Republican senators Ben Sasse and Mike Lee agree that the growth of national politics, in government and in cultural influence, is negative for the country. But the two men have complementary assessments of the details: One is based on social decay, and the other is based on Washington, D.C.’s accrual of power. Taken together, they form a right-of-center criticism of the Trump era, not necessarily the Trump presidency—which treats the current political moment as a symptom of problems that exist independent of the man himself.
Relative to Sasse, Lee in fact is gentle toward the administration. During a speech before the Federalist Society this month, he credited “a time of relative peace and economic prosperity within our country … in large measure to President Trump’s economic reforms.” But some of his other remarks during the address made news outside the gathering.
“Realistically, Americans have two options. Either we’re going to once again embrace the Constitution’s vision of a diverse, tolerant, pluralistic union of states and of communities each governed according to the values and priorities of its own citizens, or this fundamentally un-American contest—one recklessly designed to determine which half of our nation will have the power, at least temporarily, to unilaterally impose its will and its values on the other half—will escalate violently out of control,” he said. “Ultimately, this will come down to a binary choice, a simple binary choice: federalism or violence.”
Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd called that “a pretty extreme diagnosis.” Lee, in response, disagreed.
“It’s not extreme. In fact, it’s probably the least controversial speech I’ve given in a long time. Look, according to a recent poll conducted by NPR, 80 percent of Americans believe that our political divisiveness in this country, especially at a national level, is driving us to a point that could result in violence,” he said. (The survey asked specifically about “the negative tone and lack of civility in Washington” being such a causal factor.)
“This is a real, legitimate concern. It’s one of the reasons why the Founding Fathers were right in setting up a government that at the national level would be in charge of only a few things that are distinctively, unavoidably, and by designation of the Constitution, mandated to be at the national level, while reserving all other powers for states and localities. Recognizing there’s a whole lot more agreement on a regional basis, on a state-by-state, or community-by-community basis, than there will ever be at the national level. And I think that is the best way, it may well be the only way, to avoid some of this divisiveness.”
But Sasse speaks about a different remedy. His focus is more on personal choices than government ones: to de-emphasize Washington politics and prioritize apolitical features of life like family, friendship, and community.
“We have an epidemic of loneliness in this country, and one of the things we’re not doing well is putting politics in its proper place,” he told Fox News Sunday. “So, we are turning upside down the pyramid of attachments that should matter in people’s lives. Politics matter, but politics can’t come first. If politics come first in your life, something is wrong with you. It’s a sad thing.”
Sasse wrote about this development in Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal. THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s review of the book reads: “Many of the seemingly insoluble troubles afflicting Americans, Sasse thinks, stem from the decline in voluntary associations—or, to use the modern term, mediating institutions: the families and societies and associations and churches and synagogues that traditionally kept Americans together.”
A counterargument to his viewpoint is that the federal government’s dereliction to address long-term challenges only it can solve has animated the electorate; from a conservative position, debt and entitlement spending, and from a liberal one, climate change, for example. Reforming Social Security and Medicare has all but vanished from the Republican platform. And where the left has supported American-led efforts to curtail carbon emissions worldwide, such as the Paris Agreement, the right has warned of harming American industry with no tangible benefit. “I think we have to recognize that this is a global issue, and China and other countries that are rapidly building middle classes are going to be the number-one drivers in the long term,” Sasse said on Sunday.
Many of the stimuli of the nation’s political hostility, though, do not have policy solutions. Media distrust is not a government issue, beyond the rhetoric of politicians that solidifies it. Culture wars were fought in the entertainment world before Trump, a product of that world, weaponized them politically. Political hyperbole wins elections at the cost of scaring the public. A factor that exacerbates all of these, digital and, specifically, social media, is untamable.
Thus why Sasse says that political obsession is a core societal problem. Lee sees it as a product of centralizing politics to an excessive degree—beyond the point of guaranteeing all Americans equal rights, which previous generations did not do and continues to be a key debate point in discussions of federalism. He nodded toward this failure of historical balance earlier this month. “Now, I want to be very clear about something. We should harbor no illusions about state and local governments always being virtuous and pure, or always necessarily even being more efficient or less wasteful than the federal government,” he said.
The upshot is that they’re held accountable by voters more easily than Washington is, which is partly a product of national politics being the most distant form of them all. “How much of the toxicity of our national debate is due to its forced impersonal anonymity? Few people treat their neighbors or their family members the way activists tend to treat each other on social media. Politics, you see, is an innately, inherently human activity,” said Lee.
And that “small subset of people who put politics at the center of their lives, they tend to be really, really lonely,” Sasse told Fox News Sunday.
In both cases, it’s not just a criticism of searching for meaning in politics—it’s a criticism of trying to derive it from Washington.
