As we pass the half-way mark of the primary season, we need to home in on the candidate most likely to fulfill the duties of the office of President with prudence, integrity, and legality. We need to agree on the man most apt to be our nation’s executive. We need to decide who we want to become the aegis of the conservative movement for the next four, eight, twenty years. That person is Ted Cruz.
Ted Cruz stands for almost everything that the average Hillsdalian holds dear. At 13, he memorized the Constitution. He cares about religious liberty and the Second Amendment. He advocates a flat tax and abolishing the IRS.
One Hillsdale alumnus, Raz Shafer ’09, spent 12 days this month at Hillsdale working for Cruz’s campaign. Shafer calls him “the Hillsdale type.” Cruz is also the person that men of the Left, like Robert Reich and David Horsey, are describing as the candidate “more dangerous than Donald Trump” because of his beliefs and ideas. He is the conservative warrior on the field.
Donald Trump, while attracting mass support from some segments of the population and appearing highly “electable,” is not conservative. The way he speaks about women is unacceptable. How he talks about his relationship with God is unnerving. No man whose career is built on abusing eminent domain should become the face of a movement concerned with limiting government, protecting property rights, and preserving the Constitution. If there’s one thing to take away from the last eight years, it’s that it’s a bad idea to root for a candidate on a platform of pure “change.”
By staying in the race, Governor Kasich is dismantling his own people. He is playing a game of chicken from which Trump is going to emerge victor.
The very largest ideological difference between Kasich and Cruz is trivial when compared to the divide that separates them from Trump.
Cruz’s campaign is anything but a long shot. Cruz has roughly 60 percent as many delegates as Donald Trump. That’s actual competition, unlike Kasich.
Moreover, anyone who’s going to root for Trump is already supporting him. Trump’s support was momentous and fast, but here it stands. Anyone and everyone still pulling for Kasich after half of the states in the Union have passed him by aren’t going to pick Trump as their second. Kasich’s and Rubio’s voters have a clear second choice in Cruz.
Many Hillsdale students, either disillusioned with candidates so engrossed in daily ephemera or distracted by fine arguments about the good, the true, and the beautiful, refuse to be swayed — often, even to be involved in politics at all.
Here’s the thing: Daily life is made possible by having ruling officials who are God-fearing and, failing that, at least law-abiding. Politics isn’t about finding a substitute savior. It matters to our daily life, and we should care about it at least as much as we care about having food on the table or good professors in class. Partaking in that process is a part of being human, a practical part, but one elevated nonetheless; that is why Aristotle segues right into a full-fledged treatise on it from his work on ethics.
The blessings of this great land are not everlasting, nor to be taken for granted; they must be actively guarded, for ourselves and for our posterity. Cruz’s father immigrated to this country from Cuba. He intimately understands that freedom is precious and perishable. He should be Hillsdale’s choice to wear the mantle of conservatism.