a new skill, or accept the cruel verdict of the market that tells him that his skill is not that valuable any more.

The question always is: compared to what?  You don't like the price system?  Then come up with a better idea.  Marx and his adepts thought they had found that better idea 150 years ago.  It turned out they were proposing a cure that was worse than the disease.

And that returns us to the old Hippocratic oath, which begins with the injunction to do no harm.

Ted Cruz's Real Game

I know we are all supposed to be a little shocked at Ted Cruz and his reckless actions over the continuing resolution.  And defunding Obamacare.  What happens if the American people blame the Republicans, again, for shutting down the government?



Let's relax, shall we?  My guess is that nobody will remember much about the Fall of 2013, except that Ted Cruz stuck a stake in the ground and fought against Obamacare.



Today, the energetic Michelle Malkin puts the Obamacare issue front and center, with "Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died."  Yep, our Michelle is self-employed, so her health plan recently sent her a letter telling her that her health plan won't be available next year under full Obamacare.  So Obama's central promise that, if you like your health plan you get to keep it, is a lie.



Of course it was a lie.  Anyone could have seen that coming.  But America's women are trusting souls.  They believe it when someone tells them that they can keep their health plan.



In a grand strategic sense, I assert that women are coming of age with the Obama era.  Up to now, in the era that women have had the vote, they have never got royally screwed.  They got the vote, the little darlings, they got to abort their babies if the father didn't step up to the mark.  They got to divorce men that didn't turn out too good.  They got to come out into the working world and compete for jobs with men, and even got the legal system to put a finger on the scales of justice in their favor.  They got Medicare to take care of their mothers.  They got dozens of welfare programs to take care of them if their "partner" didn't step up to the mark.



But health care is where women live.  Health care is what women talk about when they are together.  Health care is what women worry about.



What women want, of course, is unlimited high-quality health care for them and their children and their mothers at an affordable cost, so naturally, that is what Candidate and President Obama promised them.  What Obamacare is suddenly giving them is mediocre health care at an astronomical cost.



And the average LoFo woman voter is just now beginning to find that out.



In the next two years we are going to see an electoral earthquake, and at the center of it will be angry, scorned women compared to which Hell hath no fury.



Ted Cruz is running for president on the assumption that the rightmost 60 percent of the 2016 voters will be looking for a tough, no nonsense street fighter.  As the two political armies march towards the climactic Battle of 2016 Ted Cruz is turning up at all the meaningless skirmishes, the minor contests at which a few people get clobbered and the march resumes the next day.  Ted is turning up at the skirmishes, bravely leading the troops, demonstrating to all and sundry that he is the man to lead the great army that will be brought to strategic concentration in 2016.



Now imagine what it would mean if all those waffling soccer moms and security moms and America's-First-Black-President moms of the last 20 years became, in 2016, raging healthcare moms.



But what about divisiveness?  Is Ted Cruz too divisive to win those LoFo moderates?



To those of you worried about Ted Cruz being too divisive and not enough of a team player, we old geezers that were around in the 1970s have something to tell you.



Back in the 1970s Ronald Reagan was considered by all sensible people as a complete flake.  He was a right-winger; he was a B-movie actor; he was divisive; he was a puppet of his kitchen cabinet; he was ignorant.  And even libertarian-conservatives like me half bought the liberal line.



It all turned out to be rubbish, pure liberal moonshine.  A couple of telling points.  When they looked at Reagan's papers after his death they found that he had read all the classics, including Mises and Hayek.  They could tell that because the books were full of Reagan's annotations.  They also found that many of the weekly radio addresses he made between 1976 and 1978 were drafted in his own handwriting: so Reagan actually wrote them.  Imagine that!  Those Reagan radio addresses ran the gamut of presidential issues; you could say that Reagan was prepping for the presidency when he gave them, making sure that he had taken the trouble to at least develop a familiarity with the issues that would come across his presidential desk.  The tone of the addresses was brusque and slightly angry, a startling difference from the aw-shucks avuncular President Reagan that we learned to know and love after 1980.



One worrying thing about Reagan was that he didn't do well under questioning.  He didn't do well at presidential debates.  You felt that he really didn't have his answers down pat, and you worried that some liberal questioner would trip him up.  That helped advance the liberal line that Reagan wasn't really up to the job.



Ted Cruz is different.  In the first place he has been the brilliant student all his life, punching his ticket at all the prestigious way-stations on the elite liberal career track.  In the second place he is pitch-perfect on the split-screen TV interview.  Here he is on Sean Hannity.  Flawless.



I have a feeling that the combative Cruz is exactly what we in the GOP base are going to want in 2016.  We are like Dorothy's Aunt Em.  For twenty years we have wanted to tell liberals what we thought about them as they trashed every honorable conservative as a kook and an extremist.  Ted Cruz may be just the man to do it for us.  Only he'll do it so smooth that liberals won't know what is happening to them.



Not until after the health care moms of 2016 change US politics forever.