Republican politician Ted Cruz is a caricature of a caricature of a vague idea. He has said there were 12 Communists on the teaching faculty during his time at Princeton. He claimed that defense secretary Chuck Hagel’s nomination was openly and publicly celebrated by the Iranian government. He has been booed off the stage by members of his own party.

It’s hard to imagine Cruz haranguing his own family with this kind of spiteful, indignant and knowingly false rhetoric. He acts this way in the public sphere precisely because it is a public sphere. These are general, defaming, often blatantly false comments he lobs into the ionosphere without specific aim because they make him something. We are talking about him. But the Cruz of the face-to-face, outside of the suit? If we’re honest, he’s most likely an affable man. In a lot of ways, you have to be simply to get along as a professional human being. It’s hard to imagine him approaching daily life with the daggers out.

But you don’t know this Ted Cruz, if he even exists, because he has not allowed himself to be known.

This kind of caricature-driven interaction based on a crafted persona is not new. Read Huey Long. Read Caesar Augustus. Read Hammurabi. Public figures have been molding themselves into convenient one-dimensional tropes since the pharaohs. But in many ways its proliferation in these internet decades has made Cruzification an industry in its own right. Because in the sense that man can’t speak like this to man in the timeless glare of face-to-face interaction without immediate repercussion, man can say or do anything if he shouts it into a void. For lack of a better term, the soul feels it when you wrong a person with rhetoric and you can see it twist into them and their eyes tell you what you’ve done.

You’ve probably read Kevin Koczwara’s profile of Ted Westervelt in Howler. It inspired a glut of reaction online, some positive, much of it negative. It’s a good piece, but it’s shallow, and that’s through no fault of Koczwara’s. In fact, that qualifier is a credit to Koczwara. It’s a thinly spread eddy of brackish water precisely because it illuminates a specific point about Westervelt: in a lot of ways, he’s unremarkably human. His feature photos for the article capture him using his phone in a field of flowers. He wears a straw hat. He seems affable enough at a Colorado Rapids game. He likes gardens. He certainly wasn’t stumping for his cause on a stadium street corner, lambasting each passerby with shouts that they were sheep.

And that’s a positive reflection for a man who, as recently as Thursday, called me, a man he’s never met who agrees with his core tenets, a cultist. My previous comment was a non sequitur about flowers.

@WillParchman It’s just adorable the way you cultists call us a cult. — Ted Westervelt (@soccerreform) November 20, 2014

To approximate this kind of interaction in reality, you’d literally have to run after strangers in the street, a broadsheet with “MLS” X’ed in blood creased into your palm and a manic shout in your lungs. You’d have to do it all day, every day. And you’d have to do it with such ferocity that your neighbors, after a time, simply roll up their sleeves, stiffen their collars so your shouts gather at their necks and mutter curses about the omnipresence of the thing. It’s unimaginable. And it gets to the Pharaohic quality of it all. If you can’t be who you are online – if that isn’t how you are met – then how do we trust? How do I listen to you?

But this is not about Ted Westervelt. So we shelve that now and our hands fall deeper into the clay.

The internet is a good place to learn, but it is a terrible place to understand. Minds are rarely changed. They are instead reinforced and projected. The core of the pro/rel message as we have been told it is this: you are wrong, I will tell you why you are wrong, you will change your mind, and I will tell you why in the most strident of terms. For those who’ve dealt with this, the pattern is relatively straightforward: issue the clarion call by using a Twitter buzzword (pro/rel, open system, hell, MLS works) and wait. If you build it, they will come.

The biggest failure of the pro/rel movement is not that it has alienated the independent majority. Under this angry evangelistic guise it never had a chance among centrists. Had they polled a political research group, they’d have found that the majority of independents value discussion and interchange. They want to weigh, they don’t want a sermon. Pro/rel’s clumsy and impossibly obtuse marketing approach never took any of that into account, so it failed before it began. They should’ve set up online discussion panels, not hyperbolic Twitter accounts.

But that wasn’t its biggest foible. Its biggest failure was the alienation of its own party, the Cruzification of those who support the cause.

Like me.

I have never written about this before because I didn’t think it was germane to anything or any particular discussion, but I am “pro pro/rel.” I am, as strange as it feels to admit, in Ted Cruz’s party. And I hate that I am in that party. In the way it has been presented to the public by the extremely vocal minority, there is nothing edifying about it. I don’t agree with the policy of needlessly badgering innocents until the inevitable depression of Twitter’s “Block” button comes. I don’t agree that other people need to agree with me (although I would like them to). I don’t agree that its lack of implementation in America has ruined our soccer, or that our soccer even can be ruined by such a decision. I do agree that it would make things better, but at this point my thoughts have been bludgeoned and pushed into the core of the earth. Why speak out when the wash of verbiage will simply drown you out with hyperbole? If this sounds like wider political voter apathy amongst Millennials, there’s a correlation. The pro/rel movement managed to tap into the very emotion that would make their push as unsupportable as possible.

It has driven me into a mental space where I am not only unwilling to side with their arguments, but I am actively hostile to them for reasons I cannot immediately explain. Where do you go from here?

@WillParchman @FriendlyFAUX We don’t know what else to do. Does that make sense? Twitter is a medium, so why not use it? — David De Groot (@davidrdegroot) November 22, 2014

This is the ultimate failure of the pro/rel campaign, and why any progress in this nation in regards to the adoption of an “open” system will be done in spite of this type of harassment. If it is done at all, it will be done by hands reaching across barbed wire, by meaningful discussions in dimly lit salons lined with mahogany bookshelves and snifters of aged liquor and real discussion (this, I will say, is how I’d want it done, but you are free to pursue truth at your own speed). By kindness. By connection. Because this is how humanity operates. It is being known.

So now we come to the pulsing core. What do the most vocal of the promotion and relegation proponents want? Really? Because if they want the movement to gain steam, for you to think as they do, they are alienating more than they are shepherding, and it’s hard to imagine they couldn’t have seen this coming. It is a disservice to all of us who would otherwise see their cause succeed in the end (albeit several years down the road). In the end this is not about the message, it’s about the packaging. Because what is your message if it’s never delivered? Most of us would agree that pro/rel is a topic worth pursuing, but it’s become a taboo, a joke, and it’s almost impossible to remember anymore that it wasn’t always this way. And it doesn’t have to be.

If the politics of the 21st century have taught us anything, it’s that fiery, obtuse rhetoric and inhuman dialogue are virtual off-switches for the human psyche. The biggest problem with the general tenor of the marketing push of the pro/rel campaign at large is that it has come across as clumsy and overbearing. It is a prize fighter vaguely stabbing at the dark. Even if you wanted him to find his direction, and even if you’d put money on him, you’d find yourself looking away by the end of the fight.

So on we march. Hopefully toward pro/rel some day. And the vast majority of us remain even more hopeful that we find discussion amidst the blizzard of static.