So Cruz has a great delivery system — he’s got the perfect rhetorical combination of having a coherent worldview that he can transpose for voters into demotic, accessible language. One can see that even when he’s casually accusing Chuck Hagel of giving aid and comfort to the North Koreans — part of the reason he outrages his colleagues is that he already commands the Senate floor and the media. And what he is delivering is the perfect exemplification of the entire panoply of Republican base politics, or, if you prefer, tea party politics (Which, by the way, is merely another name for a reconsolidated umbrella coalition of all the deeply held beliefs of the GOP base over the past several decades — nothing new under the sun.)

What this means is that Cruz embodies the unique parameters of American conservatism, which are considerably different than those of its peer political expressions in other advanced countries. European rightists are far less religious and far more statist than are their American Republican counterparts — no other rightist party in the advanced world, for example, would dream of continuing a relentless, rearguard opposition to universal health insurance. Thus the U.S. Republican base weds a religiously driven cultural anxiety about changes in the norms of gender relationships (in this, the most religious country among the peer democracies) to an ultra-libertarian opposition to taxes; income transfers and other benefits to poor people; and environmental, consumer, and labor regulation of companies. Only in the United States are the libertarian acolytes of Ayn Rand also, unlike the militantly atheist Rand, religiously devout.