In Honor of Ben Sasse

Introduction

So this is a post that requires a little bit of background. Not too much, but some. If you bear with me, I should be making good sense by the end.

The grand theme is this. In Augustine’s great book The City of God, he said that in this world of ours, the dead are replaced by the dying. And Charles de Gaulle once said that graveyards are full of indispensable men. All of us have an appointed hour, and the astonishing thing is how surprised we are by the arrival of an event that happens to absolutely everyone (Ps. 90:12).

The Needed Background

Here is the background. I first heard of Ben Sasse after his first election to the Senate in Nebraska. If you watch the two embedded videos, you will see that he has an informed interest in Burke’s “little platoons,” and is all about several things that we are also “all about” here in Moscow—the first would be the contribution that a genuine approach to the liberal arts can offer to a civil society, and the second is the screaming need for the revivifying of thick community.

My awareness of him was distant but appreciative—we had an NSA student here from Nebraska who had some sort of connection. In the first video below, if you watch about ten minutes after the 40 minute mark, you can see why we would be really appreciative of his take on higher education. The same goes for his views on thick, analog community.

Then the presidential campaign of 2016 happened to us all, and as I have written about before, I just flat didn’t believe Donald Trump at all, and opposed him all through the primaries. By the time of the general election, I could be described as what political theoreticians would call “a waif,” and so my vote for president was a write-in, a defiant gesture towards the clouds. The name I wrote in was that of Ben Sasse.

But wait, there’s more. After that election, and the deterioration of American civic comity continued apace, Ben Sasse went on to say and do some things that I differed with radically—his biggest blunder being his eventual vote in favor of the impeachment for Trump. For many conservative Christians, this put him in Liz Cheney territory, which, if you were not following back then, was not a good thing. These were happenings that made me think that he, despite being a fine Christian gentleman, did not appear, as the saying goes, “to know what time it was.” At the same time he was being harangued and vilified by people who thought that they did know what time it was—which we might call a separate delusion entirely. Although not joining in with them in their ideological warp spasms, I certainly did have second thoughts about my write-in vote, and consequently wasn’t very public about it.

If you look at Sasse’s statement around 5:18 in the 60 minutes video, you can see another example of one of my differences with him. It certainly is conservative to question a stolen election . . . provided it was actually stolen. But the RECEIVED WISDOM at the time from all the RESPECTABLE SOURCES told us that it couldn’t have been stolen. It couldn’t have been stolen because it was a Republican who lost, unlike Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, or Stacey Abrams. More about the RECEIVED WISDOM below, but suffice it to say that this “wisdom” has been in the tank for some time now. In the last few years nothing has come out to make me regret refusing the jab, and in the same way, nothing has come out to make me regret what I thought about the fishiness of the 2020 election. But back to the story.

During his second term, Ben Sasse left the Senate to become the president of the University of Florida, which he left in late 2024.. And then late last year, he was diagnosed with late-stage cancers (plural), and was given three to four months to live. He is already past that point now due to an experimental treatment regimen he is receiving, and he has recently given some interviews that have gotten quite a bit of attention online.

So I am writing this piece because I want to do two things with it. The first is to draw your attention to his courage and faith in the face of death. Watch the whole thing if you have the time. But if you do not, start around the 55 minute mark in the Ross Douthat interview and go through to the end, and then look at the 9:30 mark in the 60 Minutes piece. That is one thing, the first thing, the main thing. The second reason is that I wanted to say that Ben Sasse is being a genuine Christian vertebrate right now, and I wanted to state publicly that I voted for this man at least one time in my life. And I don’t regard that vote as any kind of embarrassment at all anymore.

Wanting to address at least some of the yeah, buts, there will be more to say about all of this below the video embeds.

Death is an Enemy, Not a Sanitizer

People without a grounding in Scripture can get pretty awkward around the raw fact of death. As long as they can ignore it, they do ignore it, and then when it confronts them in a way that cannot be escaped, they either start telling the most frightful lies, or they just vent their spleen.

We saw the latter when Charlie Kirk was shot, and various progressives around the country took the opportunity to rejoice in his murder. A lesser example of this would be when the president gloated over the death of Robert Mueller. When the two witnesses in Revelation are killed, the people rejoiced and gave gifts to one another (Rev. 11:10), like it was Christmas or something.

The former temptation is far more common, or at least it used to be. A story is told of an influential man about town, not well-liked but very powerful, who eventually made the great change, and half the town turned out for the funeral. Ten minutes into the eulogy people started checking their programs to make sure they were at the right memorial service. There is a tendency we have to treat death as something that automatically erases all debts, fixes all problems, and guarantees Heaven for everybody. But while it really is good manners not to dance on anybody’s grave, it remains true that when a wicked man dies, his hope perishes (Prov. 11:7). Death doesn’t magically fix anything.

If Ben Sasse had simply died suddenly, without warning, we would have seen both reactions. His ardent enemies would have rejoiced, and those of them that had any sense would have kept it to themselves. His friends and allies would have grieved and eulogized him, and his more moderate adversaries would have sought to find gracious things to say about him. Old differences would have been forgotten and old foes would have come to the funeral to pay their respects. And at least some of that would be the result of people treating death as a disinfectant.

But this is different. Ben Sasse is dying in public, and knows that he has very limited time remaining on this earth. He sees it coming, and is looking straight at it. And so we can see his faith, his courage, and his wisdom. It is on display for us, and it is obviously the real thing. Christ is there.

And this presents assorted political animals with a puzzler. How can someone be so wise in the face of death, and yet have been so unwise, according to our lights, on something like that awful impeachment vote? If we just gloss over the question, we are treating death as a disinfectant. We go to the funeral prepared to be irrational. But there really is an answer to the question.

Although death is not an automatic sanitizer, the book of Ecclesiastes teaches us that death is in fact a teacher, an instructor. But note that the lessons that death prepares for us are lessons that only the wise profit by; fools prefer to seek out an evening with Comedy Central—they go to You Tube to watch thorns crackling under a pot.

In these clips, Ben Sasse confessed in various ways how finite he was, how limited he was, and what a piece of work he was. Every honest Christian can translate that immediately into the first person plural—he is speaking for all of us in this. If God were to mark iniquities, who could stand (Ps. 130:3)? All of his life is clearly being held in his hands, lifted up, palms up, humbly subjected to divine review. This means that he is the kind of man who can profit from a diagnosis of death. And if a man can do that, he can profit from anything.

Not only so, but we can be instructed by his death also.

Defender of Vanished Norms

There is no dispute about Ben Sasse’s cancer diagnosis. Everyone agrees that he has it, and that it is going to kill him. His courage in the face of it is equally clear.

So for the political animals on the hard right, his vote for impeachment presents them with a thorny problem. The worst case scenario is that he was one of “them,” one of the bad guys, a hypocrite. And the best case scenario was that he just turned out to be a squish, concerning which the Republican Party has never had a shortage. But his testimony here in the face of death reveals that neither option can be the case. He is clearly a good man, not an evil man. And he is just as clearly a brave man, not a squish. So what is going on?

One of things that came through clearly in the discussion with Ross Douthat was that Ben Sasse cared very much about two distinct aspects of our public life. One would be his conservative convictions—he said that on policy, he was “very conservative. ” The other had to do with maintaining, upholding, and defending society-wide civic norms—honoring and vindicating our long-held civic “manners.”

So we need to make two distinctions here. The first one is that there is a difference between a sin and a mistake. A bad person can go in a bad direction because he is sinning and wants to go there. And a good person can go in a bad direction because of a mistake. He accepts a bad premise, and his virtues then take him places he otherwise would not have gone. Now because all of life is moral at some level, I can’t make a watertight distinction between the two, but this will do as a rough and ready distinction.

The second distinction has to do with Donald Trump the man and our civic norms. When it comes to a certain category of those civic norms, the president really is a wrecking ball. He speaks, and tweets, and riffs in ways that are “unbecoming” to the leader of the free world. So when someone like Ben Sasse wants to preserve and protect our “civic manners,” over against the kind of verbal degradation on display by the president, shouldn’t this be applauded? It all seems pretty obvious, right?

Well, there is more than one way to corrupt civic comity. Compare our whole civic life to a black tie banquet, like the most recent one where a third serious attempt was made on the president’s life. The president’s mean tweets are like him eating his steak off the end of his knife. Gauche, bad manners, all the rest of it. Meanwhile, the progressives are poisoning the food while being really fastidious about the table settings, which fork to use, and what side the servers approach the diners from. They want Trump to address his political adversaries, the ones whose rhetoric maps onto the language of the would-be assassin precisely, and they want him to speak to the “honorable gentleman from . . .”

To borrow from Catholic theology—not that I do this often—the progressives have been guilty of a long series of mortal sins against societal comity, and Trump has been guilty of venial sins. Very obvious venial sins, but still venial. And so I do believe that Ben Sasse was badly mistaken to be distracted by the latter, with the result that he wound up defending civic norms that had been taken away long ago by the whistling wind. The poisoners in the kitchen were the whistling wind.

The RECEIVED WISDOM from RESPECTABLE SOURCES has named Trump as the great violator of norms. But when it comes to substantive actions, out-in-broad-daylight actions, the violations of norms have been almost entirely in the other direction—three assassination attempts, three fraudulent trials, an unspeakable Mar a Lago raid, multiple attempts to remove him from the ballot in numerous states, dodgy doings late at night on election night, the intelligence boys spying on his campaign, and so on. Were I to continue in this vein, this post would turn aside to a different topic, but you should get the point. The norm-wreckers were on the House J6 committee.

So I don’t think Ben Sasse should have listened to the respectable voices. They were trying to describe a saloon brawl as though it were a tennis match at Wimbledon, and furthermore were pointing at Trump as though he were the only one behaving like it was a saloon brawl. “What’s that man doing down there? He just clocked the line judge.” But it wasn’t the line judge, but rather a guy with a dagger.

Can a good man make such a mistake? Clearly, the answer is yes. Sure. And this is just one more example of why justification by faith alone is such a glorious and comforting doctrine.

I know that some in Ben Sasse’s camp will want to interpret this whole thing as “damning him with faint praise,” but I can assure them that this is not the case. My respect for this man is genuinely high. Eternity can shed bright light on our political controversies, not by minimizing them, but rather by contextualizing them. So right now I think I understand the unhinged opposition to Trump more accurately than Ben Sasse did, but I also believe that in a matter of months, he is going to understand everything better than any of us do.

We can say that because we can clearly see where he is going, while we remain down here in a world of murk.

The Sum of the Matter

So with all this said, I know that there will be some on the hard right who can’t get over the fact that Sasse voted for impeachment. As far as they are concerned, that puts him on the other side of the line, over there, in the camp of our adversaries. Be it so. But are we then prepared to acknowledge that someone like the noble Abner can be on the other side (2 Sam. 3:33-34), and that a hard-bitten miscreant like Joab can be on your side (2 Sam. 3:28-29)?

And that consequently the other side has some far better Christians with them than some of what we’ve got?