Ben Sasse

And we don't yet know how to navigate the economic and cultural and familial disruptions that are coming from this technology.

And politicians act like, because they work in politics, that politics are the center of this.

Politics barely matters for what we're going through right now.

And this institution is filled with blowhards.

The Senate should be the world's greatest deliberative body, was filled with blowhards that want to pretend whatever we're screaming about in a partisan, tribal way is really essential and central.

And it's a really peripheral thing almost every single day.

And I thought we should actually start to tell the truth about what will look like to have institutional recovery in the Senate.

Well, I don't want to be parochial about this or self-serving, but I'll go from my personal experience a tiny little bit.

Again, Nebraska is only 2 million people.

I don't mean it's generalizable and it would work as an electoral strategy in California, Texas, New York.

But I got elected in November of 14.

And again, I was 93 and 0 across 93 counties in Nebraska in that general, which means as a Republican, I won Omaha.

I should define myself.

At a policy level, I'm very conservative.

At a dispositional and tonal level, I'm a moderate.

Because I believe that American civics and the glories of being able to inherit a constitutional doctrine of anti-majoritarianism and restraints and a belief in pluralism...

That stuff is so glorious.

It's so much more interesting and important than our policy differences about one versus two cheers for this level of government intervention in the economy or regulatory X, Y, or Z. So the policy fighting is so subordinate in my mind to the civic transmission obligations that we have.

that I won the whole continuum in Nebraska from very far right to pretty center left in all four of my elections, two primaries and two generals.

And yet I was constantly condemned by my party.