Ben Sasse Wants to Talk About Tocqueville, Not Marjorie Taylor Greene
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.
Ben Sasse is worried about midlife crises. Not just for himself, but for every working American who feels that their future in the face of technological disruption is not as secure as that of previous generations. “We’re the first people in human history that are really going to see the end of lifelong work,” the Republican senator from Nebraska told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. “That unsettling of community and place raises lots of fundamental questions about what gives people happiness and meaning and connection and neighborliness, and almost everything that’s happening in our politics is downstream from that.”
Sasse has mulled these questions before. He built on his theory that the acrimony of modern politics can be mostly blamed on the rise of digital spaces and the death of neighborly connections and small communities in a 2018 book, Them, and has excoriated the most extreme elements of his party for playing into those fears during the pandemic.
But Sasse thinks there’s a way out of an era of loneliness exploited by the likes of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz. The small number of Americans who pay attention to politics on a daily basis, who make political ideology their primary identifier, “are pretty weird,” he told Goldberg. The majority of Americans want to find common ground, at least in their more immediate communities, Sasse argued—and that approach is precisely how American democracy can survive and move beyond the Trump era.
Sasse spoke with Goldberg during The Atlantic Festival today. Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right now, I’m going to be speaking with Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. Thank you for joining us at the digital Atlantic Festival on our fancy set.
Ben Sasse: Thank you. I wish we were at an actual embodied festival, but good to be with you.
Goldberg: One day. One day there’ll be a live audience in front of you. It’ll be shocking! But we’ll have you next year. I hope by then we’ll be able to be back live. So let’s just talk about American politics and the mood in the country. What’s wrong with American politics? And don’t take the full 25 minutes to answer that question. Try to answer that in a minute.
Sasse: Premature elaboration.
And then we’ll go from there. But let’s lift all the way up and describe for us,
