In Honor Of Ted Cruz Bumping His Head Into Reality

The Establishment did not engineer their failures. The Establishment predicted their failures, which is not the same thing as causing them.

This sort of thing strikes me as sort of thing the Establishment types talk about when they suggest some in the Tea Party have a "reality problem." It's this relentless doubling-down and never admitting an obvious mistake, always looking for a scapegoat to justify one's own errors.

This is related to, I suppose, the incorrect idea that staking out the Hardest-Core Most Maximalist position in political campaigns shifts the Overton Window in your direction. Oh, it shifts the window a little if you win.

If you lose, it shifts it the other way. It shifts it away from you. It demonstrates, with rock-solid evidence, that you have reached the farthest perimeter of politically-viable thought, and thus sets an absolute boundary on such thought.

Prior to the experiment, one could claim there was no outer boundary on how Conservative one could run, and yet still win; after the experiment, that boundary is located.

…This sort of reality-denying -- for purposes of Never Having To Admit, Not Even Once, You Got A Minor Political Calculation Wrong -- suggests to people that the speaker is simply not to be taken seriously, which is quite the opposite of what the speaker intends.

And quite opposite of what I think would be useful for this country, for I do think the Tea Party would do the country a service by dragging it, kicking and screaming, towards a more representative and smaller-government politics.

But this kind of thing? People shrug and just decide "Write those people off; they're crazy in the first place."