Ben Sasse (R-NE) is a freshman Senator elected in 2014. He waited a year in the body before making his maiden speech on the floor. This used to be the tradition. Neophytes were expected to learn the ropes before seeking the limelight.
In the era of Obama, Rubio and Cruz, when a senator’s maiden speech is often followed shortly by an announcement of a presidential run, Sasse’s punctiliousness is refreshing. It may owe something to his previous career as a history professor and college president. When he did rise to speak, however, he was polite but far from shy. He let loose a broadside that got him noticed since it was an indictment of and lament for the parlous state of the institution he had joined.
Sasse scorned the Senate for “not tackling the generational crises that we face: We don’t have a long-term foreign policy for the age of jihad and cyberwar; our entitlement budgets are completely fake; we are entering an age where work and jobs will be more fundamentally disrupted than at any point since hunter-gatherers first settled in agrarian villages. And yet we don’t really have any plans.”
He went on to warn that the people, at least those he represents, have noticed this fecklessness. From Nebraskans he hears “a pox on both parties and all your houses. We don’t believe politicians are even trying to fix this mess.” He reports contempt by voters for the toxic mix of scorched-earth partisanship, grandstanding and self-aggrandizing “outside interests” that make them believe their elected representatives personal ambitions matter more to them than the needs of their country. In short, “the people despise us all.”
Sasse identifies one source of the infection – television. Senators jostle to get their face on the tube where they spew bitter partisan vitriol, yet “when the cameras are off, hardly anyone here really believes that senators from the other party are evilly motivated — or bribed — or stupid.” In short, they are all playing parts in an idiotic melodrama when they ought to be solving problems.
He isn’t wrong, but I’d enlarge the focus slightly. TV is just the outward sign of a deeper malady. Politics is no longer public service but a big business with campaign managers, pollsters, spin doctors, market researchers, media consultants, finance chiefs, and bundlers. The candidate is just a product, a packaged good, and the goal is not to govern the nation wisely but to devise a winning product, raise revenue to advertise the goods, and win votes. Then to do it again.
Revulsion with this political business-as-usual lies behind the hunger for something completely different which manifests itself in the enthusiasm for artisanal candidates rather than the usual off-the-shelf models, people like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson. But is any such outsider likely to break the iron grip of the status quo or will they be co-opted by the forces of business as usual? The same canned rhetoric of the competing parties. The same fealty to the entrenched interests that finance their campaigns. The same stale ideas that have failed to address the new problems of a changing world – say, supply-side economics on the one hand, welfare state liberalism on the other.
Ben Sasse is a canary in a coal mine announcing the old game may be out of steam. There is plenty of evidence to back up such a notion. George Packer in a New Yorker piece, “The Republican Class War,” cites recent polling that shows 45 percent of Republicans expressing views that amount to apostasy by agreeing that “the rich should pay more in taxes.” A second finds that more Republicans believe in “increased spending on Social Security, Medicare, education and infrastructure” than those who favor cuts in such programs.
And if the average Republican or Democrat doesn’t fully buy what the parties have been peddling, the rising Millennial generation is elsewhere entirely on many issues. All of which suggests that Sasse is on to something and our elected representatives would do well to heed his warning. If political history teaches anything, it is that parties either adapt or die. Ask the Whigs.