What are we to do with young Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska? He has announced that he is, in the words of Will McEvoy, on a mission to civilize. He spent most of his question-time in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings deploring the state of public debate in this country, and, with his earnest mien and boyish charm, he has proven very, very good at deploring things, even better than are most of his Republican colleagues who have plans for the future.

He has a book coming out on the subject, and, while it's unfair to criticize a book before it's publication date, by all available accounts, it's pretty much Bowling Alone with hay between its teeth. Robert Putnam goes to the county fair and wins the cotton-candy goat. The central thesis seems to be that America is in trouble because its politics are angry with each other, and that its politics are angry with each other because they involve...politics.

Back in March, Sasse gave The Omaha Journal-Star a preview of what fresh hell his new book will inflict upon the national discourse.

"I think it's true that polarization is horrible right now," Sasse said, but he believes it's not so much a function of politics as what he describes as "a radical evaporation of social capital" in America. Family and community breakdown, loneliness, isolation, health issues, decline of friendship and a digital revolution that has been both liberating and disruptive on a scale that is analogous to industrialization and urbanization. "The political disruption is far downstream from what's really wrong," Sasse said. It's more about cultural upheaval and disruption, he said. "We need to rethink what it looks like to be a community," he said.

Oh, Jesus H. Christ on a McCormick reaper, not this again. This is twice now in what is still a very young century that a Republican president and the party he led has made a hash out of the principles of self-government to the point where the American people, slumbering beast that they are, have bestirred themselves to angry action. And this is twice now in a very young century that ambitious Republicans have attempted to sell the country that the damage their politics have done has nothing to do with politics.

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The last time around, a Republican president was installed by a corrupt Supreme Court decision, launched a war based on lies, made the United States a country that tortures people, let a famous American city drown, and unleashed corporate greed to the point where it damned near blew up the world. And we were told that our anger was somehow a detriment to progress. Even a Democratic president told us to look beyond our righteous fury, that we were better than our anger.

Comes now young Ben Sasse to tell us that the "polarization" in our country comes not from the fact that his party elected a sociopathic charlatan to the highest office in the land, and that it is standing by him while he enacts into law every bad idea American conservatism has had since Barry Goldwater was a sprout. The problem is that we've lost track of what being a "community" is—"community," of course, being a thing beyond the grubby politics of, say, deindustrialization or the lack of a healthcare system befitting the citizens of a modern economy. I don't know. Maybe the country is hungering for the literary love-child of Peggy Noonan and J.D. Vance, but I'm not.

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But young Ben Sasse has his eyes on the prize. Assuming that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago doesn't crater the Republican Party entirely, somebody is going to have to be the straw boss on the reconstruction in which the Republicans can still be insane, but once again be taught to wear shoes and not say the quiet parts out loud. History tells us that the easiest way to do that job is to pretend that the noblest task for all Americans is to put back together again everything your party vandalized. And the easiest way to do that is to pretend that the worst part about politics is all that political stuff.

Because, if you don't do that, then people will ask you, if you believe all that guff about polarization, why you voted for 21 members of the most ideologically manic Cabinet in the history of the Republic. If you believe all that guff about a "decline in friendship" (Wow. Just fcking wow.), why did you vote almost 90 percent of the time in favor of the agenda of a president* whose concept of "friendship" has left far too many people with broken dreams and empty wallets?

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Young Ben Sasse took his project to my man Chuck Todd on Sunday, and you could see the vague outlines of the coming Republican sleight-of-hand. He is appalled at the state of things, and shocked (shocked!) at how we came to all this. My man Chuck Todd is very anxious about what comes next, and he's very impressed at the Very Strong Stands that young Ben Sasse has taken on the electric Twitter machine. And young Ben Sasse is very happy that my man Chuck Todd feels this way.

TODD: You said something that really rang true with me when you said the following on Fox on Friday, take a listen.

SASSE: The Congress is a broken institution. We don't deliberate about long-term things. People want, you all have an important role to help narrate what's happening in American life. But Senators shouldn't aspire to be pundits all day every day.

Since 2009, the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency, the Republican leadership in Congress has transformed itself into a rigid parliamentary-style party with rigid parliamentary-style discipline, and it used that to confound an elected president for eight years. As far as I can remember, long-term thinker Ben Sasse never raised an objection. He, for example, never took a meeting with Merrick Garland. Which makes me believe that this next part is simply bullshit.

SASSE: So I'm the second or third most conservative person in the Senate by the voting record, but I'm not particularly partisan. I don't care very much about these two parties because I don't think either of them have a long-term vision.

Translation from the Original Weaselspeak: "But when I run for president, as you all know I will, I will discover a heretofore unrealized long-term vision in the Republican Party, right in time for the Iowa caucuses.

But there is a number of things here that Senator Warren and I would agree on. I have a piece of ethics legislation I'm going to be introducing that also says that all tax returns of presidential and vice presidential candidates should be disclosed. We shouldn’t have any of this near-insider trading stuff happening by members of Congress. We shouldn't have cabinet officials have their spouses raising funds from foreign governments and foreign sources. We should have a much longer ban or cooling off period on former lawmakers going to lobby. So, Senator Warren and I are about as far apart on the political spectrum as you can get on most things, but on a number of ethics reform issues, I think she and I might well see eye to eye.

Of course, SPW's plan is oriented toward reducing corporate influence in the government, and not just what elected officials can or cannot do. I suspect that, when she puts that part of the plan up for a vote, Ben Sasse will be nowhere to be found.

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Lord above, however, my man Chuck Todd is looking for a hero and, I suspect, he thinks he's found one.

TODD: All right. And very quickly, you, you floated on Twitter that you sometimes thinking about, you sometimes think about dropping your party, that you don't always feel like a Republican, you said it again just now. How likely is it that you would leave the Republican Party?

Whereupon young Ben Sasse makes the Jack of Hearts leap from the deck and squirt cider in Chuck's ear.

SASSE: You know, I've said for, I’ve been in office for, what, three and a half years? And I’ve said since I got there, I conceive of myself as an independent conservative who happens to caucus with the Republicans.

Except, well, I'm not, because I have this terrible ambition that overcomes me at the most convenient times.

SASSE: But I'm committed to the party of Lincoln and Reagan as long as we can try to reform it and get it back to being a party that's about the universal dignity of all Americans and the First Amendment as the beating heart of American life. But right now, that's not what the party talks about very much.

There is no "party of Lincoln and Reagan." The two cancel each other out. It is either the one or the other. The party of Lincoln cannot ally itself with the remnants of American apartheid in the South, and with Oath Keeper crazoids out west, and with Tenthers in the Congress, and still call itself that. (Lincoln fought a war to keep radical Tenthers from tearing the country in two.) The party of Trump is the party of Reagan, but writ large and with all the bark off it. And, Lord above, you should pardon the expression, the current Republican Party never shuts up about the First Amendment, at least as regards money actually being speech, and nuns who feel that filling out a form so that their Presbyterian janitors can obtain birth control.

Young Ben Sasse is no true independent in the way that Bernie Sanders and Angus King are. He's merely a Republican with milder snake-oil to sell who's waiting for the smoke to clear. But that's good enough for my man Chuck Todd.

TODD: Senator Ben Sasse, who caucuses with the Republicans from Nebraska, a conservative independent from Nebraska.

I believe that, often, the American people are at their best when they're angry. But that's just me. The catastrophic Trump administration* is going to exhaust the political world, and then it's going to happen for young Ben Sasse, and people who should know better are going to applaud. Call me Kreskin.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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