OF THE top two Republicans in Iowa, one is a universally recognisable type. Short on policy, long on ego and bombast, promising to redeem a nation he disparages through the force of his will, Donald Trump’s strongman shtick is familiar from Buenos Aires to Rome, inflected though it is by reality TV and the property business. The other, Ted Cruz, champion of the caucuses, is the scion of a particular version of America and of a peculiar era in its history; a politician who repels or baffles many of his compatriots, even as others rally to his godly standard.

Superficially the senator from Texas is a classic overachiever, whose ability to surmount Himalayan obstacles—such as winning that office in his first-ever political race—bespeaks and fuels an adamantine self-confidence; the sort whose warp-speed ascent is powered by strenuous calculation and fearsome intelligence. Don Willett, a judge and long-term acquaintance, describes Mr Cruz as a “freakishly gifted” lawyer; watching him argue at the Supreme Court, during his stint as Texas’s solicitor-general, was “like watching Michael Jackson unveil the moonwalk.”

Like many modern politicians, if not Mr Trump, he is uncannily disciplined. On the trail he tells the same jokes, accompanied by the same gestures and self-satisfied chuckles, reproducing chunks of his book, “A Time for Truth”, verbatim. In good lawyerly fashion, he stretches the bounds of taste and honesty rather than blatantly violating them.

Yet for all these formulaic talents, in his outlook and appeal Mr Cruz is an idiosyncratic product of the convulsions that followed the financial crisis and Barack Obama’s election, and of his upbringing. Like many of his core beliefs, his evangelical faith—“To God be the glory”, began his victory speech in Iowa—came from his father Rafael, a Cuban refugee who fled to Texas, turned to drink, then found God and is now a zealous preacher. By all accounts, Mr Cruz’s Christianity is profound and sincere: Chip Roy, formerly his chief of staff, recalls visiting his condo to pick up his suit and spying a Bible and other devotional texts at his bedside. It is audible in his cadences and susurrations, his frequent references to scripture, disgust at the Supreme Court’s defilements, and injunctions to prayer: “Father God, please”, he asks supporters to murmur, “continue this spirit of revival, awaken the body of Christ.”

In Iowa, some were plainly impressed. “He’s a man of faith,” purred a cheering woman at a restaurant that poked from the snow of Manchester into the milky sky. Mr Cruz would be the most insistently religious Republican nominee in decades.

He would also be the most ardently devoted to the constitution, a fervour itself influenced by his creed—for him, as for the Founding Fathers, Americans’ rights are bestowed by God—and by his background. Before he fled Cuba, Rafael Cruz was tortured, which helps to explain why, for his son, freedom is always imperilled and government constantly on the verge of despotism. To hear him tell it, Obamacare is not just regrettable but tyrannical; gun controls are the high road to the gulag. That vigilance over liberty is widespread in Texas, where he spent most of his childhood (he was born in Canada, which Mr Trump says might disqualify him). He was among a group of teenagers who learned a mnemonic version of the constitution and regurgitated it at clubby lunches. Daniel Hodge, a former colleague and now the governor’s chief of staff, reckons Mr Cruz is a Texan “from his head to his boots”. His lucky pair are made of ostrich skin.

Defying Reagan

Calling him a demagogue overlooks the authenticity of these convictions. Better to say that his beliefs, skilfully angled and promoted, have fortuitously chimed with the evolving mood of conservative voters, especially with the emergence of the Tea Party and the backlash against Mr Obama’s agenda and the bail-outs that followed the crash. The fights Mr Cruz picked as solicitor-general—for religious liberty, the death penalty and states’ rights, against abortion and gun control—both reflected his philosophy and set up his long-shot campaign for the Senate. (He is said to have relaxed by playing several chess games at once.) His hardline antics in Washington—most strikingly, his flamboyant effort to “defund” Obamacare, which helped to bring about a partial shutdown of the government in 2013—both served his instincts and laid the ground for a presidential run.

Critics say the Obamacare stunt tarnished the Republican brand, jeopardised America’s economy, and had just one beneficiary: Mr Cruz. Yet distancing himself from his fellow Republicans is as central to his pitch as excoriating Hillary Clinton. In his book Mr Cruz quotes Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Despite Reagan’s status in his personal pantheon, alongside God and the constitution, he does not observe it. In 2013 he likened those who eschewed his kamikaze tactics to appeasers of Nazism; now, on the stump, he lambasts mainstream Republicans as corrupt and pusillanimous.

This push to portray himself as the lone ranger of true conservatism seems to be working. “Talk doesn’t do it for me,” said a man wearing an NRA jacket at Bogie’s Steak House in Albia, where, positioned beneath a stuffed deer, Mr Cruz made his usual, casually thuggish attack on the mainstream media: “You’ve got to look at what somebody’s done.” Not surprisingly, however, it has incurred a cost.

Politicians often get on better with the public than with people they actually know; to label one ambitious—especially a 45-year-old junior senator running for president—is tautological. But the antipathy inspired by Mr Cruz transcends the routine gripes. It has followed him through the litany of elite institutions in which, for all his digs at the establishment, he has spent his adult life: from Princeton, to Harvard Law School, to a clerkship on the Supreme Court and his bumptious spell on the campaign for George W. Bush in 2000. (His wife, whom he met on the campaign, is a managing director at Goldman Sachs.) He went back to Texas, later to criticise Mr Bush’s bloated conservatism, only after being passed over for jobs in the administration he felt he deserved. He became an outsider, at least rhetorically, after flopping as an insider. As both Bob Dole and Mr Trump recently put it, “Nobody likes him.”

Father, son and the ghost of holiness

In fact that isn’t altogether fair. David Panton, his room-mate at both Princeton and Harvard, describes him as “a loyal friend” and “extremely polite, kind and respectful”. At least some of his former colleagues like as well as admire him, speaking fondly of his wit, impersonations of characters from “Scarface” and “The Princess Bride” and generosity to underlings. In Texas Mr Hodge remembers him as “the guy who came with his wife to my mother’s 60th birthday party”. But the damning judgment does seem to hold for one influential subset of Mr Cruz’s acquaintances: his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Not one has endorsed him.

As he must, Mr Cruz strives to make a virtue of this unpopularity. His strategy rests on mobilising alienated conservatives, in particular the millions of white evangelical Christians who, his team believes, can swing elections when they are galvanised to vote. Conversely his appeal to moderates is limited. He has had little to say to or about the poor, beyond his perpetual gratitude that, when his father was washing dishes for 50 cents an hour, no one was sent by the government to help him. His flagship economic policy is a regressive flat-rate income tax of 10%. Black Americans, anyone concerned about climate change (which he denies) and non-Christians should look elsewhere. Ditto homosexuals: “This shall not stand,” Mr Cruz declares of gay marriage. That grandiloquent but fuzzy pledge exemplifies his gambit: making impossible vows to disoriented voters which are all, at bottom, a promise to reverse history and revive a fairy-tale idea of America.

His game-plan may itself betray a form of cognitive dissonance—because, beyond Iowa and parts of the South, those elusive evangelical legions may not exist. If the bet comes off, though, the rest of the world is in for a period of abrasive unilateralism. Mr Cruz demonstrates little more interest in foreign alliances than he does in domestic ones; the only foreign leader he namechecks approvingly is Binyamin Netanyahu. He evinces an unholy relish for “carpet-bombing” Islamic State and making the desert glow. Indeed, the violence of his language might interest a psychoanalyst. He says he would “rip to shreds” the nuclear deal with Iran; after introducing his flat tax, he would abolish the IRS, along with numerous other agencies. His insurgent approach to government mostly involves destroying things. He denounces Mr Trump as a man others in Washington can do business with, and, compared with Mr Cruz, he may well be.

One of the scriptural aphorisms Mr Cruz likes to cite is: “You shall know them by their fruits.” He deploys it to support the claim that he would conduct himself in the White House as he has in the Senate. His supporters believe that. “He’ll do what he says he’s going to do,” said a woman holding a baby and wearing a Cruz football shirt at a campaign event in Centerville. If so, the fruits of a Cruz presidency would be confrontation and rancour.