Ben Sasse and the Institutions
Timothy P. Carney
Video Embed
“We don’t hold these institutions to nearly high enough standards on pragmatic output,” outgoing Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) told me in an interview the last week of December. He was talking about the institutions he is entering — academic institutions — but he could have been talking about the one he is exiting: Congress.
Sasse’s critique of America’s institutions runs deeper than their inadequate pragmatic output. It’s that they don’t understand their purpose and so don’t adhere to the proper principles. An America whose institutions are adrift or crumbling is an America dominated by the worst passions, both of the populace and of those in power.
NEBRASKA GOVERNOR SEEKS SASSE SENATE SEAT
Sasse was always an odd Senator. His pedigree itself was unusual: both an academic and a consultant, both a technocrat and a philosopher. His post-college training happened at St. John’s College and McKinsey & Company. St. John’s is a tiny liberal arts college grounded in the great books of Western civilization and seminar-style discussions. McKinsey is a world-leading consulting firm grounded in hard data and pragmatic problem-solving. Then he also worked at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
In 2014 during his initial Senate run, his first political campaign, Sasse nicely blended the outsider image with technocratic problem-solver schtick. He promised to be the turnaround specialist — the fixer — whose fresh eyes could see the solutions the insiders missed.
Ben Sasse, I am sorry to report, did not turn around the federal government, and he certainly didn’t turn around the U.S. Senate. As he departs to become the president of the University of Florida after serving one-third of his second term, Sasse leaves Washington, Congress, and the Republican Party far more dysfunctional than he found them.
Sasse is unusually thoughtful for a federal lawmaker, so how does he assess his time here? Did he succeed? What was he trying to accomplish?
“I ran because of the future of work, the future of war, and the First Amendment,” Sasse told me in an exit interview. “These have been my touchstones.”
The First Amendment is doing fine in the courts these days, with free expression protected and forced speech generally prohibited. The principle of free speech, on the other hand, is as unpopular as it has been at any point in our lifetimes.
Campuses are erecting speech codes, major newspapers are branding conservative opinions “harmful disinformation,” and Democratic politicians are leaning on Big Tech to censor reporting or arguments they dislike. Sasse’s own nomination to the Florida post demonstrates how intolerant the Left has gotten.
Students shut down parts of campus in protest of Sasse, and a Florida Times-Union columnist wrote that the nomination “defiled” the university. The columnist’s specific charges: Sasse is pro-life, opposes gay marriage, and supported Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. These are views held by millions — maybe even a majority — of Floridians, but in the eyes of a run-of-the-mill liberal columnist, they put Sasse beyond the bounds of permissible dissent.
Powerful parts of the Left believe that very basic conservative views — in many cases views that were consensus until about 2014 — are harmful bigotry that do not deserve debate or tolerance.
Sasse doesn’t think things in America are all that bad, though. He believes pluralism is alive and well. “The anti-pluralists get all the attention in our conversations, but the vast majority of people are like ‘screw that.’”
“The pluralists are the people who are going to fix America if America is going to be fixed.”
What about “the future of work” Sasse came here to address?
These days, when a conservative talks about the “future of work,” he is often trying to figure out how to restore reliable, good-paying manufacturing jobs. President Donald Trump won over voters largely with his bold promise to bring factories back to the U.S. and to Make America Great Again by restoring the labor market of 1960.
While Trump had very few concrete plans and very little intellectual framework for this project, his presidency jumpstarted a pro-worker movement within American conservatism. Think-tankers, commentators, and a few politicians began searching for ways to lift up the working class and support families by using industrial policy to prop up good jobs.
Sasse means something different by “future of work.” He believes the old jobs are not coming back. In fact, nothing like them is coming back. “There is no possibility of a lifelong job,” he said, and even the prospect of spending one’s whole working years in a single field seems unlikely for today’s young workers.
Instead, what’s needed is that we become “lifelong learners,” the former Senator argues.
While Sasse’s answer may be correct, it’s also the most Ben Sasseian answer possible.
For one thing, Sasse’s argument justifies his mid-term career shift. “I don’t think there will be a federal policy solution” to the difficulties created by an ever-shifting labor market, Sasse said. Instead, it will be up to institutions of higher education to create new programs, new courses, new models that facilitate lifelong learning.
“We need new institutions,” he declared. “I think we’re going to build lots of new things,” at the University of Florida. “I think we should have many, many, different types of new programs and new launches because the digital revolution not only enables, but requires, us to rethink” the connection between education and a career.
The notion that you get your education in 4 to 10 years after high school and then you’re done learning doesn’t work anymore, Sasse argues.
This “future of work” view is also Sasseian because it’s how Sasse has lived his life. He has bounced between the executive branch, academia, consulting, and Congress. While a sitting senator, he wrote two books, one was a cultural lament about American adulthood, and the other was a Tocquevillian riff on community and polarization.
There is no one track on which Sasse’s career has run.
Here I need to make a personal note. St. John’s, where Sasse got his master’s, is where I did my undergraduate study. Sasse’s second book, Them, came out within a year of my most recent book, Alienated America, which was itself a Tocquevillian riff on community and polarization. Further — and I’m not making this up — in 2001, a mentor tried to talk me into moving to Nebraska to run for U.S. Senate, and I actually considered it.
That is to say, Sasse and I have had some overlap in our careers. The overlap is enough that I asked Sasse, especially in view of his early departure, whether he really saw himself as a lawmaker, or as “an ideas guy in the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
“I object to the ‘or’ in your question,” Sasse replied.
First off, Sasse touted his legislative accomplishments — and this is the “future of war” part of Sasse’s mission. “We did a ton of legislative stuff, it’s just chiefly in the intelligence space.” He pointed to cybersecurity reforms and other work he did on the Select Committee on Intelligence, much of which is by its nature not public.
Secondly, Sasse argues that just as universities should do liberal arts education alongside pragmatic workforce training, Senators ought to try to season their lawmaking and oversight with some political philosophy and engagement in higher ideas.
“I think that the Senate fancies itself the Greatest Deliberative Body in the world for a reason,” Sasse said. “Its goal as an institution … should be developing a long-term” vision for the country. The Senate isn’t merely about introducing, amending, and passing bills or confirming nominees, “it’s about debating the things that outlive us,” Sasse contends, which is “more important than any particular piece of legislation.”
We can debate the role of debate in the U.S. Senate’s purpose, but it’s undeniable that the Senate, as an institution, is failing to fulfill its role. For a decade, there have been nearly no amendments offered, debated on the floor, and voted on. Ideas have not gotten a hearing; instead, partisan soundbites have become the coin of the realm.
And the institution’s most basic responsibility — lawmaking — has been sparse as well. More and more senators see their seat in the Senate not as imposing a duty to debate, vote, amend, compromise, or provide oversight, but as a platform on which to gain fame and climb to some higher office or more prominent position.
Sasse maintains that he did his best to fulfill his role as a Senator, but one man out of a hundred is unlikely to reverse the momentum of the institution. At the University of Florida, perhaps he can preserve and elevate the institution in a way that benefits Florida, and maybe even the country as a whole.
The purpose of a university is not merely to run students through enough credit hours and hand out degrees. The purpose of a university also isn’t to indoctrinate students into the politics and ideology of the clerical class. The purpose of a university is, above all, to foster habits of mind and heart, and also to help young adults get ready for the workforce.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Students “should be exposed to debate,” Sasse said. “They should be ready to debate. They should be prepared to question their own assumptions.”
If American academia saw its role the way Sasse sees it, the benefits might trickle up, maybe even to Washington, D.C.