Search history for Cruz’s antecedent and you’ll come up empty. Scan the pages of literature. Scroll your Rolodex. Canvass the jails and prisons. Nothing. Perhaps only in the annals of psychiatry can you find anybody in possession of a masochistic narcissist profile like Cruz’s. But those people are crazy. Cruz is not crazy. He might actually be a member of an advanced but not yet recognized species that has determined that spending effort on getting people to like you is a mug’s game. From the view from inside Cruz’s skull, once you get people to like you, your job has only begun. Additional acts of kindness, consideration and fairness must be extended or your likability will fade into the background. But hatred is a much more efficient use of emotional energy. Often, a single dose of malice can seal the impression among most people that you’re a terminal prick. By acquiring as his enemies the Washington political establishment, Cruz figures he can inherit their enemies, and the 2016 campaign has proved him right. Nobody until Cruz had the stomach to build his political foundation on a bedrock of loathing…

Did Cruz decide to play the hateful political villain, or was it thrust upon him? I defy you to look at him and not associate his squinty-eyed, prehensile-nosed, whiny-mouthed demonic visage with the great villains of film noir history. If looks are destiny, perhaps the answer to why Cruz works so hard to be hated can be contained in a snapshot: It’s the path of least resistance. But even film noir villains have deep soul-searching stretches in which they question their own badness. If Cruz has submitted to even a soul-searching once-over, I’d be surprised. Instead, he wears the hatred of his peers like a badge of honor, the way Lucifer and his fallen angels wore their Lord’s scorn.