Ben Sasse, a Republican senator from Nebraska, gives the vibe of an ideas man rather than a typical transactional politician. If there is substance behind the vibe, along with some political practicality, then American politics needs more elected officials like him.
I interviewed Sasse on Tuesday in his Senate offices, hoping to get a better sense of how Sasse the excellent big-picture author operates as Sasse the political officeholder. I’ve been focusing today on the legacy of the late conservative leader Jack Kemp, a man who combined an unquenchable devotion to big ideas with a real skill at practical politics, and I was wondering if Sasse has the same sort of potential. Kemp’s son Jimmy Kemp cites Sasse as one of the elected officials approaching his job in some of the same ways his father had.
“I just loved Jack Kemp’s style of endless optimism about the American idea,” Sasse said. “There should be a skepticism that politicians and Washington, D.C., power can solve all our challenges, but a sense that the American people can indeed solve just about everything.”
He said the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago this month made a big impression on him as a 17-year-old, because “these folks [those who breached the wall] were all looking to the United States as the best way to articulate what human dignity looks like on a global stage.” Likewise, when Chinese students had demonstrated earlier that year in Tiananmen Square, he was inspired to see that they chose as their symbol our own Statue of Liberty, a copy of which they constructed in paper-mache.
Alas, Sasse said, we have lost a large part of that sense of shared purpose in the cause of freedom.
“Right now, we don’t have a shared idea of what we are and where we are to go,” he said.
One big problem, Sasse postulated, is that modern media and instant digital communications make almost all modern politics a pitched battle for immediate near-term political advantage.
“The way we consume digital media makes us act like everything is about the short-term drama. It’s like all those CNN chyrons that all day long say ‘Breaking News!’ … We are socialized to think the really important end of world or salvation of the world is going to come in the next six minutes to six hours, or at least six days. None of that’s true; it’s all BS. Our policy conversations should be about six years, 10 years, and 18 years out.”
All that, and far more which should be the subject of another column, is predicate for this: Sasse said that while he certainly believes in the importance of “nuts-and-bolts politics,” he recognizes today’s Washington atmosphere makes it unlikely that nuts and bolts will lead to many real legislative accomplishments in the next year or so. Thus, he is focused on longer-term, but very real concerns. Chief among them, he said, are threats posed by China.
“I got on the Intelligence Committee so I could devote 35 to 40% of my days to intelligence,” he said. “I was in the SCIF [secure room in the Capitol] three times today, two of them for an hour and a half each on China issues. China has a theory of how to weaponize our economic interdependence. We didn’t have anything like this in the Cold War because we didn’t integrate supply chains the way we do now.”
To summarize a longer, detailed discussion, Sasse said that because China has become such a big buyer as well as seller of American technology and other goods, China can enlist American companies to lobby lawmakers to look the other way from Chinese abuses. Huawei, for example, “fakes that it is a private sector company, but they are just an arm of the Chinese government: They are a part of the People’s Liberation Army, and part of Chinese intelligence gathering.”
Although President Trump did well to announce sanctions against Huawei for various violations, Huawei’s U.S. clients have convinced the administration to delay the sanctions three times for 90 days each, all the while giving Huawei more time to pursue nefarious ends.
Thus, Sasse is focused intensely on how, long-term, to combat these Chinese stratagems, in ways that are consonant with American freedom. This is just one example, he said, of the sort of major challenge that will take far-sighted, big-picture efforts to meet.
In a sense, this is very Kempian. In the 1970s, Jack Kemp saw one huge, epochal challenge: how to reinvigorate an entirely sclerotic economy. Hence, supply-side economics, followed by an array of market-based solutions to poverty. Now, here comes Sasse seeing a dangerous, almost civilizational challenge from China. He’s trying now to find solutions.
