Ben Sasse’s valedictory speech was full of wisdom
Quin Hillyer
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who this week is leaving the U.S. Senate to become president of the University of Florida, gave valedictory remarks on Tuesday that reminded some of us why we’re angry that he’s leaving.
It must be granted that large universities desperately need wise and competent leadership, and that Sasse can do a lot of good at the flagship college of the nation’s fastest-growing state. Still, there’s a case to be made that his exit from the Senate is an abandonment of a unique and salutary opportunity. He is relinquishing status as one of only 100 people nationwide with a hands-on chance to fix those things in today’s sociopolitical order that his speech identified as being broken. Having signed up for another six-year term of manning the national Senate ramparts, he absconds after two years to plant his flag in a largely regional redoubt.
Nonetheless, Sasse’s final Senate speech was full of insight and wisdom, a profound civics lesson in just 20 minutes. His overarching theme was that strong, largely voluntary civic organizations and an embrace of political pluralism are this nation’s strengths, while a cult of victimhood and political zealotry are pathologies that threaten us.
With all quotations below being perhaps a tad inexact (because I took notes on the fly and no transcript is yet available at this writing), Sasse’s most incisive lines included the following:
We must be “against the story of victimhood and the narrative of oppression,” and also against the “prophets of despair” and “political addicts.” The radicals on both sides are wrong to “shout that persuasion is a crutch for the weak for those too cowardly to fight.” Instead, we must welcome vigorous political debate in the confidence that persuasion is still both possible and the best means toward workable solutions.
Alas, “the Left’s plan is for more unelected bureaucrats. The Right’s plan is for a strongman.” Both approaches undermine rather than help the civic order.
The good news, he said, is that the data show most actually still believe in open-minded political debate that disagrees with but doesn’t demonize the other side. “The American people don’t like political addicts. They don’t like political zealotry. …. They want America to be America again. Americans don’t believe the Constitution is obsolete. They don’t believe a principled pluralism can’t work anymore.”
Meanwhile, “Our institutions are the vital center of our lives together. Churches, schools, businesses, little leagues, ballet troops, Fourth-of-July parades.” These are what make us, have always made us, a strong and vibrant people. What we have is “a spirit of association and a spirit of enterprise. We have the audacity to be optimistic when things are bleakest. We are the kind of people the [rest of the] world wants to be with when things go sideways.”
Sasse paid homage to the potential and mission of the Senate, which, again, makes it frustrating that he is leaving it, because “more than any other institution … this body, this place, and this floor has a special place to play in advocating for all those other institutions where people actually break bread and provide care for the dying.”
Sasse lamented that too many senators preen rather than do the harder work of real debate and legislating. And, he said, “a big chunk of the performative yelling … is just about being booked for more performative yelling on prime-time TV.”
What is needed, he said, is a “tonal and dispositional moderation … that flows chiefly from humility and wisdom and a recognition that we are ensouled, and that souls cannot be coerced. … We need more gratitude, not more grievance.”
Sasse is right. Even as he presumably does good work in Florida, his voice for right reason will be sorely missed on the national stage.