Sasse, who was against Trump before supporting him before being against him again, is disappointed with both Fox News and MSNBC. (Same.) At the end of the book, after lamenting how a country obsessed with politics has split into factions us versus them, he urges Americans to resist partisan tribalism, downplay politics, and spend more time with their families. That’s fine, except the reverse of your problem isn’t its solution. It’s just another way of phrasing the same problem.
Books, like Politicians, can impress on their own merits, or they can just sound good against the competition. Without a doubt, Sasse is more intellectually stimulating than the election-denying conspirators who invaded his Republican Party. But shouldn’t the bar be higher than that?
Unfortunately, “Them” is that familiar type of book, one that only serves to assert the author’s representative as a Washington intellectual or – what journalists call people with “Senate Master” in their Skype background – a “student of history”. Sasse, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Cold War-era debates about religion in American public life, needs no such validation. But he is committed to the end.
“Them” followed the senator’s 2017 volume, “The Vanishing American Adult,” which touts the value of hard work, self-reliance and adversity for young people — listen here, Gators — lest their passivity does not torpedo the freedoms and the entrepreneurial spirit of the nation. The connections between greater individualism (book one) and greater community (book two) as remedies for America’s ills seem intriguing enough to explore, but the author agrees. Maybe he’ll write another book on campus.
Looking back, “Them” alluded to Sasse’s displeasure with the world’s largest non-deliberative body. “It was not Washington, DC, that gave America its vitality,” he writes, one of the many times he talks about the capital and its role in it. “Profound and lasting change comes not from legislation or elections,” Sasse writes, but from the “close ties that give our lives meaning, happiness, and hope.”
During a question-and-answer session at the University of Florida on Monday, Sasse said he looked forward to “the opportunity to take a step back from politics.” This opportunity seems unlikely to materialize if he wins the top job. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose office released a statement calling Sasse a “deep thinker” and a “good candidate” for college president, has waged a culture war on the state’s education system against several levels, and Sasse must now take sides in these battles.
Former President Trump reacted to the news with his usual measured tone, predicting that the university would “soon regret” hiring ‘Liddle’ Ben Sasse, calling him ‘lightweight’ and a ‘weak and ineffectual RINO’ . And students who protested during Sasse’s visit denounced the opacity of the university’s selection process and the senator’s past positions on same-sex marriage. (Sasse said that while he disagrees with the protesters, he welcomes them “intellectually and constitutionally.”)