Sen. Ben Sasse said during a Thursday address that the Republican Party is facing a crisis because “our voters are dying.”
The #NeverTrump leader said he believed the current “front-runner of my party” is backed by the “oldest constituency of support in the history of presidential campaigns.” Sen. Sasse made these comments as part of an address at a conference for Christian pastors hosted by the Family Research Council.
Sasse argued that political disengagement is a bigger threat than political polarization. He said people are worried that their representatives are failing to come up with ideas to address the many problems the country faces, and said many have largely “checked out.”
He added that though many say cable news is contributing to divisive discourse, such an analysis fails to recognize that “no-one is watching.” Sen. Sasse said even “on a good day” the most successful network, Fox News Channel, enjoys an audience that is about “one percent” of the American public.
Sen. Sasse, R. Neb., said both parties are suffering from a “crisis of political vision,” arguing the Republicans are “trying to make America 1950 again” and the Democrats are attempting to “make America Europe again.”
“Right now what you have is two parties that are exhausted. You have a Democratic Party that has a massive product problem and you have a Republican Party that has a massive constituency problem,” said Sasse.
The conservative lawmaker said “the idea that the disruptive moment that we face right now is chiefly due to immigration and trade [policies] is simply not true,” arguing the “much bigger threat” to employment is the “automation and the elimination of tasks that can be done repetitively.”
“What’s happening now is … there is never going to be permanence around jobs again,” he said, noting that millennials are entering a workforce in which they will switch not only jobs, but entire industries at an unprecedented rate.
“The future of work is going to be disrupted unlike anything in recorded human history and we are trying way too hard to … make this a political fight between two political parties that both have a gigantic crisis of vision,” Sasse said.
