I was a little giddy when Ted Cruz announced he was running for president. It seemed too good to be true — and of course, now we know that it was. But Senator Cruz came much closer than any other candidate to holding together the old conservative coalition, and his run was the most principled and thoughtful major candidacy we have seen in quite a long time — with Rand Paul’s an honorable second. As I’ve written before, the conservative movement in America, when it is healthy, lives in the tension between two equally crucial elements:

• The Golden Egg of small government, free market, decentralized Republicanism that in theory could thrive in any country on earth, and inspire patriotic immigrants from every human culture.
• The Goose, or the sobering fact that most of the places on earth where such a system actually thrives are part of the “Anglosphere,” which inherited a bone-deep love of liberty through a kind of apostolic succession — from civic ancestors such as the barons who demanded the Magna Carta, the Puritans who beheaded Charles I, the Pilgrims who settled North America. Immigrants who arrived in plausible numbers and converted to this tradition could fatten and strengthen the Goose. Let in too many who won’t … and the Goose sickens and dies.

A sane, humane, winning conservative movement would treasure the Egg, and fiercely guard the Goose.

For the past 16 years at least, the GOP has been dominated at every important level by those eager to polish the Golden Egg, while cruelly neglecting the Goose. Our spendthrift democracy-building adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan; our record-high immigration (legal and illegal) from anti-capitalist, often anti-Christian countries at a time when working class wages stayed flat; our blinkered refusal to see the real nature of Islam or protect persecuted Christians in Iraq when we ran it. …

These were not the prudent measures of steadfast, sober conservatives. They were champagne bubbles still floating around from our 1990 victory celebration over Communism. But the party is over, folks.

And now, in a bitter historical irony, Donald Trump has seized control of the Republican party via the promise to do the opposite: to force-feed the Goose, surround it with razor wire, maybe even crack the Egg to make the Goose an omelet. But we can’t survive on a diet of our spilled out, scrambled principles.

Ted Cruz’s policies and rhetoric threaded the balance perfectly. He embraced our nation’s civic creed sincerely and advocated it with passion. He also knew, like any prudent statesman, that our creed cannot thrive in the vacuum of airless ideology — any more than a dead Church could spread the Gospel.

The principles of liberty will only appeal to voters who know that they won’t be carelessly misapplied to threaten their safety and basic well-being, or get hijacked and used selectively by powerful special interests. Profane our sacred principles for crass uses for too long, and ordinary people get cynical and jaded. Jaundice the air, and they won’t see the egg as golden. It will start to look cheap and phony, and they might just be willing to trade it for a nice little mess of pottage, for rah-rah slogans and bloodthirsty threats against enemies, for the testosterone rush of a leader who struts on stage and bobs his chin defiantly. Just so, some Englishmen jaded by centuries of indulgence-selling and wealthy monks must have seen King Henry VIII as a breath of fresh air, someone willing to “tell it like it is.”

Ted Cruz doesn’t bob his chin. He is, in fact, a little wonkish. Pundits are already analyzing how he erred by fighting too hard for the mantle of “true conservative” in the race, for counting too much on the clear vision and consistency of small-government and social conservative voters. Perhaps he didn’t see how sick the Goose is getting. But Cruz outpolled by far every candidate who neglected its care and feeding, and lost out to a demagogue who trades on the poor bird’s desperation. I don’t know how a slightly more folksy persona, or a better electoral strategy, could have stopped Donald Trump this year. Perhaps as Michael Brown says, the choice between Trump and Clinton is a divine judgment upon us — a case where God insists on letting us have exactly what we asked for.

What is crucial is that Republicans not draw cozy, self-serving lessons from this catastrophe. Obviously we should shun the arrogant, Machiavellian statism that Donald Trump has been peddling. We should work hard for down-ballot candidates of real conservative principle. On the chance that Trump wins, we must fight against him in Congress whenever he tries to overstep his Constitutional powers or act against our core moral principles.

What is not quite as obvious but even more important, we cannot let Trump’s careless caricature of foreign policy “realism,” prudent immigration policy, and other signs of concern for the Goose’s health and happiness, blind us to the truths which he seized and distorted. If Trump loses this year, we must not take the lesson that we should have nominated some sunny, optimistic glad-hander who welcomes the irreversible transformation of our country by undisciplined immigration, the expansion of the federal government so it can wipe every American’s runny nose, or the use of our nation’s military as a glorified blue helmet force — which doesn’t advance our interests or guard our safety, but instead serves the blue-sky fantasies of globalist utopians. Then we would really have learned nothing.

Ted Cruz is a rare combination of zeal and balanced wisdom. I pray that his future in American politics is long, happy, and fruitful.