The Virtues of Ben Sasse

E arlier this week, as the House began its descent into madness over who will possess the coveted speaker’s gavel, outgoing Nebraska senator Ben Sasse delivered his farewell address from the Senate floor, warning of the perils of hyper-partisan zealotry. It was a striking juxtaposition that provided yet more evidence of how the virtues Sasse displayed will be in ever-shorter supply with his exit.

Sasse’s speech conveyed these virtues, and made a case for them. He extolled persuasion and emphasized the importance of making good-faith arguments, noting that this has fallen out of fashion on both sides of the political aisle among the most engaged. Political addicts on the left think you can only disagree with them “because you’re an irredeemable deplorable clinging to some phobic backward-looking vision,” making good-faith argument impossible. And for the political addicts on the right, “persuasion is a crutch for the weak for those who are too cowardly to fight.” The only way to win is to destroy the Left before it destroys us.

But Sasse stressed that these are not our only choices. He made the case for sober-minded civility and for reviving lively debate in conjunction with “tonal and dispositional moderation.” This does not mean to agree on everything, but it does mean lowering the stakes of national politics and regaining faith in the ability of existing channels to process different opinions. This prescription for civic rejuvenation is the best way to begin crawling our way out of the pit of political toxicity where we currently find ourselves. And it is a prescription he believes most people are already following, yet are being thwarted by the efforts of the very-online, politics-obsessed zealots who control our national life. They “are factions and they’re small, and they command nothing like majority opinion,” he said.

To some of Sasse’s critics, this may sound good, but sounding good is, in their view, all that Sasse ever did as a senator. They harp on the fact that he doesn’t have a long list of legislative accomplishments. But that’s partially due to the fact that much of Sasse’s time in the Senate was consumed with his work on the Senate Intelligence committee, which remains functional, unlike other committees on the Hill, because it’s classified and there are “no cameras there to reward performative grandstanding,” as Sasse put it. And as I’ve stated before, “the number of bills introduced or passed is not the best metric by which to gauge the success of a senator’s time in office, especially in an era in which Congress has often rendered itself impotent and is often complicit in bad policy when it does manage to rouse itself to action.”

Another, related critique of Sasse combines a criticism of his emphasis on the possibility of persuasion with a condemnation of his supposed inability to understand power properly. National Review’s Nate Hochman, for example, quoting a Wall Street Journal op-ed Sasse wrote that resembled his Senate farewell address, argues that Sasse fails to understand how “power matters” because “ideas, while important, cannot ‘move the world’ without it.” But Sasse isn’t saying that ideas are everything and that the possession and exercise of power is unimportant. He understands they matter a great deal. Indeed, in the Journal, Sasse wrote not that power is irrelevant, but that “ideas move the world more than power does.” Ideas furnish the public square with substance. They have a force beyond their mere articulation. Without them, we are left with merely a contest of competing strongmen or factions, a ceaseless vying of wills-to-power. Today, that means, as Sasse puts it in his farewell address, “political addicts who prize short-term power over long-term dignity and liberty are the ones who now dominate the nation’s conversation.” We need a reaffirmation of the belief not only that deliberation is possible, but also of the truth that ideas have consequences.

Nate believes that, because Sasse believes in the power of ideas, he doesn’t understand how to be “actively interested in attaining, maintaining, and wielding power” to achieve political ends. But Sasse is arguing that what we have too much of in our political life is power, wrongly wielded and desired, left and right. The power-mad “salivate on the idea of chaos and our disrupted age that can be the excuse for seizing more power” and “foment anger and fear because they think if we’re angry and scared enough, we’ll assent to some Caesarist solution.” One thinks of Donald Trump, not mentioned by name in Nate’s assessment of Sasse, against whose post-2020-election behavior Sasse bravely stood. But belief in this kind of power is not a metric of conservatism. For a better metric, take a look at his voting record. Those who downplay what Publius in the Federalist Papers called “reflection and choice” might be more interested in “accident and force” under their control.

It is unfortunate, in some cases, that humble people are the likeliest to act upon their humility. So with Sasse. Not for nothing does his farewell address reference Cincinnatus, the early Roman Republic statesman who twice relinquished his post as the supreme magistrate in exchange for a simpler life as a farmer. Instead of cultivating crops, however, Sasse now proceeds to the cultivation of minds as the president of the University of Florida. There, Sasse will have the opportunity to help young people chart a course for meaningful lives. This is something that politics and raw state power alone cannot accomplish. Politics, after all, is just a means to an end. Sasse understands this, which is why he’s returning to the associative and institutional level, where the real work of readying the next generation of citizens occurs.

Even if Sasse will still be doing important work, it is appropriate to lament his departure from the Senate. He was the rarest kind of public servant — one genuinely motivated by the betterment of his community. Time and time again, he put his constituents and countrymen ahead of political expediency. Instead of being punished at the ballot box for his supposed naïveté, however, he was rewarded, securing the most votes of anyone in the history of Nebraska politics — and more in 2020 than Trump, one might add. Sasse’s resounding electoral successes should serve as a source of optimism for all who doubt the American people’s capacity to drown out the loudest political addicts among us.