Of Prudence and Principle: Ted Cruz Endorses Donald Trump

How do you tell whether someone in public life acts out of moral principle or cynical pursuit of his own advantage? Is it at all a complicated matter? Does it require thought on what motivates a genuine statesman, and how the intention to do good must take account of practical reality? Apparently not, to judge by the conflagration of scorn, ignited in certain circles when Senator Ted Cruz decided to endorse the candidacy of Donald Trump. To Dr. Charles Krauthammer Krauthammer on Cruz: "This Is Politics; Exactly What You'd Expect" ...and to the editors of the Wall Street Journal "Ted Cruz’s Convictions", Cruz’s decision was so palpably corrupt that no reference to the fate of the nation if Trump loses was even necessary. In his written announcement Facebook post, Senator Cruz sets out six urgent policy concerns -- the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights, Obamacare, energy, immigration, national security, and Internet freedom -- that compel his vote for Trump. They are not taken up by his detractors, except insofar as the Journal’s editors dismiss them for having been no less true two months ago, when Cruz “ostentatiously refused to endorse Trump.” Krauthammer’s rebuke amounts to his recollection that both Cruz and Trump claimed to be outsiders, above the corrupt mores of politicians, and now look at them. Krauthammer does not take very seriously Cruz’s claim to have searched his conscience before doing this: a “quick search of a very small place,” as in the case of all politicians (they lack the moral depth of television talking heads). Neither do the Wall Street Journal opinion writers think Cruz capable of honest deliberation. Cruz must be thinking only of his own career in belatedly reconciling himself to Trump.

The Journal editors do betray something of their original hatred of Cruz when, looking forward to a Hillary Clinton administration, they preemptively reproach Cruz for thwarting Republican congressional efforts to give her whatever she wants (to “compromise” and thereby “modestly advance” conservative goals” in Journal-speak). This is entirely congruent with their grounds for scorning Cruz during the Obama years. Only a dishonest grandstander would try to get his congressional colleagues to use the constitutional power of the purse and the mechanism of checks and balances to arrest terrible executive policies, policies often called pernicious and unconstitutional by the Journal editors themselves. The Journal accuses Cruz of not becoming one of Trump’s antagonists “for months during the primaries when the businessman might have been defeated.” The attacks on Trump by Bush, Paul, Rubio, Graham, and Fiorina were unavailing, but had Ted Cruz only joined the attackers it would have been a different ballgame. In fact, what launched Trump and made him so formidable was the resentment generated in millions of voters by the Republican leadership’s failure to confront Obama and to make good on the promises issued during the 2010 and 2014 elections. As a senator, Ted Cruz, more than anyone, sought to buck this tendency and to initiate resistance. But that was unwillingness to compromise for the sake of moderately advancing conservative goals. Of course, you could say that endorsing Trump was compromise for the sake of advancing conservative goals, or preventing the complete dominance of socialist ones. Why don’t we experiment a little with the premise that Cruz is a better man than his detractors and consider the compromise he had to make? He had more reason than they to resent the malice and mendacity of Donald Trump. It was not their loved ones whom Trump aspersed. As to Cruz’s ostentatious refusal to endorse Trump at the convention, we will leave to the Journal’s editors their notion of ostentation, but reply that he did not refuse to endorse. He refrained from doing so in his address. Then, meeting with the Texas delegation, he said that he was not in the habit of supporting those who attacked his family members. None who call themselves men are. But he seems to have departed from the habitual and endorsed someone he has reason to hate. Those deriding Cruz take it for granted that the only effect of the endorsement will be upon his own career. We might remind them that Cruz came in second, behind Trump, and has some influence with movement conservatives -- not a decisive factor in the primary contest, but a party component that Trump now badly needs to attract. Is it possible that Cruz, seeing that the election was getting quite close, took a step both personally painful and likely to bring opprobrium down upon his head, took it for the sake of stopping Hillary Clinton -- took it for his country? How does it work, anyway, this compromise business? Is it something you are to do only with leftists, once they are ensconced in the world’s most powerful office? Is it admirable to bend to the will of an Obama or a Clinton, but not to put aside one’s private passions to help Trump prevail over Clinton, when he is the only alternative to her presidency? Liberal Republicans freely lecture conservatives on the necessity of “moderation” and “prudence” (sometimes they say “pragmatism”). They loudly proclaim the folly of demanding conservative “purity.” And yet what is it other than a demand for purity that causes a Journal columnist like Bret Stephens to write that his “fundamental objection to Trump is that he is unfit, as a person, to be president” and we do not “elect a policy menu?" NeverTrump for Dummies This means that the policy differences between the candidates are irrelevant -- the point is whom Mr. Stephens deems to be of sufficiently upright character (Hillary Clinton?). And so it matters little whether the Titanic has a captain who steers her into an iceberg or another one who does not: let the ship founder so long as its captain is fit, as a person, to be such. And if the American ship of state should go down by the bow, like the Titanic, then as the stern dips beneath the waves we can still admire the moral probity and independence of our erstwhile conservative pundits, and that is the important thing. Prudence, “not to be confused with mere cleverness or cunning,” (Carnes Lord, “Aristotle,” in Strauss and Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, /Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; 1963 130-31) seeks to achieve a virtuous goal by taking into account the actual, current circumstances around us. Moderation, Aristotle tells us, is the moral quality that preserves prudence, freeing us from the passions associated with the love of pleasure and aversion to pain. (Ethics, Bk. VI) To repeat somewhat, the decision to support Trump must have been a painful one for Cruz, but intended to stave off a continuation of the calamitous presidential leadership that characterized the last nearly eight years. The ambivalent conservatives who disparage Cruz, by contrast, are blinded by their loathing of him and Trump. They also appear slightly inebriated with their role as beings too ethically pure to join the Republican cause, even when the adversary is Hillary Clinton. Cruz displays a prudence that they simply lack.