﻿The Only Answer To Our Political Problems Is For Me To Do Nothing

By Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.)

Is America irreparably divided? The question is unavoidable. I hear some form of it daily, from hog butchers, schoolteachers or Jake Tapper. And it is an understandable concern. Democrats and Republicans alike have turned politics in a totalizing culture war.

Each side believes the other will send America down a path of ruination. Fearing the worst if our enemies come to power, we beg our elected representatives to do anything possible to stop the other side, to use any tool at their disposal to halt the advance of the opposing army.

But that way lies terror and tyranny. We can’t expect other people, even senators, to heal this country. It is a mistake to ask our elected representatives to do anything, in fact, besides think very hard about what is wrong with America.

Americans are the only people who can solve Americans’ problems. A senator’s job is not to fix the moral rot of modernity, or to fix anything else for that matter; it’s to carefully curate a canonical list of 60 books to repeatedly read to his children.

I had a job, once, as a teenager, for a few months, that was hard. It was the last hard job I’d ever have, but it taught me a useful lesson about the value of doing something yourself, with your own hands. Something like sending a manuscript to your publisher, or mentioning Rousseau in an interview with The New York Times. Americans have forgotten that producing something yourself, instead of asking a senator to produce anything, teaches self-respect, and, more importantly, it teaches problem-solving. Maybe if more of our teenagers today did a hard job for three months before going to Harvard, instead of looking at screens for 17 years before going to Harvard, they’d be able to tackle the ongoing decline of the labor share of income themselves, instead of expecting their senators to.

It is probably a symptom of our time that people expect to outsource the hard work of fixing the country to the men and women they elect to represent their interests in the country’s foremost legislative body, but it’s not a creed we have always followed. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, what made America great was “not what public administration executes but what is executed without it and outside it.” The Nebraska I grew up in, the Nebraska I believe we can get back to, as long as I don’t do anything to make that happen with the power I have been granted, fit his observation well. It was the Nebraska of 4-H Clubs, Friday night little league games and Elks Lodges. The government didn’t create the inequitably distributed but widespread prosperity that allowed these communities to thrive. The people did, through their hard work. The government didn’t directly subsidize the creation of the community itself, and countless others like it, in a series of policy decisions designed to create a middle class with wealth rooted in homeownership. It all just sort of happened that way because of our national character.

Every night, after we finish reading a selection from The Federalist Papers, I ask my 7-year-old son what he is going to do tomorrow to become a better citizen. He tells me he will help out at church on Sunday, or offer to mow a senior citizen neighbor’s lawn, or send his allowance to a troop. What I’m most proud of, though, is what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say he’ll ask a lawmaker to exercise his power to address the systemic problems facing his state or the country as a whole.

This is what I wish I could tell everyone who asks me why I don’t “perform oversight of the executive branch” or “meaningfully interrogate judicial nominees.” My first responsibility as a senator is to raise my sons right. And my second is to tell other people how to raise their sons right.

Congress can’t solve America’s real problems. It can only point them out in editorials. God willing, we can once again make the Senate floor a place of high-minded debate, and nothing else.