The Dispatch Podcast - Sen. Ben Sasse at the Aspen Security Forum

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Today’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast is a little bit different than the typical Friday version. Steve interviewed Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse at the Aspen Security Forum on the topic of America’s response to the digital revolution across the globe. Among some of the more interesting topics discussed: China and “chuckleheads,” as Sen. Sasse refers to some members of Congress. Sen. Sasse explains why even though the country faces an immense amount of problems he is still optimistic about the future. Show Notes: Link to video of the discussion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. A little something different today. This week I had the opportunity to interview Senator Ben Sass, Republican of Nebraska, at the Aspen Security Forum here in Washington, D.C. We talked about America's role in the digital revolution and looked at what our choices are as a country. I hope you enjoy the conversation. We've got a terrific session coming up, and it is titled Rejecting Decline, Mapping America's Choices in the Digital Revolution. And we're very lucky to have Senator Ben Sass, U.S. Senator from Nebraska, who is particularly equipped for this topic because he's on the intelligence, judiciary, finance, and budget committees. But even more, he was a member of the Salarium Commission, which is one of the more successful of the various commissions that we have was bipartisan, and a good chunk of it has been actually enacted in legislation. So it's, in that sense, a great success.

But he's also been a hero of mine because he is somebody who really does go beyond the partisan polarization of this country, both by his statements generally, but if you can get this from the title of his recent best-selling book, them, why we hate each other and how to heal. We need more senators like that. And we're very lucky to have him being interrogated by Stephen Hayes, an outstanding jury. journalist who's co-founder and editor of the dispatch and former editor-chief of the weekly standard. So over to you, Steve. Great. Thank you, Professor. Thanks for having us here today.

Senator, let me start sort of level set. What is digital, why are we mapping the digital revolution? What is the digital revolution and why does it need cartographers? Thanks, Steve. Good to be with you. Professor and I. Thanks for that introduction. Good to see you.

I think I'm a historian by training, and usually there's more continuity than discontinuity in the world. Usually a historian's job is to be boring at a party and say, you think everything's changing, we're in some massive inflection point in human history, and actually there's a lot more that's the same, not different in this moment. But I think we're living through a truly unprecedented time in human history. Everybody before us forever has worked fundamentally, primarily with Adams, and most people in our time and place are going to work mostly with bits going forward. Everybody before us

has had something approximating lifelong work. Not everybody got to work at the same firm their whole life, but they had the idea of lifelong work. Hunter-gatherers, agrarians for 10,000 years, and even industrialists for the last 150 years, had an adolescent identity crisis as teenagers about coming of age about what you were going to do with your life. But once you figured out, you did that one thing until death of retirement. And I think Mark Andreessen's really prescient essay a decade ago in the Wall Street Journal, Software Eats the World, saying that will be the end of lifelong work.

That's what we're living through right now. And so I think almost everything happening in our politics is a downstream echo from what's happening in technology, economics, and culture. I think politics is not driving this. Politics is responding poorly to a disruption that's happening technologically first, economically second, and then unsettling place.

And therefore, almost all the major markers of human identity. Family, neighborhood, work, congregation, embodied living is moving to, you know, half or majority online, and we're not very good at the habits for living in the digital world yet. Why is politics responding poorly to this? And are our politics here in America responding more poorly than politics around the world? I don't know enough about all the other places around the world that are navigating the community disruptions that we're going through. But I I think, you know, I spend, as Professor and I said, I'm on the Intelligence Committee and I'm a nerd, so I keep a timesheet on myself, and I spend about 42% of my time on Senate Intelligence Committee and adjacent stuff. So China Tech race is the main policy area that I focus on, but I actually think of the expansion of technocratic, technological autocracy around the world as only the second biggest problem we face.

I think the biggest problem we face is this point, not just our politics, but our culture, not knowing how to navigate into this digital world and still embrace the American idea. The American idea is universal human rights, principled pluralism, government institutions or power are not the center of life. They're the frame, George Washington's silver frame with the golden apple. The golden apple is the freedom to stuff, your loves, your passions, the things you try to go and build. the frame is the framework for ordered liberty. Power doesn't bring people happiness. Power creates the conditions

that allow people to pursue happiness and community. And I think right now, this idea of primarily private sector, not just for profit, but not for profit, Tocquevilly in America, principal pluralism, universal human rights, entrepreneurship,

volunteerism and persuasion over power, that cluster of ideas that define America. We haven't done civics for 40 or 50 years in this country. And it turns out in technology, when you can create a narcissistic feedback loop that makes everybody feel like they're a victim all day, every day, the American experiment looks pretty fragile. Well, that was where I was going to go with my next question. I think for years, for centuries, there's been sort of an underlying assumption that the American

idea is a source of strength as we grow. Is it today, the way that you've just defined it, still a source of strength? I think a robust, vigorous, decentralized. system that privileges the gritty and sold humans going to build stuff, that system will beat an autocratic system. The American system at its best would beat techno-authoritarianism that the CCP and Chairman Shee are trying to export. But if you do a crappy version of decentralization, I'm not at all convinced that that beats a strategic focus centralized system. The digital revolution is going to change everything about the nature of work. It's changing most of the things about the nature of community.

It's radically transforming war. Anytime there's any big disruption, offense has the advantage over defense. My dad, high school and football and wrestling coach my whole life, so I think about life as an offensive coordinator would. When there's new offensive opportunities, defense has a really hard time catching up.

And when we have 86% of our critical infrastructure in the private sector, and we don't know how to do defense, and offense has the advantage over defense and not just the big five. You know, the sort of bad guys of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, but a grab bag of jihadis that can get coders and try to have cyber attacks of global reach as well. But you've got ransomware attackers

that are sort of off-book on the edge of 16 Russian oligarchs. There are many, many different offensive actors, and America has to pay defense because we have the luxury, the benefit, of only 4% of global population, but we've got 24% of global GDP, which means our tech footprint is much bigger than anybody else's, which means the underbelly of what can,

can be attacked is really big. And right now we're bad at trying to say, hey, partisan fight in Washington between this and that, these are not existential issues. Existential is, is there an American civic shared understanding of that idea of principled pluralism, universal dignity, why a private sector and entrepreneurship matter?

And right now we got a bunch of chuckleheads in politics who have confused themselves. And they think because they're on this stage and they want to do performative jackassery all day every day, that that actually, defines the center of meaning. And so we got a bunch of people on the left who aren't sure they believe in the American idea

because they think the state should be the center. And then we got a bunch of reactive people on the right who've decided, well, if I don't like their overreach, then what I should want to do is also use the powers of the state against my cultural opponents. That's not America. So what does a decentralized tech strategy for the United States,

what does it look like in your view? Yeah, I think we've got a lot to work out there. We've got a couple of assets that are wonderful, right? We've got some of the biggest and most innovative tech experiments in the world happening in Silicon Valley. So better to have our private sector than have anybody else's actual private sector or China's kind of fake private sector. But we do have to figure out what it looks like to coordinate. I can't remember what's exactly public now, but I know there's something public about in the last 24 to 36 hours about Google returning to

compete to partner with DOD. I'm stalling to look around and make sure lots of heads are nodding. Google partnering with DOD in response to their kind of internal HR woke revolt three or four years ago against Project Maven, we have to go out and build the case of why American public private sector cooperation is the right play for a world against a CCP that is actually committing genocide. Like this isn't this isn't a hard thing. Like, you just think about the range of LeBron.

So all woke politics at home, but abroad, whatever the Chinese Communist Party says, fine and good. Who gives a shit about the Uyghurs? Right? I mean, we have to have the American people understand what we actually believe in together, and we need to go out and tell that story and understand why the state shouldn't control our private sector, but our public and private sector need to cooperate. Another big asset we have is Paul Nakasone, the forced army general that heads NSA and his dual-hated, his head of Cyber Command, is the best cybercerners.

warrior on earth. It's great that he's our guy. One of the most consequential decisions Lloyd Austin, Secretary Austin will make, I think, is whether or not he extends Paul Nakasone. This is a rickover kind of moment. The troop rotation, the leadership rotation that we do in the U.S. military makes a lot of sense in general. It wouldn't make any sense at all to move Paul Nakasone out ahead of NSA right now, because he's doing a great job of helping socialize, not in a governmental term, in a communications way, helping socialize a lot of U.S. industry, tech companies and beyond, you know, financial services companies, energy, transportation, helping them think at his fusion centers about the right

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Well, I think there's a lot to be optimistic about in the sense that in a republic, this challenge isn't all that new. I mean, this is George Washington's farewell address in December of 1796, the most important, most widely read civic catechetical document in the United States until the Civil War. Wasn't the Declaration of Independence, wasn't the Constitution, it was Washington's farewell addressed because he said, essentially, as Reagan would paraphrase it, in the 1960s and 70s when he was riding the train for GE, in a republic, you're always only one generation away from the extinction of liberty. The only way a republic ever works is that you teach it to the next generation. And I think the overwhelming majority of the American public is not at all satisfied with these two minority parties that we have right now.

The only thing that happens in American elections right now is that someone loses. No one wins. It isn't hard to understand this unless you're a politically addicted weirdo who watches cable news all day or lives on blue checkmark political Twitter or is an office holder yourself who got warped into thinking that you should stay forever in politics. Most of the American people know that politics right now is not aspirationally persuading anyone. What happens every single election is somebody overreaches, and then you have a backlash. And this isn't the way it's always been. From 1952 until 1994, the House of Representatives turned over zero times. Since Bill Clinton's election in 1992, every single second year of a new president's term, with the sole exception of George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9-11,

every single time the Congress flips two years into a new presidency because that person didn't win because they had some grand mandate to go and transform America. They won because the other person was regarded as a bigger jackass, right? Every election is basically a lesser of two evils election right now. This isn't actually complicated if you look at it or if you talk to actual voters. Only 14% of Americans pay attention to politics on a daily basis. they are not at all representative. Something like 20% of America is on Twitter,

over 80% of all political tweets are from less than that 2% of that 20%. And yet I work with a lot of people who actually think the Twitter response to things they say are representative of real people. It's not at all representative of real people. The Chiron writers for MSNBC, CNN, Fox, and whoever writes the headline alerts for New York Times,

they were the octane fuel for Donald Trump, right? Because it's the overreach of saying these hyper-large things as if the American people really want politics to be offering them these big swings. So the Virginia election, if you spend any time on the ground, I commute eight months a year. We live here for four months every spring. My family comes out, and most of our social network

is in northern Virginia when my family's here in the spring semester. And like the idea that Glenn Yonkin was going to win, I'd have given anybody 50 to one odds. Like there wasn't any doubt Glenn Yonkin was going to win. And you talk to people to parents and the plus 20 numbers that he had with independence were because Randy Weingartener in the teachers unions said, screw you to parents. Like, it just wasn't hard to understand. Are you cheering that she said that?

Oh, thank you. And the New York Times headlines were the breaking news alerts, Two weeks ago, Republicans pounce trying to turn education issue into electoral issue. What are you talking about? Republicans pounce. Terry McColliff just committed suicide on national TV. Republicans didn't win that race. McCullough decided to lose.

And that's what happens in every single election right now. And so this sounds pessimistic, but I actually think there's a lot of silver line. There's a lot of silver lining to this, which is, I think, even though we don't teach civics, I think in our bloodstream, Americans still fundamentally understand the freedom from freedom to distinction. They get that in our system, politics are not going to make you happy. Politics are supposed to hold at bay lots of bad things that can happen to you. Government's job is to take the difficulty out of things that shouldn't be difficult. Politics job is to make sure that walking home from a restaurant late at night isn't dangerous for anybody in any neighborhood in America.

That's politics job. Politics job isn't to take the difficulty out of raising your kids. That's actually the fundamental nature of how bonding between parents and kids works and how character is developed. And I think the American people overwhelmingly don't want a politics that tries to be the center of life. And I'm in a party that I think really used to understand that and increasingly doesn't. There are a whole bunch of radical addicted political hacks on the left. And a bunch of people in my party have said, let's own them by trying to. trying to do the same thing.

Let's seize the powers of the state to regulate speech from the right. No, and I don't think the American people want that. So the good news is, I think the American people want a government that says, hey, we've got a small number of priorities, but we're going to be focused on governing prudently for 2030. And the people who are trying to live performative politics

to get on cable tonight or to have some viral tweet an hour from now, they're not thinking about 2030. And I think the American people want a politics that thinks about a small number of things for 2030. 2030. Future war, future work, how do you navigate, how do you maintain a First Amendment culture in a place where public squares are increasingly digital, not physical? It's a small number of issues, but they're really important. What's your best evidence that the American people, broadly, are thinking about such long-term issues? Well, I think them checking out

is a bad feedback loop on politicians that's having the negative consequence of the politically addicted share of the country gets more and more attention, but they're a smaller and smaller group of people. So I'll go strategy nerd for a minute. I'm a McKinsey and B.C.G guy by background. So the crowd out of the middle on an X-axis of ideology

is obvious. The crowd out of the middle on a y-axis of political engagement is less obvious, but far more consequential for our time. So if your X-axis is progressive, center-left, center, center-right, far-right, the crowd out of the middle is very visible in Gallup and Pew Data. So in the mid-1990s, 26% of Americans define themselves as moderates. They were higher propensity voters than people to the right and left of them. Today, 7% of Americans define themselves as moderates, and they're less likely to vote than tribalists to the right and the left of them.

That's obviously a challenge for finding ways to build bridges. And I say this as somebody who's clearly on the right. I'm not in the middle ideologically. I'm tonally and dispositionally a moderate because the people I want to be my neighbors are people who want to make sure we're raising kids well and making sure people aren't driving too fast through the streets and coaching Little League.

If you vote the same way I do on marginal tax policy, I don't give a rip. That is not what defines neighborliness. This shouldn't be a core issue. But I want to be clear, I'm not in the middle, policy-wise. I'm dispositionally in the middle, but I'm a policy conservative.

But on the Y-axis, if that's political engagement, and so you have an upper tier of addicts, and you have a middle tier of what I would call healthy Eisenhowerian middlebrows, one cheer for politics. These are the kind of people that make a republic work. And if your bottom tier is disengaged people checking out, what's clear is that the middle's completely evaporating.

About 8% of America is politically addicted and fairly far left. And what Donald Trump both saw and exacerbated was the growth of a politically addicted always online right, which has grown from 2 to about 6.5% over the last 5 or 6 years. So you've got about 8% politically addicted on the left,

about 6% politically addicted on the right. And you've got this middle tier of people who say, oh, wait a minute, if I pay attention to politics, I have to pretend that it's my whole worldview and my whole identity, screw that. I'm going to check out. I want less and less to do with you people.

And so I think of it kind of like, the casino versus Kronkite model of how you consume your political news. Back in the day, and I'm not romanticizing the three broadcast networks of 1965, but there was still a sense that thoughtful adults had to pay some attention to politics, but this wasn't their core identity. So what fits inside 26 or 28 or 30 minutes a day and help rank order for me? What are the important things I need to know about? Now contrast that with a casino model. What happens in a casino? There are no clocks, There's all you want to do is create people who are weirdos, who are addicts, who just endlessly scroll. And so you lie to them.

And the narcissistic feedback loops on your feed tell you, you know what, you're a victim. Everybody's mistreating you. And so right now we have this weird thing happening in our politics where those who are more and more engaged in politics are less and less likely to actually know what's happening in politics at a substantive level. Tons of study on this now, by the way. People who pay less attention to politics are more likely to know basic things about America. American life in American politics than the people who are totally addicted because they end up in these warped feedback loops and these bubbles and these conspiracy theories where they don't know anybody who doesn't already believe exactly what they believed.

And so we have this like universal intersectional victimology of everybody's trying to outvict them everybody else. And so you've got all these guys pretending to be tough guys. And the way you pretend to be tough in politics now is by what? By whining the most. That's the tough guy in American politics. And that's a huge part of what happens on the hill now. got this performative stuff where people aren't trying to talk about. How do we build a coalition

to do these two or three or four things over the next five or eight or ten years? You have people trying to say, how can I say something super provocative, grandstanding at this hearing, so I can get on TV tonight and speak to only the three million people who already believe exactly what I believe. That's not healthy. And I would add, cash in on those TV appearances with low dollar fundraising, right? I mean, that's a part of the problem. So how do you break this grip? I mean, I mean, I may have missed it. I keep looking for your optimism, and I keep failing to find it. How do you break the grip on this?

I mean, if you look at elections every two years since 2006, we've had a change election with one exception. That furthers the pattern that you talked about going back decades. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think those elections often called change by people who write about politics all day every day. I think what it usually is an anti-overreach election. It's usually people saying, can we be normal?

And I think that's what Glenn Yonkin just did. He just ran a campaign that was just pretty sane and normal, and other people overreached, and he said, no, actually, we're not going to do that. And so I don't know that this was a change election, though I think we need lots of change in American education, both K-12 and higher ed. Some of the most underperforming sectors of our economy right now

are what we're doing in education. And education has never been more critical to a republic than in a world where it's, everybody's getting disrupted out of jobs forever more into the future. So it isn't just you have an identity crisis at 14 or 16 or 18 or 20 years old because you have to figure out your work. It's 40 and 45 and 50 years old forevermore because there isn't going to be any lifelong work.

So we're the first civilization ever that has to create lifelong learners, but I don't think this education revolution, the hybridization, I don't think it's all online. I think it's a hybrid of digital and multiple embodied things. I don't think this education revolution is mostly going to come from the government. I think we're going to see a bunch of plural foundings. We need a new cultural wave of institution building. We need venture and social philanthropy everywhere in every community. And so what I guess I'm optimistic about is the American people are not saying yes to tribalists.

They're saying, you all are weird. And so the good news to me is there's still a republic that's latent. Lots of people are inattentive. They should pay more attention. Some of the reason we get so much of the performative nonsense politics is because not enough normal people are paying attention to demand that they sit down and that normal people try to lay out an agenda for 2030 and 2040.

But I think there's latent opportunity in that American idea of principal, pluralism, universal human dignity, and lots of entrepreneurship, both on the tech side for for-profit, you know, future work ventures, but also we need a Toquevillian wave, like America saw a lot of Foundings in the 1880 to 1920

phase during the rise of cities and early industrialization, we need a wave of not-for-profit and civil society foundings now. And I think most of the American people don't look to politics and say, oh, that's my great hope. Some political hack said, only I can save you.

And I'm not meaning to refer just to the former president. I think there are 20 people on the left and 20 people on the right who this is their whole message, that only they can stop the flight 93 election from the bad guys on the other side, I think the good news is 10 to 15% of people are interested in listening to that conversation. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side.

So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Presale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at MX.ca. slash y annex what's the to return to the digital revolution i think you can make a pretty compelling argument that that this digital revolution has accelerated trends yeah these trends a lot of the negative trends is there a positive role to get to the solutions you're talking about to wake up the normies

as it were yeah i i think the analog to industrialization is important right civil society the new England Green collapsed when technology made production, ag production, so much more productive on a per acre basis that you didn't need as many people working on the farm. So you had push factors from the village, and you had pull factors to the city with the rise of factories. And when you got to cities, people were like, holy crap, this isn't going to work. We're never going to have community here. Think how weird it is that we had prohibition.

People drank so much more per capita than we do now. And we don't have polling, but we think there was probably between 75 and 85% support for prohibition. Why? Why would that have been? There really were drunk Irish kids passed out. Sorry, Steve, to hit your people. Drunk Irish kids passed out everywhere in the street of all eastern cities in the U.S. And what happened over the course of 10 or 15 or 20 years?

People figured out how to rebuild community in urban ethnic neighborhoods that was different than the New England town village. but there was a lot of texture and dynamism in American civil society. And I think we're going to have to go through something similar. And the digital revolution has lots of upsides and lots of downsides, right? I mean, the reality is we are the richest people any time and place in all of human history

in a middle class level. There has never been a median portion of a population that's as rich as Americans are today in 2021, unparalleled in human history. That's great. but it turns out, I know Arthur Brooks was here this morning, I don't know if he covered this, but I'm just stealing from him and his summaries of the happiness literature.

Turns out consumption isn't very highly correlated with happiness. Production is highly correlated with happiness. Do I have meaningful work? Do I think somebody needs me? When I leave home on Monday morning, I'm speaking for all of us, when anybody leaves home on Monday morning, do you think you're needed? If you do, if you have meaningful work, it's highly likely that you're happy.

It's the highest correlate with happiness. Do you have a theological framework to make sense of death and suffering? Do you have a family? Do you have a few deep friendships? Two, three, deep friendships, Aristotelian friendships, not Senate friendships. My good friend, the senator from Vermont

who's face, I'm about to rip off in a debate. But do you have actual friends? Those three things are numbers two, three, and four in whether you're happy. Do you have theology? Do you have family? Do you have friends? But the number one correlate to human happiness

is do you have meaningful work. If you do, you're happy. right now, we haven't figured out what it looks like to help people find meaningful, productive output in a world where software is consuming their lives. I believe we will. I'm against UBI. I think universal basic income is a bad idea, but I'd like us to be debating it explicitly right now, not drift to it in the crisis when we've got lots more 40 and 45 and 50-year-old suicide than we currently have. By the way, pre-pandemic, you probably all know this, but pre-COVID in In 2016, 17, 18, and 19, three of four years, we had declining life expectancy in the U.S.

Never happened before. There wasn't data during the Civil War. We probably had declining life expectancy during the Civil War. But in over 100 years, we had never had three years of declining life expectancy. And we did. Why? 80-year-old longevity was up. Infant mortality was down.

Maternal delivery mortality was down. Cancer and heart disease, by far the two leading killers in America, at 27 and 24 percent of the public, they were both down. How can you have every metric pointing in the right place and you have declining life expectancy? Massive 25 to 55 year old male suicide in America. Opioids, other forms of overdose, liver disease. If you're 70, liver disease is a disease. I'm sorry, if you're 30, liver disease is a disease. If you're 70, liver disease is a disease. If you're 30, liver disease is another form of suicide most of the time. This is about the crisis of work. The crisis of deep relationships and the crisis of place, community, and meaning. 60-year-old men

today, 61% define their wife as their best friend. 60-year-old women, 29% of people define their husband as their best friend. Why? It turns out women, it feels like the Aspen Security Forum decided to do the military show right now. I present to you the C-130, followed by the 1945 reenactment. It's a lot of planes. It turns out women are really good at figuring out how to navigate disruption. I mean, at a time when our weird, woke politics

pretend we're not supposed to think that biology exists, the neural imaging revolution is producing just fascinating stuff, right? The structural differences between male and female brains are so amazing what we're learning right now. Men have more same side front to back, same hemisphere, hemisphere connections. Women have many, many more cross-hemispheric connections in the structure of your brain. There's a Moore's law and neural imaging happening now. We've learned more about

the human brain in the last 20 months than the beginning of human history until 20 months ago. And it turns out cross-hemispheric connections are highly related to being able to handle complexity and disruption in life. Women's brains just seem to be much better structured for a complicated world. And we live at a time where people are disrupted out of jobs and they're disrupted out of community, and a lot of things feel like they're being undone when you're 45 or 50, and men tend to build no new relationships after that point. I don't know how much of that is susceptible to change, but I know she's about to give us the hook because she's managing complexity.

Thank you, Senator Sass. Women are very nimble. You reminded me of that. That's why. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Senator Sass and Steve Hayes for great conversation. All right. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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