Ben Sasse: Finding a Vision for the Future in an Uncertain Present

thank you thanks Robert and thank you all for inviting me good to be with you tonight Robert mentioned that I have three kids we do something that's a little bit atypical I think for most families in the Senate Melissa and I are mom and dad first before we have this public office and we're trying to raise three little kids and she doesn't want him all week every week by herself and I don't want to be away from him all week every week and so we do a family commute so I want to introduce my 12 year old is somewhere here it's dark from where I stand so back there is my 12-year old daughter we have 14 year old girl 12 year old girl five-year-old boy and we rotate who commutes with dad every week and so Alex drew the long straw or the short straw to be my my date for the week but we talk a lot in Washington about all that's wrong and politics and there is a lot that's wrong in our politics but I want to give you one report from the field to encourage you a little bit first because there's a lot that's right in America despite a lot that's bumpy in our politics right now and my little illustration from the field again because we live in Nebraska we live about a mile from where I grew up farm town about an hour outside of Omaha and as I go back and forth every week I try to do field events listening to and learning from Nebraskans on the weekends and as you travel the state you think that they're going to be policy centric conversations or politics centric conversations I find this quite inspiring actually that as I've been traveling Nebraska the last five or six weeks almost everywhere I go almost the only thing anybody wants to talk about in Nebraska when I show up is our 14 year old daughter and the experiences that she had for the month of March living on a ranch so some of you that I know in the room I know follow me on Twitter and on Twitter I'm a dad far more than a public figure and our 14 year old girl it's hard to figure out where to get her hard work and we want her to suffer because we know that's it's a central part of developing character and so Nebraska is known for work ethic and for football and all bunch other great things but we're also the largest cattle state in the Union and so there's a lot of baby cows born every spring Nebraska and so we shipped our 14 year old daughter out to live on a ranch for the month of March and the cattle ranch she was at she had her hand in about 245 deliveries in some way or another over the course of the course of that month and i miss my daughter being gone from dad mom and brother and sister for that long and so she was texting me over the course of her month living on this ranch and I realized these texts the sort of each factor of a 14 year old girl experiencing a whole bunch of you know rubber gloves to the shoulder that she'd never experienced before there was too much there that was too good to lose and so we actually had as Corey would text me throughout the day I just started converting them to tweets and so I made up this hashtag hashtag from the ranch and whatever she was learning is she was delivering baby cows or you know vaccinating or tagging or pulling cows I started to tweet it out and everywhere that I go in Nebraska right now people say to me how do we make our kids suffer how can we how can we get for our kid what you got for your kid can you give me those people's phone number because I need to call them up my 14 year olds plan too many video games so why do I say that why is that relevant to our discussion here because the distinction between politics and culture is really important there's a lot that's broken in our politics but there's a lot about our culture that's still hopeful and there's a lot to to dream about and a lot to try to recover and culture is well upstream from politics politics is downstream from culture in the end the analog I think to the three stories that you're going to hear tonight from Mike and Melanie and brian is there's actually a lot in the think tank community and in the not-for-profit sector and in social entrepreneurship in America right now that's working and yet it's not really informing our political discussion very much why is that and so I'd like to spend my 15 ish minutes with you focusing on that barrier to opportunity which is the crisis of political vision that we have right now Mike and Melanie and Brian who I was just backstage with and have read their comments over the course of this weekend there are three really inspiring folks and there are three people that have a lot to teach policymakers in this country and yet right now they're not really a model for a lot of we should be doing in the public sector and I'd like to talk a tiny bit about why that is because I think that we do face a crisis of political vision that flows partly from the fact that we have to exhausted political parties right now we have a conversation in Washington that is really stole two fying relative to the vibrance and the vitality of the American people and relative to the magnitude of the challenges we face right now and what really needs to be accomplished in our time I think we're reaping the fruit of a lot of what President Reagan predicted well before he was a Republican president well before he was a Republican governor of California but Reagan the Democratic labor union organizer who then ultimately ended up traveling the rails for GE talking about the meaning of America and factories across this country and talking about what unites us and that Reagan the democratic labour Union Reagan not just the Republican President Reagan would say in any Free Republic you're always only one generation away from the extinction of freedom if you don't pass along the meaning of America to the next generation you can expect that that small our republic that you have will be in peril will be in danger of being lost and I think what's happening right now in this city is we're reaping the fruits of the last 40 or 50 years where we've ceased to talk in a meaningful way about the shared vision that unites us I have I have no real intention to talk about presidential politics at all tonight but just as one brief aside I would say that you know one of the dispiriting things about the moment we're at is you can sort of predict what the next six months are going to look like do we expect that the presidential campaign of the next six months is going to be a big uplifting conversation about what we need to restore and revitalize the country is anybody up to the heads nodding so vigorously I think some of you might need medical help I mean I really think there's a woman in Row three or just dislocated of vertebrae but right now we know that where we're headed is not where we really should be headed the conversation we're going to have is she's more evil than I am or he's more evil than I am and we're already starting this conversation about the less of two evils there's already this punching conversation developing where people punching each other in the face is not really likely to inspire anybody I spent most of this weekend at college in high school graduations and commencements I'm sure many of you did as well and when you're talking to 18 to 22 year old kids they're pretty dispirited about our political conversation people in this city people who are obsessed with politics whether in the professional classes or in the media talk a lot about political polarization I think the much bigger challenge at the moment we face is actually political disengagement and when you listen to young people they're not motivated to get engaged in a shared conversation about what makes America great and what shared vision we should have together they're really put off by this and their right to be put off by this so I want to try to set aside politics for a bit and set the stage economically where we are because we are at a really really interesting moment in global history it's scary to be sure but it's also interesting I'm a history guy by background some business strategy by my work history but my training is as an academic historian and I think that in an overly simplified way you can say they've only been four kinds of economies in the history of the world hunter-gatherers subtle degree informer's and the kind of villages where I'm from the rise of the cities and the big tool economies that are associated with industrialization we think of it as this big disruptive moment from 1872 1920 or 1930 and the fourth major economy in the history of time is whatever we've just entered but we don't even really have a name for it sometimes we talk about it as the information economy or the knowledge economy or the ite economy sociologists and economists and demographers kind of call it the post industrial economy which is another way of saying we don't have any clue what to call it right so you have hunter-gatherers settled farmers you know pastoral agriculture you have big tool economies in the rise of cities and you have whatever we're entering now we started into this new kind of economy this digital economy this highly rapidly dislocated disrupted economy 20 30 40 years ago and it's scary but it also has huge huge opportunities but our policy conversation hasn't been updated since the late industrialization fights and so in many ways when you talk to young people they know that we're entering a really really changed world as recently as the late 1970s average duration at a firm was still nearly 30 years so i was born in 72 I'm sort of tweener on some generations but think of the people think of your parents or your grandparents in this room and they they came into a world when they heard their grandparents talk people had the same job their whole life largely our parents and grandparents knew a world where people often change jobs maybe once maybe it was different than their parents or grandparents but by and large once you got settled down at something after high school or college you were probably going to work not just in that industry but that firm until death or retirement now we live in a world where kids who walked across the stage graduations in Nebraska and 48 49 other states and the District of Columbia this weekend they're not just going to change jobs they're going to change industries three times before they turn 30 the sort of magnitude and pace of disruption is unprecedented in human history the historian in me is always skeptical of people who say something is unprecedented but this really is new we've never done this before we've never created a society of lifelong learners and we need to do that now and right now our national conversation is limited to a few sources of angst a few causes of maybe competition on the supply side of the labor market immigration and trade are scary and disruptive in certain ways for people but this weekend as I'm talking to 18 to 22 23 year old kids you know what came up multiple times robots I haven't heard that discussed in the presidential campaign but there is no magic bullet around immigration or trade that's going to change the nature of what robotics are going to do and jobs that are routinized able if that's a word and predictable those jobs are going to become more and more rapidly disintermediated and disrupted and we're going to need to create a completely different kind of conversation than we've ever had before and right now our politics aren't really up to that level of disruptive conversation we have two political parties that seem to be wanting to have a fight about whether we should make America Europe again or make America 1950 again right neither of these are very interesting I was talking to an analyst the other day who said you know what we're dealing with as a business strategy matter is too failed enterprises in these two political parties the party that I'm a part of is largely suffering from a declining customer base because root sort of core republican voters are dying the democrats don't have the same customer base problem but they have a massive product problem because the Democrats are still trying to pretend if you just expand 1965 entitlement programs and the chassis of the federal government from 50 and 51 years ago that somehow this is the only three tinkers away from being a working system it's not true the Democrats are trying to sell central planning in an age of uber both of these parties have a massive vision problem about what we need to accomplish in our time and place and I think that one of the places to start is by just recognizing that demographically the middle class really is shrinking I'm a part of a political party that doesn't like to admit this very much Democrats regularly act like any problem that we find there's something that if you just gave more power to Washington and if you gave more power to central planners and bureaucrats it's Tinker Bell and a sort of wilsonian way from you know academic papers of 1890 and the presidency of 1912 it's not fixable but then you look at my party and you say well what are we offering instead we don't have much of a vision for young people we don't have much to offer that's optimistic and persuasive about where we're headed pew came out with a study last week that showed out of 230 metro areas in America just over seventy five percent of americans live in these 230 metro areas 203 of the 230 have had a declining share of their population in the middle class over the last 15 years and it looks to be accelerating what does that mean it means that there's a lot of angst the public and we should be having a conversation about what it looks like to create that society of lifelong learners we should be having a conversation about how to make more poor people and more disc people going through disruptive events able to become independent again not be having a conversation about how to make more of the middle class dependent again in new and expanding ways we should be having this big conversation about the good about the Telos about the end of public policy and by that I don't mean in any way to limit pluralism I believe that the American experiment is gorgeous and beautiful largely because the First Amendment is the beating heart of the American experience and the First Amendment is kind of a roadmap for how to recognize that in a continental nation of 320 million people with lots and lots of diversity we want to come up with a way to honor all the dignity and all the natural rights of everybody and set up a world where those people can live in harmony where we wrestle through what the good life looks like in our different communities but in a way that says we don't believe in violence in the public square so what America is fundamentally about at the federal level is an architecture or a framework to be able to live out that pluralistic society but everybody who's advancing a vision for what a good life looks like in a pluralistic society should have a shared sense that the American idea is that we want all of our people to be thriving and vibrant and independent and free and a huge part of what I think you're going to hear about tonight is particular people who've lived really heroic and or served other people in special ways who are trying to become heroic and pull themselves out of dependency back into a place where they're contributing to their community and I think one of the fundamental sort of heuristic devices we should use when we think about policy conversations is are we ultimately trying to reallys and religious and cultural institutions and mediating institutions and local enterprises are we trying to re empower them with with whatever the new welfare state becomes or are we trying to displace them and right now I don't think we're having that vibrant conversation we should be having about how to make more people independent when they go through these times of disrupt because it's going to be more and more of our shared experience to have those kinds of disruptions instead we have a political playing field that has one party that seems to want to make Washington more powerful and trying to essentially plan things and another party that looks like we've largely exited the playing field I think the kinds of less political conversations that you're going to be entreated to tonight are the kinds of things that can give a lot of people hope and a lot of people optimism and I'm grateful to be able to kick this thing off and look forward to learning with you tonight from Mike and Brian and Melanie thanks for having me you

Channel: Senator Ben Sasse

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Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2016