The Parable of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz
As the mob that would storm Congress began to assemble, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley—a former editor of the Yale Law Journal and supreme court law clerk—saluted them with a raised fist. Inside the Capitol, Texas Senator Ted Cruz—a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and supreme court law clerk—argued against certifying the election results in Arizona.
Cruz and Hawley scare me in a way Donald Trump doesn’t. They scare me because they are neither ignoramuses nor pathological liars. They are more like the rest of us. Trump is a sociopath, utterly unable to care about anyone or anything but himself. Hawley and Cruz are less exotic. In other circumstances—if Jeb Bush had become president in 2016, for instance—they would right now merely be very conservative Republicans. Trump has long broadcast his hatred of democracy. By contrast, had you told Hawley and Cruz earlier in their careers that they would one day support a coup d’etat, I suspect they would have recoiled in horror. They did not set out to become what they now are.
My guess is that they viewed the Trump era a little like Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy—who were both ambitious young senators in the early 1950s—viewed the era of Joseph McCarthy. Nixon and Kennedy were both smart enough to know that McCarthy was a dangerous lunatic. But McCarthy enjoyed strong pockets of support both in Nixon’s Republican Party and among Kennedy’s Irish-Catholic base. (Robert Kennedy briefly worked for McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. JFK skipped the 1954 Senate vote censuring McCarthy, which later led Eleanor Roosevelt—in a play on the title of Kennedy’s book—to say she wished the Massachusetts Senator “had a little less profile and a little more courage.”)
Nixon and Kennedy saw McCarthyism not as a test but as a sideshow, a temporary unpleasantness that they must survive—with their political viability intact—so they could one day take their moment on history’s stage. Luckily for them, McCarthyism did subside, and each man ascended to the presidency, as they had hoped. As a result, when children read textbooks about Nixon and Kennedy, they read about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, Civil Rights, Vietnam, the opening to China, and yes, Watergate—but not the two men’s cowardice in the face of a demagogue who threatened the rule of law.
Hawley and Cruz appear to have approached the Trump era in much the same way. Cruz certainly had no illusions about the character of the man who called his wife ugly and his father an accomplice to JFK’s assassination. In 2016, he called Trump “utterly amoral” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” But Cruz and Hawley realized that Trump—like McCarthy in the early 1950s—had forged a visceral connection to the voters whose support they had to have. And so both men began making moral concessions in order to not alienate Trump and his base—so that once the Trumpist interlude ended they could seek the presidency themselves, and achieve the great deeds for which history would remember them.
That now looks like a bad bet. To stay on Trump’s good side, Cruz and Hawley had to commit greater and greater offenses against democracy and the Constitution. The deep revulsion—even among many conservatives—over Wednesday’s mob attack on Congress may cripple their future presidential prospects. It’s likely that their complicity in Trump’s effort to overturn the election will prove the defining event of their political careers.
For me, the terrifying part of the story is that, on a smaller scale, many of us are susceptible to this same kind of moral failure. You wake up on a given morning determined to accomplish a set of tasks that you consider crucial to your personal or professional success. And then, out of nowhere, at the worst possible time, a problem comes into view. Maybe you learn that a friend or family member is in trouble. Maybe you discover that the path to glory you’ve charted out for yourself contains an ethical glitch. There’s a tremendous urge to downplay or evade this terrible inconvenience—to do whatever is necessary to push it to the side so you can return to the path you were on. Sometimes, as with Kennedy and Nixon in the 1950s, you get away with it. The problem turns out not to be that significant, and quickly goes away. But sometimes the challenge you refuse to face just grows bigger and bigger, until it explodes and causes irrevocable harm. And you realize that the sideshow was actually the main event, that in life we don’t get always get to choose which tests define us and when.
“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” It’s a cliché because it’s true. I don’t think Cruz and Hawley were destined to become history’s villains. I think that, for some reason, they were unable to put aside their ambition—their grand plan for themselves—and recognize that Trump was the challenge they were meant to face. In the Book of Esther, Mordechai asks the eponymous heroine a question: “Who knows but that you have come to your position for such a time as this?” All of us have moments in life like that. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are reminders of what can happen when we fail.
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Best,
Peter
There’s a discussion out there about how some people knew that Wednesday was going to be violent and unprecedented, while others remained clueless. Here’s an explanation: anyone who understands that Trumpism is a full-fledged CULT were never in doubt that January 6th would be a an historic day in the life of this nation! There were red flags EVERYWHERE (coming from Trump’s own words, the activity on social media, as well as numerous stories being reported in the media) that were signaling that not only would violence erupt—but that it would be directed at Congress in an unprecedented manner.
What those who understand cult behavior have observed time and time again is that as soon as a cult leader sends strong signals to his followers that the time has come for them to act in defense of their dear leader (think Manson and Jim Jones), they will follow their leader’s orders just like a robot follows their programmer’s commands—even if it requires sacrificing their lives.
This behavior is exactly what people mean when they describe Trump cult members as brainwashed. Trump utilized the classic steps that authoritarians routinely use to rewired aspects of their followers’ neural networks. Those steps ultimately restrict one’s access to their own reasoning and critical thinking skills in a manner that prohibits them from believing anything other than what their leader tells them is true. The most dangerous cults are those that end in murder, mass suicide or an authoritarian style abuse by the leader towards his followers and/or his enemies.
Because other lack the typical characteristics of cult leaders, I don’t believe that Hawley and Cruz are more dangerous than Trump. Neither one of them has Trump’s ability to follow, to the letter, every single strategy outlined in the authoritarian playbook. Also, in order to become a cult leader, one must possess a very particular combination of traits, most notably, the ability to soothe a very deep-seated sense of inadequacy in the guts of their staunch followers. It’s that gift of elevated self-esteem that creates the undying loyalty of cult followers towards their leader. Trump was so successful at brainwashing his followers because his own anger at having been deemed unworthy by the elites is truly authentic and deeply felt; like many of his staunchest followers, his vengeance is rooted in his low self-esteem. That authenticity is a prerequisite that both Cruz and Hawley lack; they could never make that sort of connection with Trump’s base!
You have a remarkably attenuated notion of courage.
Mitt Romney is a grotesquely wealthy man in good health. He has thriving business, a loving or at least polite family, fine places to live, and armed guards, and he'll never go hungry or cold. The episode last week is likely the first time he's ever been in real danger of his life that he hasn't invited himself through expensive sports. The only thing he risked, voting to impeach, was a Senate seat. He risked a job he liked but certainly does not need. That is not courage. There he was, trembling, because he was afraid some other very wealthy men wouldn't like him anymore. In a word: Aw.
I'm a single mother. I've been raped twice, attacked outside a gym and had my nose broken and got away by fighting, had my house broken into twice, had a nice ex-husband who eventually turned violent and did his best to persuade people that I was nuts (fortunately, people saw him coming). Because of how work and custody are structured in this country, I spent ten years pulling all-nighters twice a week, sleeping on average four hours a week, working freelance on tight deadlines for $15-60/hr, no benefits, tight deadlines, working at night after my daughter was asleep and during the day when she was at daycare and school. I never had any idea how I'd pay the mortgage three months ahead, but knew that if I didn't, she'd grow up in poverty and instability, because I wouldn't be able to get a mortgage again till most of her childhood had passed, and we'd fall victim to rising rents. So I just kept beating the bushes for those freelance jobs till she was old enough to be home alone for an hour or so at a time after school, when I could get a better job. I had no benefits, and, when the Great Recession rolled around and my clients shut down, no unemployment insurance. No one helped. My family is small, old, and far away. You know how people tell you to ask for help? Go to your "faith community", go to friends, ask for help? I want you to consider how many single mothers you help out routinely: that's how many single mothers everyone helps out routinely. I found -- as many Jewish poor and single mothers find -- that Jews in particular don't want to hear that you haven't got money, which is why, after getting my daughter past her bat mitzvah, I've made no effort to go back to the Community of Comfortably Wealthy Organized Jews and all the delightful talk there about ethics and community. And the society around wanted me to shut up and accept poverty and hardship, dangerous living conditions, and a bad education for my daughter: I did not.
Who had courage? I did. I've put myself, all 5'1" of me, between aggressive men and women they were victimizing, bodily, and shamed standing-around men into intervening. I've taken on aggrieved men and fielded physical threats in many situations. I've thrown men out of stores and apartments, taken them to court. I've dealt with unstable tenants and students, some armed. I've fought with her lying father about covid and invited a lawsuit by keeping her here rather than expose her to his household's carelessness.
Here on the other side of 50 I'm still robbed for my labor, and yet I'm the only one making sure this child goes to college without getting a debt millstone hung around her neck. She's got men all around talking a beautiful game and making excuses to her about why there isn't money from them.
I am not scared of these jackasses at the Capitol because, like so many women, I've lived under too much physical and existential threat from "I AM VERY ANGRY" men to find them all that scary anymore. They're lethally brutal? Okay, how's that different from an abusive boyfriend, or the guy at work who snaps? The random guy in the street or the bar who's catcalling you or sucking his teeth at you, the guy you turn down? They shout a lot and throw shit everywhere? Please, let me introduce you to legions of "good guy" husbands, fathers, boyfriends. They're stupid and want to destroy the order under which your life flourishes? Wonderful, let me tell you the story of every single mother alive, and a lot of the married ones. We have spent so much time picking up and restoring lives after men rampage through and do violence to them that honest to god, man, I'm not scared anymore. Not scared of poverty, not scared of sleeplessness, not scared of showy violence, not scared of laws turning to disadvantage us, not scared. It's all burnt out, we have too much experience with it from you guys already.
But you are. You're scared of them. And you think gajillionaire Mitt's brave because he voted to impeach, but to do it, he had to hide behind God's skirts. Boy, that was some long God story he told about how God was commanding him to do it. Now that is courage indeed.
What worried me in the rioting wasn't that a bunch of politicians turned out to be scared and a bunch of cops turned out to be bought. Those are things you can expect. What worried me is that this went on for hours and, in the midst of a highly populated American area, regular people sat around waiting to be rescued. Just sat. There weren't people pouring into the streets and up to the Capitol with whatever they had handy to go dispatch the threat themselves. If they had, they'd have put that thing down within 45 minutes. But they didn't. That's the part that worries me.