Prominently featured in Ted Cruz’s radio ads heard in the run-up to Super Tuesday was the asseveration that “Trust is everything.” That was where he made his big mistake. In the world of postmodern politics, a world in which Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were then already seemingly on the glide path to winning their parties’ nominations for the presidency, trust was, if not nothing, at best not counting for very much with voters, except maybe in Texas and a few other places. Mr. Cruz was trying to induce his would-be supporters to reach back into an increasingly hazy folk memory of a time when politics was still connected with traditional notions of the “honorable”—a word now surviving only as an honorific before a congressman’s or senator’s name. “Honorific” means “bearing honor,” but nobody, including Ted Cruz, has a very clear idea of what honor means anymore.

Like trust, to which it is closely related, it is not something you get just by saying you have it. It has to be conferred on you by a group of your peers, to whom you give the right to judge you. How trusted is Ted Cruz by his Republican senatorial colleagues? They loathe him, virtually to a man. If he’s not trusted by those who know him best, how can he expect to be trusted by voters to whom he is mostly a stranger? In his ads, Senator Cruz also boasted of having “stood up to” his own party