Ben Sasse

But big picture, you said, what did I learn?

I said the voters hate us all.

At the end of the day, this place at that point, this is Thanksgiving of 2015.

The tribalism of 2020 or even 2017 wasn't as apparent in 2015, but it was bubbling up fast.

And people involved in politics love to do nut picking about the crazy people at the other end of the continuum that aren't in their party.

And there's a lot of truth to that, but it's a definite subordinate story in my mind to the big things that are really happening.

And so I, in that speech, I just kind of wanted to contrast the idea that the public approval numbers for Congress bounced around between nine and 15%.

When you ask people objectively, what do they think?

They think everybody here is bad at the job.

It isn't that Republicans are right that Democrats stink and Democrats are right that Republicans stink.

It's that these institutions are not working very well at all.

And so the historian in me says,

75 or 100 years from now, when you look back on our moment, we're not going to talk about politics at all.

What we're going to talk about is the fact that we were living through a technological revolution that was creating economic and cultural upheaval.

And we were living through institutional collapse and way, way, way, way, way below that.

There's a whole bunch of political institutions that are part of that institutional collapse, but what's really happening is these super devices in our pockets, the largest tools any median individuals ever had access to in all of human history, allow our consciousness to leave the time and place where we actually live, the places where we break bread, the people who are living next door to us, the people that you can physically touch and hug, the small platoons of real community

And we allow our consciousness to go really far away.

And there are things that are awesome about the digital revolution.

We're the richest people any time and place in all of human history.

But there are also things that are horrific about this.