Much as I respect our friend Ross Douthat, I believe his post-mortem of the Cruz candidacy in the Times today misses the mark: a caricature of “True Conservatism,” the demise of which he undertakes to explain. To my mind, Ross minimizes the forces that gave rise to Cruz’s constituency and exaggerates its (purported) intransigence. I’ve responded in a column just posted on the home page. A taste:
President Bush’s conservative heresies had not merely “reached for the center” or, as Ross elsewhere puts it, “led the Republican Party into a ditch.” They had paved the way for President Obama and the radical Left to lead the country into a bottomless pit….
No sensible conservative is against compromise. We see the country being destroyed. We were and are reacting to a crisis. This is not an Ayn Rand seminar. We have simply wanted the bleeding stopped by — radical as this may sound — having Republicans do what they promised to do in order to get us to elect them.
The full column is here.