CALL it the “Sunset Boulevard” riposte. Too many candidates have spent this election declaring that America is too diminished or plain dumb to keep its people prosperous and safe. Such gloom has served some of them dismayingly well. Filter out this doomy din, though, and a bunch of young, reform-minded conservatives can be heard making a different case. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, these reform Republicans believe America is still big; it’s the politics that got small.

One of them is Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a 44-year-old former college wrestler, business consultant, policy adviser in the government of George W. Bush, university president and, to date, one of the only members of Congress to say that conservative principle will stop him voting Republican in November if Donald Trump is the party’s nominee.

After his election in 2014 Mr Sasse waited a year to give his first speech on the Senate floor. He spent those months watching debates and, heeding his training in corporate crisis-management, interviewing fellow-senators about why the Senate is a “broken institution”. In his maiden speech he reported back. With its six-year terms and nearly limitless hours for debate, the Senate was built as a sort of national board of directors, he thinks: rising above short-term popularity to consider big things that America needs to get right. Yet it has fallen prey to “soundbite culture”, Mr Sasse told his colleagues. Too many debates are “fact-free zones” full of straw-man attacks. He urged both parties to accept that “the people despise us all”.

Conventional wisdom holds that Washington’s ills stem from excessive partisanship and incivility. Mr Sasse demurs. He does not want less fighting between the left and right. He wants more “meaningful fighting” about issues of substance. America’s big problems are no mystery, he notes. A post-industrial age is imposing breakneck change on the world of work. Both parties have promised federal benefits, notably for the old, that are not “mathematically possible”—but called them “entitlements” so that voters imagine that they have paid for them. The government does not really know how to fight radical jihadism, or cyber-attacks. At the same time the public is impatiently tuning out traditional sources of authority, from politicians to the mainstream media.

Alas, the Democratic and Republican Parties are “obsessively” focused on what Mr Sasse calls “a bunch of stuff that is not big enough”. On paper, such criticism from a newbie might make him sound bumptious. In person he is more disarming. Many senators resemble Victorian bishops in their slow-moving pomposity. Not Mr Sasse, a young-professor type who talks at machinegun pace. Loping along Senate corridors to his office, he abruptly ducks into the next-door office of Senator David Perdue of Georgia. Lucky Georgia is home to giant firms like Coca-Cola which sponsor free drinks and coffee for Mr Perdue’s visitors, he explains—and as a poor Nebraskan, he has established a permanent claim. He kneels by a small fridge to help himself and his spokesman to Cokes, offering Lexington some, too. “What, now you help others to our stuff too?” asks a young Perdue staffer, half-amused and half-incredulous, as Mr Sasse jogs out.

The senator sometimes sounds like another lean, sports-mad 40-something farm-state Republican with young children: the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. In late March Mr Ryan gave a speech seen as a rebuke to Mr Trump, telling a gathering of congressional interns to believe in a “confident” politics based on ideas, not insults.

Mr Sasse goes further. He sees both parties breaking up as they focus on “26% issues” rather than “70% issues”—meaning questions that interest impassioned partisans on left or right, rather than problems that most Americans know to be important. At times he sounds like a physicist, describing party coalitions drifting apart in the absence of principles weighty enough to exert a gravitational pull. Mr Sasse says calmly that he expects both political parties to fall apart within the next decade. He had thought the Democrats would break up first, given the distance between the party’s pragmatic wing and leftists like Bernie Sanders. Instead, he marvels, it looks as if the Republican Party “is going to come apart first”, undone by Mr Trump, a man who scorns so many organising principles of conservatism.

What happens next

In an open letter explaining his opposition to Mr Trump, the Nebraskan reminded fellow-conservatives that they believe in limited government, constrained by a constitution whose “heartbeat” is the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association and freedom of speech. In contrast, he wrote, Mr Trump has praised Chinese leaders for showing “strength” in crushing the Tiananmen Square protests, threatened to toughen libel laws, and says that Mr Obama has "lead the way" in using executive orders. If Mr Trump is his party’s nominee, Mr Sasse says conservatives will need a “third option”.

The senator is no moderate: his voting record is sternly conservative, and he accuses Democrats of exploiting racial issues for political gain. But he deplores the fact that some in the Republican Party think that “white working-class identity politics”, as stirred up by Mr Trump, might be a legitimate tactic. He thinks Mr Trump is a warning. A lack of “shared facts” and broad national discourse undermines accountability. This creates an opportunity for big men (or women), with big personal brands, even if Mr Trump himself fades from the scene. Mr Sasse is sure big government is not the solution, saying: “Monopolistic, insular, unaccountable bureaucracies will do really stupid things.”

Pressed to spell out big, bold alternatives of his own, Mr Sasse notes that he is just one senator, new to the job. For now he is focused on sounding the alarm about America’s shrinking politics. It’s a start.