Ben Sasse Shouldn't Be Taken Seriously By Anyone, About Anything

Benjamin Eric Sasse, junior Senator from Nebraska, Republican, peeked his head above ground last week, and American journalists apparently get six more weeks of sunshine. One of America’s most prominent “Never Trump” Republicans, Sasse garnered attention for criticizing the outgoing President’s spate of lame-duck pardons. In a terse, internet-friendly one-liner, Sasse said: “This is rotten to the core.”

Beginning in 2016, Sasse took point in the “Never Trump” movement when he preemptively announced his refusal to back Trump for President. This, and a handful of speeches from the Senate rostrum, made him an early darling of left-leaning social media, which dutifully retweets anything he says critical of the President. Despite being a junior senator from a sparsely populated state, he’s accumulated significant media airtime for his stated opinions.

Except his actions don’t follow his words. He votes strictly party line nearly 95% of the time (which, in fairness, is less strict than most Republican Senators). Given the opportunity to support the impeachment measures in 2020 and remove the supposedly corrupt President, he again voted party line, protecting the President he supposedly disdains. Facing a serious primary challenge, he ran radio ads boasting of protecting Trump’s judicial nominees.

This gap between words and actions prompts an important question: What does Ben Sasse want?

Sasse enjoys issuing media reports and press releases. He loves giving national interviews, and publishing books and articles in venues with a national reach. In short, he loves jockeying for attention, and getting the world's eyes upon him. He wants to be seen, because being seen is necessary for national office. It’s an open secret that he plans to eventually run for President.

Maybe not everything Sasse does is necessarily intended for a presidential run. Maybe he only wants a hand in swaying the national conversation and setting the agenda. But it sure seems at least possible that he has national ambitions. His demands to stay in office, embodied in his primary campaign double-talk, mean he needs to maintain his position and be seen. He isn’t interested in truth, he’s interested in attention.

That answers a lot. Sasse has little interest in truth, as evidenced by his repetition of internet memes in his books. He amplifies notional ideas carried in national and global media, because it’s easier than building a platform based on evidence. Truth, for him, is moral, not factual. Therefore he feels free to insert whatever pseudo-facts he desires, as long as they serve his capital-T Truth.

Sasse’s books, particularly The Vanishing American Adult, are littered with internet memes, to the exclusion of facts. He laments a storied Christian past of stay-at-home mothers and prayer in schools—a past which, as a Doctorate-holder in history, he should realize never actually existed. Many of Sasse’s anecdotes of supposed Millennial and Zoomer entitlement have been widely debunked; even the conservative National Review considered his book specious.

Unburdened by facts, Sasse builds a moral code which he thinks Americans will honor, by paradoxically putting Americans down. He seeks to sway our behavior, not by appealing to our better angels, but by shaming and humiliating us for wanting better. His morality works toward themes of work, service, and self-abnegation. Good people, in Sasse’s morality, subordinate themselves to leaders, who subordinate themselves to God.

His accusations of President Trump being “rotten to the core” derive, not from devotion to facts, but from a moral code in which certain people must serve. Trump’s pardons were not delivered to bad people, in Sasse’s opinion, but to people who strayed from their place: crooked businessmen, political insiders, and insubordinate soldiers. He doesn’t want these people pardoned, not because they are criminals, but because they aren’t correctly subordinate.

He’d never say so to the media, but Sasse has an Ayn Randian worldview, that life rewards certain people remuneratively (including himself) because they’re simply better than the mass. Therefore whatever keeps the mass subordinate is appropriate. Law, in Sasse’s mind, exists for lesser people. Trump is lesser because he churns up emotions in the plebian class, making rowdy White people think they own the country rather than being subordinate.

That, therefore, is what he means by “rotten to the core.” Sasse wants a world where people are appropriately subordinate. His opposition to Trump comes from Trump getting above himself, and not subordinating himself to the hierarchy. It isn’t that Sasse has strong convictions that keep him from supporting a criminal president, it’s that Sasse wants Trump to recognize his place in the hierarchy and stay there.

The Sacred Pause

The year 2020 has changed many of our relationships with time, possibly permanently. The hours of solitude, and for many the weeks of mandatory isolation, have made us aware of passing time. People have been forcibly separated from the activities that made time meaningful, like productive, autonomous work, or time with family; others have been separated from the activities that make time go away, like drinking with friends.

If I’ve learned anything about time in 2020, it’s how flimsy time really is. Only two objective units of time have any meaning to our lives, the day and the year, and those only matter because we happen to live on a certain planet orbiting a certain star. Technology has bequeathed us the “hour” and the “second,” measurable only by man-made machines. Scientists can measure time by vibrations of a cesium atom, accurate but, for most people, wildly impractical.

“Time,” in any meaningful sense, only exists inside our minds. Like anything else that apparently exists in the outside world, we can only perceive it through our senses, and impose meaning on the sensory data through our minds. While evidence suggests an objective world exists outside ourselves, our brains and bodies impose limits on our perceptions of that world. Time, space, and matter probably exist; but only our minds give anything meaning.

Therefore one of antiquity’s greatest activities, was defining time. Ancient civilizations sought ways to define time that allowed humans to synchronize their activities. Beginning with the basics of survival, they organized time around planting and harvesting. These times weren’t only practical, they were sacred, because the collaborative effort of creating food guaranteed the people’s survival. Planting wasn’t ordinary time; it was transcendent.

In the strictest sense, calling something “holy” doesn’t mean calling it “morally pure”; it means calling it “separate from everything else.” This applies to places, but it also to time. Pre-Christian festivals like Beltane and Samhain weren’t pretty traditions; they marked changing seasons, associated with growing and eating. Celebrations of cyclical seasons meant celebrating the people’s continued survival. Time meant keeping people together and alive.

We see something similar in the Abrahamic tradition. Ecclesiastes, with its famous statements about “a time to plant, and a time to sow,” as well as “a time to kill, and a time to heal,” wasn’t simply dividing human lives into hours; it imposed shared meaning on time, keeping the people together. Christianity, in its biblical roots, doesn’t have specific seasons that way, but preserves (sometimes wrongly) previous seasonal festivals, especially Christmas.

Remember, however, that these festivals weren’t private celebrations; everyone participated. To be Mesopotamian, for instance, meant participating in Mesopotamia’s seasonal festivals. Ancients had no separation between one’s national identity and one’s religion; language, ritual, and ethnicity traveled together. Even Judaic tradition preserves this, as the wandering Israelites paid homage to other people’s gods during their sojourns, according to the books of Moses.

Modernity doesn’t have this continuity. One can be American, or British, or Japanese, without observing that nation’s religion. Some countries, like America, have no official religion. You can believe and practice anything, or nothing, and still consider yourself American. There’s definite value to this, as it means one needn’t conform oneself to narrow and oppressive standards to be a citizen. But it also means Americans have no shared definition of time.

Except one. Everybody celebrates Christmas. One needn’t be Christian to celebrate Christmas, as demonstrated by the ascendance of that strictly modern “religious” tradition, the Hannukah Bush. For one day every year, America’s economy pauses. Most people don’t work. We don’t have pressures to perform “useful” or “profitable” activities; we simply sit with our families and appreciate being here, now. Christmas is Capitalist America’s only shared festival of time.

We have exceptions, certainly. First responders remain vigilant, and Chinese restaurants remain so widely open that it’s become a running joke. Generally speaking, though, Christmas is the one time nearly all Americans renounce worldly demands upon our time, and instead celebrate the present. Employers, governments, communities, and other outside pressures don’t own our time; for one day, time belongs uniquely to us.

Other holidays increase pressures: the July Fourth barbecue, with its public warm-weather spectacle, comes to mind. Certainly, advertisers and PR agencies cajole us to spend lavishly before Christmas on huge trees and garish presents. But on Christmas itself, for one day annually, we silence their demands. Frequently it isn’t easy; we’ve internalized demands to work, act, and produce. But Christmas, uniquely, allows us to pause time and just exist.

See also:
Fear of Darkness

Truth, and the Metaphors That Make It

If, like me, you care about politics and the relationship between people and power, then chances are your recent social media feed has looked like this:

I cannot wait till the Truth comes out and Trump remains POTUS for 4 more years! #democraticfraud #bidencheated and the world knows it!

— Karen Jacobson (@KrickitJ) December 15, 2020

Seven weeks after the incumbent President lost the election, after multiple court cases to overturn the vote have been ejected prima facie for lacking evidence, after the Electoral College has certified the results, and the Supreme Court (one-third of which the incumbent hand-selected) has unanimously refused to even consider a case they consider specious, loyalists continue demanding their definition of truth.

This demand for “truth” strikes me. Thousands of all-caps tweets continue pouring in, asserting the truth, dammit, that Joe Biden could only have won the presidential election through dishonesty. The only material evidence of electoral malfeasance has come from inside the incumbent administration; time and again, the incumbent’s claims of cheating die for lack of evidence. Yet loyalists continue demanding “the truth.”

President-Elect Joe Biden

Late in the George W. Bush administration, Berkeley linguist George Lakoff published his book Whose Freedom? Lakoff, whose career has focused on how linguistic metaphors shape how humans perceive the outside world, observed the late-Bush-era arguments over how to define freedom. He realized that, though conservatives and progressives used the word “freedom” generously, they imputed it with very different meanings.

Electoral politics generally stands or falls according to bromides, not principles. If you tell voters you’ll tax anyone holding remunerative jobs, or that you’ll let the poor starve, they’ll vote against you in numbers sufficient to torpedo your career. So working politicians learn to traffic in generalities: letting the rich hoard resources is “freedom,” and so is lifting the poor from penury. “Freedom” is an eternally elastic metaphor.

So, I’m coming to realize, is “truth.” When the tweeter above, and the thousands of her cohorts demanding the “truth,” shout that Biden stole the election, we progressives respond, almost crinkum-crankum, “Where’s your evidence? Show me the proof!” Because, for us, “truth” means accordance with reality. For claims to have truth value, they must have some real-world correspondence, something measurable enough to stand up in court.

But capital-T Truth, for defenders of the status quo, doesn’t require evidence. Truth is ultimately moral, not evidentiary; truth derives from accordance, not with the world, but with purity. If the world contradicts their Truth, then the world must amend itself, for the world is immoral. Just as morality requires us to examine ourselves and change our ways, it also requires us to change our world, by force if necessary.

Notice who, in public life, continues most assiduously defending the lame-duck administration. It’s mainly public moralists, people who think in black-and-white terms. From religious leaders like Franklin Graham and Kenneth Copeland, to secular moralists like Edwin Meese and Rick Santorum, the figures most inclined to defend this administration have a history of dividing the world into camps of good and evil, and acting accordingly.

Dr. Jill Biden

In fairness, I sympathize with this position. When I witness how our legal system continues to exclude certain populations, even as we’ve excised naked bigotry from the ledgers, I see a world plagued by moral compromise. When I swallow my objections to my coworkers using racist and homophobic slurs, because that’s the culture of industry, and purging it would leave us without skilled workers, I realize my world is unjust.

However, this doesn’t mean I can ignore reality. Elections frequently break in ways I find morally objectionable, and I’d love to overturn the outcomes; in my world, Elizabeth Warren should be preparing her incoming administration. But that’s not how the election happened. Electoral processes are devised by humans, and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves we’ll never completely purge unfairness, so we must accept a certain level of arbitrary injustice.

To people who think in mainly moral terms, this acceptance of injustice is intolerable. Whether it’s progressives railing against the fact that we haven’t purged racism’s stain from economics, or conservatives wailing that their champion of continuity lost, any level of perceived injustice is unacceptable. Boring old evidence isn’t a meaningful counter-argument to morally founded truth; only a superior morality can reverse their purified thinking.

We must relinquish the idea that we can out-argue defenders of the status quo based upon evidence. They don’t want arguments based upon facts (though some, like Ben Shapiro, claim they do), because to them, this world is less true than the Truth. Even quoting their holy scripture generally doesn’t dissuade them. Truth, to them, is an eternal verity, not a worldly fact; we can only respond with better verities.

Guilt: the New White Man's Burden

Robert Taylor as Walt Longmire

Sheriff Walt Longmire is the sort of person who blames himself when bad things happen to others. That’s what makes him an effective sheriff, in his TV series: he takes crimes in semi-rural Durant, Wyoming, personally. So in the season 2 finale, when a hit-and-run accident leaves his daughter maimed and comatose the same day he gets re-elected, he considers it karmic retribution for his willingness to seek office.

Infuriated, Longmire storms into the Red Pony, the largest local tavern, owned by his best (and only) friend, Henry Standing Bear. “I need your permission,” Longmire growls, “to do what no White man should ever do.” Henry, who is Cheyenne Indian, leads Longmire into the wilderness, where Longmire strips to the waist. Henry gives Longmire his blessing, and Longmire engages in what appears to be a Lakota sun dance.

That’s where my suspension of disbelief hit a wall. The sun dance, for those unfamiliar with Native American traditions, is a ritual of self-mortification in which men, and only men, let mentors pierce their skin with large bone needles, and bind those needles to a tree. The sun dancers then pull against the binding, letting the needles dig into their flesh, until they either have an ecstatic vision, can’t stand the pain any longer, or lose consciousness.

I watched this enactment of Native tradition with mingled disbelief and horror. Those who know me, know frequently I balk at accusations of “cultural appropriation,” which I fear forces otherwise well-meaning people into racialized silos. Once upon a time, fascists didn’t want the dominant population sullying themselves with traditions of “lesser” peoples; today, colonized peoples fear their traditions getting polluted by grabby settlers.

Yet even I acknowledge that cultural mis-appropriation happens: blackface minstrel shows come to mind. It’s possible to seize others’ cultural markers in ways that demean and insult the original culture. That, I fear, happens in scenes like Longmire’s sun dance. First, though many Great Plains nations had religious rituals of self-mortification, the sun dance was specifically Lakota, and the Lakota and Cheyenne were traditional rivals.

Worse, though, is the image of the pious, self-sacrificing White man engaging in this specific ritual. At various points throughout the series, Longmire engages in Native spiritual practices; in a very early episode, we witness him having to leave a Cheyenne sweat lodge ritual because a violent crime report came in. As someone who strives to learn from Buddhist, Jewish, and Native religions, I support Longmire’s spiritual eclecticism.

Lou Diamond Phillips as Henry Standing Bear

But why the sun dance?

Students of history already know, but many White Americans don’t, that the U.S. government specifically tried to eradicate the sun dance. Because it could often be bloody, and some Lakota died practicing it, 19th Century Christian missionaries wanted it abolished, at gunpoint if necessary. Because of this history, the Lakota seldom allow White people to witness the sun dance, much less participate; they never allow it to be photographed.

Yet sun dance reenactments have become a staple of Westerns since at least the 1970 movie A Man Called Horse. The myth has arisen, among White people, that outsiders can purchase tribe membership through this and other rituals. Despite being set in present-day America, Longmire is a conventional Western, even down to Longmire’s Stetson and duster. And like many cowboy characters, Longmire yearns for an older, more primal spirituality.

Much frontier mythology dates not to cowboy days, but to 1893, and to Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.” Turner asserted frontier life’s purity of goodness of frontier, letting White people shed civilization’s neutering influence and “live like Indians.” But as Yale historian Greg Grandin has written, Turner’s hypothesis assumes, falsely, that White people crossed the frontier peacefully. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In practice, the American frontier didn’t exist until the U.S. cavalry drove Natives off their lands. Friendships between White settlers and wise Natives, like between Longmire and Henry, have often populated Western stories. But this only happened after the military penned Natives in, squelched their language, and often destroyed their religious gatherings at gunpoint. The Lakota massacred at Wounded Knee were performing the ghost dance, a religious service.

Watching Longmire perform a TV-friendly version of Native religion, therefore, jolted me to my shoes. No matter how well-intentioned or how sanctioned by Native nations, such depictions cannot exist separate from American history. When the descendents of those who killed Indians, attempt to participate in Indian religion, I realize I’m witnessing settler colonialism. How much worse, then, when networks do it to sell ads?

See also:
Innocence, Experience, and Justice on Netflix
Vampire Cowboy Cyborg Racist Firestorm

The Difference Between “Kid” and “Kiddo”

Dr. Jill Biden

Like millions of left-leaning Americans, I felt queasy when shitty journalist Joseph Epstein called presumptive First Lady Dr. Jill Biden “kiddo” this past weekend. Epstein delivered the unearned nickname amid a string of sobriquets lumped on Dr. Biden in jumbled succession, like the repartee in a 1930s screwball comedy. Maybe Epstein thought he sounded like Clark Gable. Instead, he wound up sounding like a patronizing dickhead.

My opinion about this incident is extensively documented. Yet I’ve realized my initial response overlooked something. I said the word kiddo “demonstrates bad faith.” Yet afterward, I remembered the summer of 2017, when Donald Trump, Jr., son of the President, admitted meeting with Russian state agents to purchase dirt on his father’s campaign rival, something he’d previously denied. Several politicians and pundits rushed to Junior’s defense, calling him “a good kid.”

Junior Trump was 39 years old, married, and a father of five. Dr. Biden is seventy years old. Both are, in the eyes of the power establishment, still kids.

At first blush, these two uses of “kid” seem contradictory. Epstein used the word kiddo to undermine Dr. Biden, and with her the entire educational establishment that tacitly rewards women. Multiple sources, including President Trump, called Don Junior a good kid to shield him from culpability for meeting with America’s state enemies during a bitter campaign. The word which tears Dr. Biden down, somehow protects Junior Trump from consequences.

Yet, thinking about it, I realize these two uses overlap remarkably. To call someone “kid” or “kiddo” makes them small, defenseless, and needful of adult guidance. The word kid conjures images of a newborn baby goat, still wobbling unsteadily, requiring its mother for food and protection against a world swarming with predators. Kids, whether human or goat, need adults to prepare them for an innately hostile, even violent, world.

Sure, the attitudes with which one claims adult superiority over a purported minor differ. Epstein’s vulgar diminishment of a grandmother with a terminal degree is noxious, compared to the Trump Administration attempting to keep Junior a permanent adolescent. Besides, Epstein isn’t Dr. Biden’s father; parents can, arguably, claim parental protection over adult children. These shouldn’t be mistaken for equivalent events.

Donald Trump, Jr.

Yet they share one important presumption: some people never, somehow, become adults. They have protected adolescent status well into adulthood, willingly or not. This week’s political shakeouts have demonstrated how that happens in national politics, but it isn’t unique to that domain. Criminal law has revealed how some people become adults at absurdly young ages, while others remain children for literally decades.

Back in 2014, Cleveland, Ohio, police shot Tamir Rice in a public park because he was playing with a toy gun. The officer who pulled the trigger claimed he couldn't distinguish Rice’s toy from a real gun. Importantly for our purposes, he also claimed he thought 12-year-old Rice looked twenty. We’ve heard similar in the shootings of Laquan MacDonald, Michael Brown, and other Black children. Somehow, he always “looked big for his age.”

By contrast, convicted Stanford rapist Brock Turner was nineteen years old, and therefore a legal adult in all fifty states. Yet even after tearful witness testimony and international outcry, the judge nevertheless sentenced him to a fiddling punishment, asserting that Turner was a child and therefore not culpable. Like Junior Trump, Turner is shielded from legal consequences (but thankfully not public censure) by his permanent adolescence.

White people are protected by childhood’s cloak, even if, like Dr. Biden, they don’t want it. Black people, by contrast, have adulthood thrust upon them early. Our society’s definition of childhood innocence is White, frequently fair-haired, and innately female, as any boy whose father thought he needed to “teach you to be a man” can attest. If you’re White, and especially if you’re a woman, you’re a child forever.

Meanwhile, we watch the ideological retreat of a President whose notorious midnight Twitter tantrums, complete with schoolyard name-calling, have perhaps permanently cheapened the Executive Branch. At age 74, his arrested adolescence doesn’t just embarrass him, it jeopardizes global security. This product of permanent White childhood has made humanity less safe, perhaps forever.

Admittedly, secular Western society lacks adulthood rites. Where traditional cultures had programmed events when children became adults, we lack that now, except in religious enclaves. This means extended White childhood is likely to get longer and more destructive. Because if nothing happens to turn the child into an adult, nothing will stop the entitled child demanding the teat, even if they don’t want it.