Suppose you are also convinced that Obamacare will be a total disaster. Once in place, constituencies will form that will make it difficult to repeal, yet it will make most ordinary Americans deeply unhappy. Obamacare will be the big-government equivalent of crystal meth: an addictive substance that destroys your health. When the public finally realizes this, it will abandon the Democrats in droves and look for an alternative.

If you think both these things are true, then what Ted Cruz is doing makes some sense. Cruz wants to take over the Republican Party. He could try to organize the Tea Party as a third party, but that is a risky proposition, and it could easily fail. Representational systems like the one we have in the United States, which lack proportional representation, are generally unkind to third parties. It's true that the Whig Party fell apart in the early 1850s and was succeeded by the Republican Party, but since that time no third party has won a majority of either house of Congress or the presidency.

So the prudent move is to take over the existing GOP's operations and transform it in the image of the Tea Party, with the goal of becoming the dominant party once again. That is why Cruz is attacking his fellow Republicans for being weak-kneed and insufficiently devoted to the conservative cause, rather than doing what you would think a hard-right politician should be doing -- attacking liberals and Democrats. He is deliberately fracturing the Republican Party so he can take hold of the largest piece of it.

In some sense this is a repeat of the conservative movement's playbook from 1964 on: Push moderates out of the Republican Party and make it a wholly owned subsidiary of the conservative movement. As George W. Bush would say, Mission Accomplished. The moderates are mostly gone. George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole would be RINOs today. Even Ronald Reagan would have to be sent to a re-education camp to extinguish his dangerously liberal tendencies toward raising taxes and nuclear disarmament. The “mainstream conservatives” the press talks about today are a misnomer. Mainstream conservatives aren't moderate at all -- they are very, very conservative in relation to the Republicans of days gone by. What distinguishes "mainstream" Republicans is that they are not much interested in what they see as the Tea Party's suicide mission.

Enter Cruz. He sees that what is now called the Tea Party has actually been gaining dominance in the Republican Party for some time. He also notes that the Tea Party increasingly controls the primaries and that elected Republicans are more afraid of being attacked in a primary on their right than on their left. Thus, he notes that the wing of the party he wants to lead increasingly has the other parts of the party cowed. He likes that. He likes it a lot.