The road ahead for renewing democratic values and an open, transparent, and once again credible political system in the United States is becoming clear. That is the emergence of Senator Ted Cruz to eventually unify a resurgent nationalist Right.
In my 2015 book Cycles of Change, an overview of more than 200 years of U.S. political history, I predicted both the nationalist insurgency of Donald Trump in the Republican Party and the progressive shift unexpectedly spearheaded by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic Party that transformed U.S. politics in the 2016 election cycle.
The “Big Lie” that Russia influenced or decided the shock outcome of the 2016 presidential election was, in reality, cooked up by defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton—a bungling loser of historic proportions—on the very same night she was still reeling from her rejection at the Javits Center in Brooklyn after the results were clear.
Since then, the old Republican and Democratic establishments alike have eagerly clung to the Big Lie because it offers them an excuse to deny and ignore what really happened: The American people for once rose up to express their ringing rejection of the ruinous policies of totally unregulated free trade, globalization, and ludicrous pretensions to world empire to which both parties have subjected them for the previous 70 years.
President Trump, however, however, was ruthlessly opposed, undermined, betrayed, slandered, and blocked on his honorable and responsible foreign policy and national security goals to restrain NATO, improve relations with Russia, and pull U.S. combat forces out of both Iraq and Afghanistan over these next four years and by the time of the next national election in 2024, he will be 78—as old as Joe Biden is now. Undoubtedly, the efforts to destroy and discredit Trump will continue unabated from now until then.
Trump should not yet be ruled out by any means, but he has already played the role of being the prophetic precursor of the dawning new political age. Such figures emerge in every era of transformational change, as I pointed out in Cycles of Change.
That “prophetic” pioneering role was played by General John Fremont in 1856 for Abraham Lincoln in 1860; by New York Governor Al Smith, the “Happy Warrior” in 1928, for the epochal election victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932; and by Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 for the eventual presidency and new political era of Ronald Reagan starting in 1980.
Trump was the exceptionally successful political precursor of the coming new age of American nationalism. And now Ted Cruz is by far the most likely candidate to succeed him and shape the new era, just as defining Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Reagan did before him.
On April 14, Cruz, renowned for having the most brilliant legal mind in the U.S. Congress, eviscerated Kristen Clarke, Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), at 81, is watching her precious House majority vanish before her eyes. Following the victory of Trump protégé Julia Letlow in a special election in Louisiana last March, the Democratic House majority is now only a margin of two seats—the narrowest either party has experienced in the lower house of Congress in more than a century.
Worse for Pelosi is sure to come. It is perfectly feasible that even before next year’s congressional midterms, a handful of congressional special elections could throw control of the House to current Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who loathes Pelosi and her ancient creaking clique of cronies with an ever-burning passion. Then, Pelosi’s already fading clout will be totally gone.
The Democratic Party is now tottering perilously between the Far Too Old and the Far Too Young—the Scylla of Pelosi counter-posed to the Charybdis of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her young super-Left fledgling hawks.
Cruz is a mature, formidable, and potent emerging force on the nationalist Right. Like Reagan before him, he offers potent hope that the new forces awakened by his predecessors will triumph yet.