Ted Cruz thought he had Beto O’Rourke right where he wanted him. Without commentary, Cruz tweeted a video of his Democratic rival expressing outrage over the killing of Botham Shem Jean–an African-American man shot dead in his own apartment by an off-duty police officer.
“When we all want justice and the facts and the information to make an informed decision, what is released to the public?” O’Rourke asked as the crowd of predominantly black church-goers. “That he had a small amount of marijuana in his kitchen. How can that be just in this country? How can we continue to lose the lives of unarmed black men in the United States of America at the hands of white police officers? That is not justice. That is not us.”
Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger had allegedly mistaken her victim’s apartment for her own when she barged in and shot Jean dead. An investigation into the killing revealed that the deceased had marijuana in his possession, but the reaction this revelation inspired among observes was widespread confusion over its relevance. Guyger had no warrant and no cause to enter this private residence, and it was Guyer who instigated the confrontation that resulted in this deadly altercation. Shortly after this incident, Guyger was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and fired from the Dallas Police Department.
If Cruz had hoped to rally conservatives to Guyger’s side, he failed miserably. “Lack of outrage about this case is disgraceful,” wrote Reagan White House staffer and author Mona Charen. “The man was gunned down in his own home,” marveled National Review’s David French. “This is the sad distillation of what Ted Cruz has become,” the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf wrote of a lawmaker “who criticizes his opponent for… saying it’s unjust for police to needlessly burst into someone’s apartment and kill them.” But Cruz’s target audience was not the conservative and libertarian intelligentsia. Nor was he simply broadcasting winks and nods toward racially reactionary whites, as the usual suspects on the left insisted. The Texas senator was invoking a style of cultural conservatism that is often at odds with philosophical conservatism.
The foundational conservative ethos is rooted in healthy fear. Conservatives fear the unchecked power of the state, and they are keen to rein it in. They fear the unintended consequences of well-intentioned lawmakers and bureaucrats whose efforts to “do something” so often backfire. They fear the immodest and prideful who do not cherish the traditions that buttress civil society and are inclined to pursue change for change’s sake. Conservatives would first do no harm because their first instinct is to do nothing at all.
That worldview is often incompatible with some of social conservatism’s diktats, and this is most evident in how lawmakers approach issues related to law and order. It is difficult to reconcile the criminalization of a substance on the federal level that is often legal at the state level, a substance that remains classified as a schedule 1 drug despite Congress’s declaration that it no longer meets the applicable FDA standards. The enforcement of the nation’s border and immigration laws is a national imperative, but there’s no “law and order” in pardoning a flagrant and unrepentant scofflaw merely because he was recklessly overzealous in prosecuting them. Those who fear the nationalization of the health-insurance industry because it will lead to the rationing of potentially life-saving care cannot at the same time insist that the state’s monopoly on lethal force should not be questioned outside of a courtroom.
Conservatism is not libertarianism. Conservatives have a noble suspicion of the instruments of state power, but they also recognize that those instruments are necessary, desirable, and meant to be judiciously wielded. The right’s intellectuals will probably never stop debating the maximally beneficial balance between these two conflicting values. Ted Cruz is channeling the voters for whom this debate is entirely academic. That may not be the road to a more thoughtful politics, but it sure is a path to victory.
