Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) speaks at The National Press Club

hello everybody and welcome to the National Press Club the place where news happens I'm Andrea Edney I'm an editor at Bloomberg News and I am the hundred eleventh president of the National Press Club before we get started I'd like to ask you if you haven't already to please silence your cellphone's if you're on Twitter we do encourage you to tweet during the program our handle is Press Club DC and please use the hashtag n PC live for our c-span and public radio audiences please be aware that in the audience here at the club today are members of the general public so any applause or other reaction you might hear is not necessarily from the working press and now I would like to introduce our head table audience please hold your applause until everyone has been introduced so starting from your right we have Lisa Matthews who is the video assignment manager for Washington at The Associated Press and she is co-chair of our National Press Club headliners team we have Sarah wire who is congressional correspondent at the LA Times we have Dan Friedman who is a correspondent in the Washington bureau of Hearst Newspapers coming in from this side we have Ellen Ferguson who is reporter at CQ roll call and a member of the National Press Club headliners team we have Maureen Groppi who is the Washington correspondent at USA Today we have Philip Brasher senior editor at Agri pulse skipping over our speaker but just for a moment we have Betsy Fischer Martin who is the executive director of the women in politics Institute at American University and also she is co-chair of the National Press Club headliners team so today's guest if the past couple of months have been any evidence electoral politics are not for the faint of heart and since his election in 2014 senator Ben Sasse Republican from Nebraska has not been shy to speak his mind only two years after his election to Congress he surprised the nation his party by deciding to not endorse Donald Trump for president even after that election he has continued to question administration policies from border issues to the trade war with China perhaps this willingness to face issues head-on is due to senators asses background in contrast to his legal minded Senate colleagues senator sass holds a doctorate in American history and wrote his dissertation at Yale on the religious rights response to the attack on activities like school prayer in the 1960s that dissertation was twice as long as the book that we're going to be talking about today but it did win him some very prestigious prizes excuse me one second senator sass has also worked as a management consultant held several positions in the administration of george w bush and taught at the University of Texas at Austin it was in educational administration however where he found his most high-profile success prior to his Senate run before senator sass turned 40 he turned around the foundering Midland Lutheran College in Fremont Nebraska his hometown over five years sass rebranded the school as Midland University he balanced its budget he increased enrollment and he expanded athletic and performing arts programs as well as he also set up a four-year graduation guarantee so in the Senate Senator sass also works to make things better he sponsors bills addressing everything from congressional workplace misconduct and anti-corruption to presidential tax transparency today he's here to talk about his newest book and I would remind everybody in the audience this is his second in less than two years this book is called them why we hate each other and how to heal as traditional communities weaken and divisions threatened to become more prominent than the things that bind us together together senator sass is some thoughts and ideas on how to reverse that shift and bring us back together as a country speaking today senator sass will talk to us on what it would take in his words to pass along a country as great and free and opportunity filled to the next generation as we were blessed to inherit from our grandparents so some of you in the audience here today already know this but I am especially pleased to welcome senator sass here to the Press Club because he represents a state that is near and dear to my heart my dad is from Nebraska my parents met on a blind date in Nebraska I spent most of my childhood vacations going between Humboldt and Omaha and completely coincidentally truly coincidentally my husband is from Nebraska from Omaha so everyone whether you have a Nebraska connection already or not please join me in welcoming senator Ben Sasse to the National Press Club Thank You hundred there's so much that I want to talk about that isn't officially on our agenda but it feels like she gave us 15 jumping-off points one of which is she mentioned that I wrote a five hundred and twenty page dissertation there's an old joke among humanities PhD students that you write a 500 page dissertation because you didn't have time to write a 200 page dissertation that's what I did in my under edited project up here today we've been talking about dead animal twitter I would like to follow that lead if we can follow that a few times and question and answer so if I can tease someone up too please ask about Twitter I think Twitter is going to be relevant to some of the things we're gonna talk around a little bit in my comments today dead animal twitter wasn't something that i thought we'd get to go to but i have a seven-year-old boy and we live in the country we have three dogs which is a sign of people who make bad life choices we also may or may not have outdoor cats we probably do but if they're members of the Audubon Society here I'm not gonna claim that these cats are fed by me but they delivered that animals to our front stoop every morning and my seven-year-old and I think that this is something the world needs to know about so that's the main reason that I'm on Twitter you also said that the purpose of lunches like this is to try to make news I want to be a good guest I'm grateful for the invitation Betsy thank you for having me the rest of you but I want to say that why I wrote this book frankly is because the obsession we have with short-term news I think might be crowding out whatever we should define as the other thing the other side of news we consume lots of information and I think wisdom literature might be the alternative to news but not exclusively and so my goal is not to say I want to duck making news but I do hope that I can persuade you that some of what's broken in our time and place is claims of things like a 24-hour news cycle which I'm gonna posit over the course of our time together doesn't exactly it doesn't actually exist there is no such thing as 24 hours of news that 320 million Americans actually need and that means there's a tension between the ways we consume and the ways we might get to a sense or recover a sense of an American we so I'm grateful for the invitation we're here to talk primarily about the book I know in question an answer will end up in some other places as well but I want to tell you something about the structure of the book so that then I can roughly dive deeper on one third of it so I structured this project then why we hate each other and how to heal around the collapse of traditional tribes the rise of or the ramping of political tribalism or anti tribes and then the third third which comprises nearly half of the book is a constructive argument about what do we do what does it look like to recover habits of rootedness in a digital age that is increasingly whispering to us you can be rootless I think one of the fundamental tensions of the moment in which we live is that the happiness literature is starting to tell us things that people who've had grandparents have probably known for millennia which is that most everything that drives whether or not humans are happiness rather humans are happy are intimately connected to place the four biggest drivers of whether or not you're happy statistically are do you have a nuclear family do you have a few deep friendships not Sennett friendships my good friend the colleague from such-and-such state whose throat I'm about to tear out in our debate on the floor not social media friends but actual friends do you have friends number three and statistically the number one driver the number one correlate with happiness is do you have meaningful work do you have important vocation do you have a sense of calling do you have co-workers that is the number one driver of whether or not people are happy not do you make a lot of money not is there a co-worker who's three cubicles down that talks loudly and annoys me not does my back or might do my knees hurt at the end of the day but do I think somebody needs me do I think my work matters if the answer to that question is yes statistically you're almost certainly happy and if the answer to that question is no you're very very unlikely to be happy and fourth do you have a theological or philosophical framework to make sense of death and suffering do you have a worshiping community family friends meaningful work all three of those are highly tied to place and sort of world you questions about death and suffering partly tied to place through worshiping community three-and-a-half of the four drivers of happiness are about rootedness and we're living through a digital revolution we're living through a moment where we are constantly told were bigger than place we can just traipse across we can skim across the surface of place and we can be anywhere but it turns out the more that you think that the world is so flat that you don't actually have to have roots in a place the less likely you are to be happy the more likely you are to actually expand the denominator of potential unhappiness because of news we take in from afar and the investments that we make less in the place where we actually live so I wrote this book because of I think this implicit tension between rootedness which drives happiness and rootlessness which is one of the byproducts both for good and for ill of living through a technological revolution the digital revolution that we're living through isn't something that came apart about last year we're decades into the digital revolution and my guess is we're many many decades or a century away from figuring out what it looks like to have transitioned from a world that's mostly about atoms which is what almost all of our ancestors through all of human history of known physical material stuff in place to a world that's heavily driven by bits and those bits are gonna drive economic output bigger than anything the world has ever known we're gonna have more high quality low cost stuff than anybody in all of human history and yet it seems strange that we could live at a time with the greatest material prosperity ever middle class Americans are the richest people anytime in place in all of human history and yet we have lots and lots of anxiety and discontent and if you want to sort of make this precise about something that is closer to a new so we're gonna have our third year of declining life expectancy this year in the u.s. we've never had this before we didn't have good data on life expectancy during the civil war we probably had at least three years of declining life expectancy during the Civil War but since we've been measuring things like this for a century we've never had three years of declining life expectancy and right now we have ramping deaths of despair overdose doses opioids suicide things like that have displaced car accidents which on mortality tables from 80 years ago and five six seven eight years ago car wrecks were always the biggest driver of death particularly among anybody under the age of 60 or 65 and now we're displacing those deaths with deaths of despair that's a weird thing to be paired with so much material surplus so I wrote this book to talk part one about the decline of the natural tribes the good tribes the tribes of place we have a statistical collapse of the nuclear family particularly among the 70% of Americans that have the least educational attainment we have a rapid decline in friendship I graduated high school in 1990 the average American had 3.2 friends in 1990 the average American today has 1.8 friends I'm defining this again in an Aristotelian sense somebody who loves you it's not a transactional relationship it's that if you're if you see someone who's your friend and they're happy you're happy you don't choose to be happy you just are because you love them when when my kids hurt I have 17 and 14 year old daughters and a 7 year old boy when one of my kids hurts I don't choose to hurt I just hurt because they're part of me I love them right a great friendship is like that it's like somebody in your family we've had a halving of friendship in America in the last 27 years at the level of work we have rapidly declining average duration at a firm average duration at a firm in the 1970s that was born in 1972 average duration at a firm for a primary breadwinner in the 1970s was two and a half decades average duration at a firm for an American today is 4.2 years and getting shorter what does that mean it means it's much less likely that you have lifelong co-workers guess what males in particular are terrible at building new friendships after age 25 and so if you don't have the built-in chance to have coworkers that you just work next to on the assembly line for decade after decade after decade it's incredibly unlikely that males replace relationships after 30 35 40 45 and as we have more mobility in the economy not for everybody but as the economy becomes more mobile in a digital economy over time a lot of males have this atrophy of relationships when you ask middle-aged and older men who their best friend is 60% of them say their wife when you ask middle-aged and older women who their best friend is 29% say their husband there's a lot going on there they're all a bunch of culture war fights we have but I have a friend a couple who lived down the road from us in rural Nebraska and the husband is a big stockbroker is announced that he's retiring next year and his wife standard line is oh no he's gonna have twice as much time and make half as much money but there's just so much about the way relationships develop over the course of life that when you don't have coworkers over life it means you have less sense of a shared project and we're meant for we so all of these natural tribes are atrophying that's part one of the book part three of the book is constructive stuff what do we do about it and hopefully in question an answer you'll help lead us there I want to focus for our 25 or 28 minutes that all consumed before we get to question and answer together I want to focus on the middle third in my book because it relates to being in a venue like the National Press Club and before an audience of people who are doing a job which celebrates the First Amendment so the five freedoms of the First Amendment from religion speech assembly protest and of course press and so being in a place like this I want to talk a little bit about the media but not necessarily in the shorthand ways that we're used to talking about the media in our political discourse I want to talk about it a little bit more broadly and look at some of the economics of our moment as well so even though I don't usually speak from notes I'm gonna speed through seven theses because I know we'll run out of time and so I want to tell you my seven theses that are about the rise of anti tribalism and particularly I mean by that not just political tribes but news media consumption drives because I believe there are really only two kinds of communities when you think about what is a community there are communities of police and there are communities of idea do you sit next to somebody is your body near somebody else's body do you live in their neighborhood do you work at their workplace do you worship in the pew next to them are you apart sharing the same household with this person there are communities of place and their communities of idea and because of the digital revolution through which we're live living can Unity's of police are in collapse we could spend lots of time and hopefully if you haven't picked up the book you will I try to travel through a bunch of the data about what it means that place is being undermined in our time but since humans are social animals since we're relational animals we need to be a part of tribes we need to be a part of a group we need to feel like there's a place where everybody knows your name and where you belong and so if you have less place you're likely to have more attempts to make community of idea but it turns out almost all the economic incentives of our time to mediate distance and so when I say media here I mean something broader than just reporting I mean the mediation of being a part of a community that isn't just people who live on the same block or work at the same workplace when you mediate a distance between things it turns out almost all of our economic incentives are to anti tribe rather than constructive tribe what are you against rather than what are you for and so I'm gonna give you seven quick theses then I'll go through them a little slower and then when when time gets called on me hopefully I'll persuade you to hopefully have said something provocative enough that you want to keep talking about it a question/answer thesis one there is no we in American media consumption today there is no we in American media consumption today the reduction of barriers to entry has meant we've gone from a world where almost everybody had a local newspaper and maybe a sense of one national newspaper or a regional newspaper and three broadcast channels to a world where barriers to entry have fallen so rapidly that today 93 percent of American households have access to 500 or more broadcast or cable channels in that world it means that almost everybody is a part of smaller more fragmented audience niches which means that the incentives again not every reporter does this but the incentives inside media organizations are toward fanservice not pretending that you have a chance at speaking to a 70 percent audience there are no 70 percent audiences almost everybody is writing or broadcasting for some subset of a 1% audience and so almost all the economic feedback loops are toward an intensification of saying things that you zoom your audience needs to hear or wants to hear number two my point that I made earlier there's no such thing as a 24-hour news cycle there is no such thing as better better said there's no such thing as 24 hours of news that the median American needs Chiron's are lying to you before you even get to the question of whether or not the substance in the headline at the bottom of your cable news channel is true or false or accurate or biased it isn't true that everything that's being shouted at us from cable news channels is breaking most of it is not breaking and most of it isn't news that you need number three the obliteration of straight reporting versus editorial or commentary is a really big deal and we don't pay nearly enough attention to it we know that cable TV has been swallowing print for decades but there would be an argument 15 or 20 years ago that perhaps the internet could foster a culture that returns to some of the virtues of print media which is more deliberate is more dispassionate and is more amenable to thinking about that distinction between straight reporting and editorial or commentary I think the way the Internet is actually producing news though is much more like cable than like print and I think that has huge consequences not just for a republic of 320 million people getting back to a we but for the way the sub segments underneath that 320 million think about what the media is I don't really think there is a thing that is the capital T M Capital m media and yet I think the public increasingly does think about a world where there's such a thing as a New York and a washington-based mainstream media to say the least and they conceived of it as a group that fits in one of the tribes number for every site has a temptation to become a clickbait site even the best journalism in America has by virtue of headline testing economic incentives to become a clickbait site and that accelerates the accelerates the feedback loops that leads to lead to a lot more calm for me bias in the way we consume information so when there's a lot more information in the world you might assume that that would mean that we'd end up with a lot more shared news I think the likely outcome of where we're headed now is toward a lot less shared facts because of the way we consume number five one of the effects of fragmented consumption is the rise of a Manichaean conception of politics we're almost every issue can be thought of as good versus evil I'll just give you one data point on it here before we go back through this more slowly later and that is that in the last quarter century we've gone from 14 percent of Americans conceiving of the other political party as evil to 41% of Americans thinking of the other political party as evil a tripling in a quarter century of people who think when we disagree in politics it's not that Republicans and Democrats or conservatives and progressives think there are unintended consequences of the choices that people on the other end of the spectrum for me might make but that they're actually ill motivated that's a new thing and it doesn't bode well for a republic number five more and more of our politics is becoming symbolic at one level this seems to me to be a necessary consequence or maybe necessary is not the right word but a fairly certain consequence of more and more identity politics but I think there's more going on than just that so I want to unpack at some point later in our discussion I want to unpack something that maybe could be made a moral more easily which is the difference between country preferences and city preferences and by that I mean there are great things for the history of humate across the history of humanity about living in a city there are all sorts of things that come with density and scale there's higher-quality music and arts and there's professional sports teams there are great things about being in a city there are great things about living the country we live in the country and lots of it is about nature for my family and so we spend a lot of time in the out-of-doors there are virtuous things about loving the city and there are virtuous things about loving the country our nature but I think one of the skews you could lay over American politics right now is a belief that we need to think about urban versus rural as good versus bad or bad versus good I don't think that's healthy for us many of you the reports yesterday that the two dominant variables if you try to understand American polarization right now are gender and educational attainment so we end up with a kind of stereotypical view of a younger woman highly educated probably living in a city and an older less educated male probably living in the country and this is one of the ways that the the data analysts would say you can visualize a depiction of polarization in American life lots of the ways that we divide the electorate or we divide the culture end up value-laden I want to try to pick some that don't have to be value Laden and it seems to me I could argue either side of a debate about what's great about living in a city and what's great about living in the country again our teenage daughters and a seven-year-old boy when they get into a heated debate at the dinner table one of the things of Melissa my wife and I regularly do is we make them trade positions if you're so sure you're right about something then for the rest of dinner you have to argue the opposite point to the one that you hold it would be useful in our politics to find some things that clearly have deep cleavages that are starting to play out in our politics and try to get people to argue the opposite side by the way America is now 82 percent urban / near suburban so the the divide in American politics isn't necessarily about people's experiences of dense city versus rural country but it may be about some of the value assumptions of living in those kinds of places lots and lots of the people buying the three best-selling vehicles in America which are all four wheel drive pickups by far the two best selling vehicles in America are the Ford f-150 for decades and the Chevy Silverado for decades lots and lots of those people don't live in the country they live in the suburbs right so there are value choices that we're making and those symbolic politics are being expressed inside our political life when I travel I live in Nebraska and commute every week and when I'm home on weekends it is amazing to me how much of the grassroots feedback I get from Nebraskans are about cultural and symbolic and consumeristic preference issues and for the discussion today anti-media sentiments rather than policy or legislative discussions policy and legislation is discussed among my constituents when they come up to me and approach me a restaurant or at a sporting event policy and legislation far less than a discussion about the national media for instance I think we should unpack some of why that is by the way bracket this and go to a completely different topic for a second I probably should have said this at the outset I said that you all celebrate the First Amendment we should just say as a people and this is 320 million Americans it shouldn't be red state rural people versus urban blue people it shouldn't be Republicans and Democrats the Free Press is not an enemy of the American people the Free Press are people who are living out a First Amendment calling in an America that celebrates the First Amendment as the beating heart of what we do together those five freedoms and including the freedom of the press mean that most people in this room have a very important vocation to try to do reporting and do press and do journalism for the American people that doesn't mean we shouldn't also have really important debates about things like the collapse of the distinction in my view collapse between straight reporting an editorial slash commentary again I think driven more by the way we consume cable news and now increasingly internet news that but maybe we don't reflect on together as a group and seventh and finally I think right versus left is not only not the only way to think about the spectrum of American life I don't even think it's the primary way we should be thinking about the divides in American life right now I think of far more useful and that doesn't mean good but useful hermeneutic on what's happening in American life right now is the intensification and the obsession with federal politics to crowding out all other domains of life economics culture local politics many of you have seen the study that was done hidden tribes that came out maybe three four weeks ago and a number of folks have written very good analytic pieces on it but it divides the American electorate into seven different cohorts one of the most interesting takeaways from it is about 14% of Americans are almost completely addicted to federal politics but they're 8% on the pretty far left centric discussion have to swallow everything else in American life there was a point where for about six in my fieldwork in Nebraska that I kept notes on this the most commonly asked question I got in Nebraska was why does ESPN seem to be about politics all the time now instead of sports like I mean you must senator why are you asking me I mean I'm a football addict and and I've you know ESPN is probably the only reason we've turned our TV on for most of the last two decades but it was a very strange thing and I'm not making any comment this was by the way before the kneeling controversy this was about six months a year prior to that were the most common answer or question I got in Nebraska was about ESPN's broadcasting and why politics seem to be crowding out so much of sports I think this is a helpful loop back to where we started with the number of channels so those are my seven quick theses I know you're eventually gonna give me the hook and I'm gonna go through them and in as much time as you'll allow me to but I want to get a few facts out there in common about some of these seven points the first is in the mid 1950s I Love Lucy had a 68 percent share when there were only three options for what you could watch every week 68% of American households were watching I Love Lucy that told you that probably 98% of people were familiar with Lucy and Desi as characters and if you had a spat with somebody at work about a project if you were divided about politics in the bleachers at some sporting event there was always a way to return to some bit of common data in the last 18 years the most-watched serial programming in American life is in 2014 for three weeks Sunday Night Football hit of 14% share the two most-watched cable programs cable news programs in America right now are Sean Hannity number one and Rachel Maddow usually number two they're at 3.2 million and 2.9 million viewers which is one percent of the public and nine tenths of one percent of the public we act like we in Washington DC act like people are consuming politics at this deep constant intense level and I think there is a deep desire in America to not consume politics like this but people don't really know what to do because we don't have any substitute data that we can go to as an alternative that gets us to we the obliteration of this distinction between straight news reporting and editorial slash commentary leaves me very worried about the moment when we have a deep fakes attack and we are going to have deep fakes attack soon I spend about a third of my work life a third of my work week dealing with cyber and Intel issues and at the top levels of the US intelligence community there is a deeply held view that we sit on the precipice of a perfect storm three things are true right now one you know people have always tried to sow misinformation campaigns in your enemies tents since the beginning of time there's a whole bunch of you know Old Testament wisdom literature about sowing discord in your enemy's tent people have always tried to have attacks that are Trojan horses but in the past it's been really expensive to tailor spying to a place where you have a prostitute or a business partner or at least a bar or a restaurant or a hotel lobby now we can tailor our Intel in ways with the digital revolution that's never been possible before and you have second Russia willing to do that tailoring because they have a collapsing domestic economy and they need to figure out ways to unite their public at home and they want to do it by creating a bad guy abroad and so Russia is terribly clunky at the misinformation campaigns they do against us but the real fear in the intelligence community is that China sits right behind Russia running Scout team offense looking at everything that Russia is doing and getting better and better and better for the moment when they want to do this and the third variable of the deep fakes revolution that we sit on the verge of is simply the fact that we are so divided whether the issue is race geography gender guns urban-rural there are so many different variables that you can pick it scabs on us about when you get audio and video which we're going to get inside the next five to ten years maybe we're gonna get it inside the next five to ten months when you get audio and video that looks like a figure in American Life did or said something that he or she didn't say or do imagine during the Cavanagh hearings if the day after dr. Ford's testimony you had had a situation where video appeared where it looked like Brett Kavanaugh was partying at Yale 25 years ago you had some grainy Betamax tape or imagine if you got fake audio of Chuck Schumer huddling with Michael avenatti and other attorneys trying to plan a strategy for how to roll out different attacks where will the Walter Cronkite be in American life that can stand up and tell the American people actually we've consulted these folks in the IC and this audio is fake this video is fake as we collapse the distinction between straight news reporting and editorial slash commentary reporting I think we will rapidly spiral toward a world where the assumption is that almost everyone who's speaking in this moment is an advocate and in that moment I don't know how you actually bring the American people back together I'll give you one more stat and then I'll let you have have the podium back for questions one more stat that I think we need to have in common actually want to do six of them and I know I'm not gonna get away with doing that since I promised the general public has a 67 percent response rate to the question do you trust the media right now I think people who have the important calling that you have need to wrestle with why that is I think some of that I'll acknowledge here most of what we're going to talk about is nonpartisan some of that is political bias inside big parts of the media establishment because of shared background meaning that folks who work in journalism are far more likely to live in one of two big eastern cities and to be much more highly educated than the American people and to make a lot of similar assumptions about political and legislative priorities but I think lots of it is actually these structural questions about the way we're consuming information and in a world where most people who work in media organizations again that's not to say the same thing as being a direct reporter but most people who work in media organizations have structural incentives to get the people who came to your website yesterday to come back to your website or your newscast tomorrow and in that world it is much easier to say the things that you know because of algorithms yesterday got the clicks of the 1% audience that you had than it is to try to say things that would translate the complicated world we're living through with this digital revolution to a 70 or an 80 or a 90 percent share of the electorate I've heard people in both broadcast cable and in New York magazine publishing make the exact same quote to me there are only two kinds of stories that we run now we run stories to make the people who love us love us more and we love the people who we love to run stories that make the people who hate us outraged because if we can create a viral moment even if it's negative against us the odds are we're gonna get a lot more eyeballs and a lot more clicks and that's the best strategy to get an intensification of the 1% of people we got to sell soap to yesterday I think there are a whole bunch of structural things happening in the way we consume media right now that make it a lot more difficult to recover a sense of 320 million American people that are 1.we and we'll talk about it in the order that you see fit thanks for having me [Applause] so you've you've presented a lot of big ideas here there's a lot to that we we could definitely unpack but since we're in Washington and we are having this conversation Washington one of those two cities that you mentioned you did say that there's there's a general obsession across the country with federal politics and I know you touch on this in the book you say this is a newer thing and you as you know I do not recall this obsession to this level at the time that we were in high school for example if I'm getting that right from the book yeah so let me can you talk a little bit about that how recent do you think it is and just as importantly or more importantly why and what do you think would need to change for that to change yeah thanks so I I do believe that the rise of anti tribalism is a response to the collapse of these traditional natural tribes which is the tribes of place that have historically given people a sense of we when they atrophy you need a new sense of we and having a shared enemy is not a good enough sense of we but it's at least a common experience that people have again I Love Lucy wasn't meaningful content it wasn't important but it was broadly shared when 68 percent of households are tuning into that there was a sense of something that everybody had as common grammar we don't have any of that common grammar right now so when you have half as many friendships when you have a statistical collapse of the nuclear family again Robert Putnam has done some very important work that the most important to America's divide is essentially the education a high attainment educational mobile mobile class which is about 31 percent of America if you grew up in a house where either mom or dad graduated from college you're in the upper thirty-one percent of America and if you grew up in a house where you had one parent or if you had two but neither of them graduate from college you're in the sixty nine percent of America and in that sixty nine percent of America now the the fatherlessness crisis is an epidemic that's hard probably for you to all you all to write about because what's the news hook to write about it today but it's infinitely more important than almost anything else that we're talking about in this city when you look at the collapse of these traditional tribes it means people look for groups to identify with that are farther away because they don't have the local ones and right now we're being served lots and lots of content that's mostly oppositional content instead of aspirational content and so I think the ways that we consume media and the download speeds that followed the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 continued to exacerbate this curve so a lot of this is obviously a lot of the news that is produced is produced because people want to read particular types of news right there when we're talking about clicks we're talking about choices the people are making and the types of things that they read so how do you think education plays a role in this you talked about education and upward mobility here so do you think that there is something we should be doing at the high school level or junior high or elementary school level to help our citizens become more informed and critical consumers of news which could perhaps help them get to a place where they're clicking on something that's more than sensationalistic yeah thank you I I do think that one of the questions that all of us should be asking our kids and our teacher which asking our teachers if they're asking of our kids is what's your definition of news why do you need it and if you didn't have it for seven days or 10 days or 14 days what exactly would you lose so when you go camping for a week and you come back and you try to figure out what do you need that you missed who would ever actually go back through some of the most click maytee short term sensationalist sites that some of us occasionally go to to figure out what they published seven days ago we all know that that's obsolete it's ephemeral and it's it's passing it's not important content but in this is not to romanticize my grandmother's news consumption habits but I can remember in the late 70s or early 80s when my grandmother would be gone for a week and she'd come back to the farm she would want to read the local paper that she missed for the last week why there were obituaries in it there were kids who won sporting events these were humans that she had actual relationship with and I do think one of the challenges of our time and optimistically I believe we will solve this I just don't know that we'll solve it inside the next two or five or ten years it might take decades to do this I think we will recover the habits of rootedness and mindfulness in a rootless digital age that tells us we can be placed 'less it's not true humans aren't happy if their place 'less humans are happy when they have roots but you want to think about what kinds of news you want to consume and right now digital addiction is an actual real problem this isn't something that somebody made up because the last few moments it's because we actually have lots of neurological research coming in fast there's a Moore's law that gives us faster download speeds and the ability to consume more digital content quickly but the Moore's law that you know we sometimes know of as you can get twice as much laptop computing power every 24 months for half the expense another way to think about Moore's law is computing power is just that that doubling curve happens in everything digital and we're getting that in neurology right now we've learned more about the human brain in the last 19 months than from all of human history combined until 19 months ago and one of the things we're realizing is that when teens are constantly saturated and bathed in digital content it's rewiring parts of their frontal lobe the frontal lobe for females isn't done until multiple years past puberty now and arguably the male frontal lobe is never completed some some neurologists think it's probably a late 20s proposition but if some car drives by you on the interstate driving 120 miles an hour you can be sure it's a male and he's under 24 right the insurance company algorithms about what to charge you on Property and Casualty aren't random they're based on human experience but what we're learning about the brain is the rewiring of the brain with digital addictions is fast and it's not good for us but we haven't figured out how to learn those new shared habits of what it looks like to do mindfulness and rootedness in a digital age what do you think needs to happen in order for people to look to consume information that will make them feel rooted because something has to prompt that something needs to change right I think the collapse of local journalism is a really horrible thing right because one of the things that local journalism does is it tells our stories of people that have shared place so shared idea is really important theology is the most important anchor in my life and that unites me to people across time and place not just in my local worshiping community but one of the things about ideas that transcend place is they lead us to sometimes think that place itself doesn't matter and since that's not true one of the best ways to develop those habits of rootedness would be to have shared stories with people who are in your place and so I think the collapse of local reporting is it is a big and bad thing when it's harvest season right now in Nebraska and so when we were at a grain elevator yesterday where the there is so much corn being harvested we're living because of the digital revolution the agricultural revolution continues to ramp we produce more per acre than anybody in all of human history has ever conceived of as possible our grain elevators can't take all the corn we also in Nebraska had a really wet season so a lot of people are just late getting some of their crop out but when you take all that grain and you go to sell it to the elevator to put it on trains the elevators are full they can't take it and so a lot of our grain is being dumped in giant piles next to the elevator lots of things happen because of that one of them is that lots of extra deer come to steal the grain that's not in an elevator and then you hit them in your car and so when you're near a grain elevator and you're talking to these farmers who are harvesting one of the most common topics is the fact that there's a technological substitution for labor happening in the local community that is this huge output is happening but with lots fewer labor inputs and so when you're in small town Nebraska three counties in Nebraska and you know three or four of the County are kind of urban around Omaha and Lincoln and the rest of them are very rural places people are leaving those counties and there's not a sense you're gonna need kids again right and so people aren't moving back to those counties and so we're we're having massive out migration in these counties and the stories that you used to tell that we're generational are now aging populations and so you have a combination of the economics of journalism with an out migration of young people in these communities and there's an attempt to figure out what is rootedness look like I think lots of the reefs entering of America around 100 to 300 metros require different kinds of storytelling and we haven't figured out what that suburban journalism will look like what do you so about local about local press and what do you think can or should be done to restore a vibrant local press because there are a lot of reasons obviously for well I mean I think one thing is to your point about the symbiotic relationship between the supply side of journalism and the consumption side some of why a lot of clickbait tea you know cotton candy stories are written is because a lot of us read clickbait tea cotton candy stories we're going to need to have more of 320 million Americans embrace the idea that you want to consume good local content that actually just requires knowing your neighbors more statistically happiness is highly correlated with knowing the people who live two doors away from you happiness is not correlated with going from 200 to 500 social media friends or from five hundred to a thousand social media friends some of the studies have been done on this showed that once you get to a certain point there's actually declining happiness as you spend more and more of your time and energy grooming and digital and an online profile which displaces your actual embodied relationships social media is beneficial when it's augmenting relationships you already have not when it's substituting for relationships that you should have or used to have I view a sometimes active on Twitter but I take a lot of Sabbath's and fast from it because the place is so darn toxic most recently seven months I took seven months off at Twitter starting at Christmas last year and only back this summer when my wife and I had a long conversation about the rules of how we were gonna conceive of when and where Twitter would be allowed in our lives but I really think of my Twitter account as 420 of my buddies like guys that I was friends with in college that we don't live the same place but we get together once every six months to two years we just viewed Twitter as public-facing email for a small group of actual humans rather than something that's done for an abstraction that is all these weirdos in the comments section who you know tell you in detailed ways the ways they'd like to just remember you I think a huge part of what's gonna be required is figuring out how to use digital and social technologies to augment relationships of place instead of substitute for them do you think when we're talking about newspapers one more question on these along these lines and then I have some other questions for you we've received so many questions from the audience today thank you for those do you think newspapers should continue to endorse candidates local or national write newspapers or does it blend the lines too much and seem partisan to readers who don't always understand the difference between news and opinion pages that's a great question I haven't thought about it much I don't it seems to me that the editorial page of a newspaper is a defined space that people understand what it's there to do it's a different thing than the front page of a paper when I was a little kid Nebraska football addict were the winningest team in the last 50 years in case you're curious we've had him we've had a bumpy last couple of years we're on a two game winning streak by the way but that followed us game losing streak they're not supposed to know that fact but in when I was a kid I wanted to get to the sports section every morning when I got the Omaha world-herald off our front stoop my dad's requirement was you had to read a story on the front page and you had to read a story on the editorial page before I was allowed to turn to the sports section the distinction was pretty deeply ingrained I think the bigger problem we faced is that and again this is not to beat up on particular reporters you know either in this room or elsewhere but right now the incentives even for print journalists is often to get on cable news to talk about your story in a format that often has a lot of kind of quippy sir not for everybody but there's a there's a quippy certainty about the way we do cable news consumption that often causes the editorial culture of the cable news format to consume even straight news reporting and I go back to that Walter Cronkite question about what happens when there's fake audio and video so the the thing I want to see is more trusted brands both actual journalistic enterprises and individual reporters who could be trusted by the American people and a time of crisis and I think we're obliterating that distinction between editorial and straight news reporting in the national context at the local level endorsing candidates it seems to me most consumers of the Freemont Tribune or in the little paper and the 25,000 person town nearest where we live they understand the distinction between what's on the editorial page and what's on the front page that's great okay I'm gonna come to some political questions if I may do you see anyone emerging as a major GOP primary challenger to Donald Trump in 2020 I think that Donald Trump has basically captured the majority of the Republican Party over the course of the last two and a half years I think one of the things that's obvious about these two-and-a-half years though is that many of the settled assumptions about what these parties stood for and the sort of core principles of them were held much more firmly than was probably warranted I didn't know that right I'm a I'm a first-time candidate I'm one of eight people out of I think out of the hundred the US and I think I'm one of eight who's never been a politician before never run for anything before and I had a pretty clear sense in the summer of 2013 when I got a Kim got on a campaign bus for 16 months what I thought that kind of top three or top five or top seven issues that define the Republican were and I think that's much much less clear and so I think the personalization of national politics and the ability to grab a political party was far more possible than I thought and far more possible than most people thought and who knows what that means for the future but I'm the second or third most conservative voter in the US Senate by voting record but I'm more and more certain of my conservatism and I'm less and less certain of what the Republican Party stands for I think neither of these parties have a very clear vision I think it's very difficult to imagine either a Republican or a Democratic platform committee standing up and articulating a big list of the five to ten major challenges America faces over the next 10 to 25 years and that's what I care about I think that the continuum from right to left matters to me but I care a lot more about past versus future issues somebody might sorry do you think that somebody might is emerge as a serious challenger to President Trump the GOP I have no idea but it looks less likely to me then maybe many people in DC assume it seems to me that the Republican Party his electorate is pretty comfortable with the ante positions that President Trump takes on a lot of issues that's different than having a shared constructive sense of what our party's for will you run for elected office again I have three little kids and being the first-time candidate that I am my wife and I made a deal in 2013-14 which is we think one of the core problems in this town is the main long-term thought most politicians have is with their own incumbency and we think it would be a lot healthier to be thinking about 10 and 25 year out issues so we said for the first four and a half years of my six-year term we would act like I'm never running for anything again and we're gonna have a big family meeting my wife and I'll have a extended date in July August of 2019 and think what future calling so we think we have but right now I have the the two best callings that I want which is to be raising three little kids on the road back and forth and getting to serve the people in Nebraska sounds like we should have you back in a little less than a year's time as long as we're talking exclusively Husker football in the win streak I'm in maybe maybe you can't promise is there a chance that you would run for president at some point in the future I honestly spent 16 months cleaning up then two-year-old maybe vomit off the floor of a campaign bus and the thought of doing that in 50 states instead of just 93 counties sounds absolutely terrible so I think noxious weed Control Board of Dodge County Nebraska is a far more probable scenario for me what are your thoughts today on the appointment of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh and what were your reasons for supporting him with your boat I think that judge now justice Cavanaugh's speech on the first day of his testimony so we did whatever 38 hours of public hearings in the first weeks I think day two would have been when he made his speech about the fact that the Supreme Court has no center aisle there are no caucus rooms at the Supreme Court and I often use the language of black robes rather than red or blue partisan jerseys that justice is where they're supposed to shroud all personal policy preferences they may have now or they may have articulated in the past justice Cavanaugh made a really good speech about the importance of the American people knowing that their judges are there to judge not to be policy advocates I think that was a great speech and I want a world where Americans regardless of whether you vote for Democrats or Republicans want a speech like that to be given by all of our nominees to the court obviously we're in a terrible place right now the public perceives of the judiciary as a third political branch that is a bad bad thing it's 32 years in the coming going back to the the Bork nomination in 1987 there has been an increasing hatfields and mccoys sense that every next nominee should be the next bloodbath to the end of time and we already know what it looks like in Venezuela when you have fistfights in the legislature we know what it looks like when you politicize more and more of government and when a sense in the judiciary that it's also another political branch that is a terrible thing and the way the confirmations have have gone over the last 32 years lead the American people to presume that the curve is gonna continue to decline and we've got a big problem and I don't think any of us have a great idea about how we fix it ultimately the Senate is given by the Constitution two verbs two charges advise and consent I gave advice to the president in the summer of 2018 about the candidate that I thought was the single best candidate he could have nominated who was that I haven't named her but could you name her no I don't think so because I probably will be advising again in the future so I advocated hard for one person but the president shortlist of four was all strong I think the list that he ran on by the way is an important innovation in American life no one's done that before I hope future presidential nominees of both parties do that run on an explicit list one of the most important powers the president has is nominating people to the judiciary and telling the electorate who you nominate for the Supreme Court I think is an important innovation I hope people do in the future the president's list was good he's stuck to his list I'm glad he's done that and I think all four of his finalists were strong and ultimately I spent about a hundred and fifty hours reading materials and consulting the FBI did its seventh background investigation which included another hundred and forty-six interviews and I ultimately came to the conclusion that the yes vote was the right vote what do you think the likelihood of President Donald Trump's administration getting a third pick for Supreme Court justice what do you think the likelihood of that is I'm a data nerd so as a historian I would want to consult what the frequency of of next vacancy is but it seems to me relatively high right I mean you the president's gonna be president for two more or six more years but even if only two years we have a elderly Supreme Court and somebody could resign right for example if that happens who do you think the pic should be I have an interesting relationship with the president there are a broad range of topics that we wrestle through some things I agree with him on some things I disagree with him on but my basic tradition has been I want him as I think all 320 million Americans should want want him to succeed in the most important parts of his calling to steward article 2 of the Constitution for this time and so I give him advice in private and sometimes I argue with him in private and then some subset of the things I argue with him about in private I discuss in public but since I plan to lobby him on future Supreme Court vacancies I think I'll keep that counsel private is it somebody who's already on the list that was submitted sorry is it somebody whose name we've already seen on that list oh I most of my recommendations have been related to the list all right let me ask you just we are coming super close on time and I wish that we had another you know hour to talk about different things but you sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee which has oversight over the Justice Department do you think the Justice Department is doing a good job supervising the Special Counsel probe run by Robert Miller I do I think that Robert Moeller is a very important public service with a distinguished career and his investigation needs to run its full course let me throw in just one question about Russia what do you think do you think that we are doing enough to counter or stop election interference from for example Russia or China and if the answer to that is no what do you think we should be doing the answer to that is no but we're improving so a number of good things are happening one of which is that the secretaries of state across the country have relied on the Department of Homeland Security much more in recent months in our constitutional system elections are held at the state level and you have more and more states availing themselves of a lot of resources from Homeland Security that's helpful I think we've done more both article 1 and article 2 to call out Russian interference they're still way way too much of it Putin presides over authority and the only reason he can keep his people down is by trying to keep the other kleptocrats satisfied and in power in their horrible agreement they have against the Russian people and so Russia runs disinformation campaigns everywhere and I think one of the things that the American electorate is going to need to learn over time and the tech companies are gonna need to do a better job of and of course the US intelligence community is going to need to do a better job of making clear to the American people is how much disinformation is out there but during the kneeling controversy for instance and I cite this one only because this one is now public and most of the disinformation campaigns Russia runs are not always in public but in the first 72 hours after the president decided to go after Kaepernick a year ago the two fastest trending hashtags in social media over the next and 72 hours were hashtag stand for the anthem and hashtag taken the NFL a huge share of both of those were majority Russian we have to have an all of society not just an all of government sense but in all of society sense that our divisions as Abraham Lincoln said are the only thing that could ever lead to our collapse when you are a Free Republic as Lincoln said basically quoting Washington's farewell address our Free Republic will preside for we'll live for all time or it will die by suicide Russia and China know that the best way to attack America is to pick at the scabs of our own internal hatreds and Russia knows that's the only tool they have they could they could never as Lincoln said drink from the Ohio River on their own they need us to kill ourselves and right now that's the only lever they have and we have to become much more sophisticated about all the we that unites us before the particular policy issues that we should reasonably argue over well this pretty much takes us to the end thank you so much for being with us here today I do have one more very short question for you but first I'd like to let our audience know about some upcoming events here at the Press Club on Monday November 5th we have a luncheon and book event with Doris Kearns Goodwin on leadership in turbulent times on November 13th we have a book event with Joanna Brier when your child is sick a guide to navigating the practical and emotional challenges of caring for a child who is very ill and on November 29th is our Fourth Estate award Center where or honoring Marty Baron and Dean bouquet of the executive editors of The Washington Post in the New York Times respectively we do still have some tickets for that but they are going fast so please make sure to get your orders in and you all know that that is of course a fundraiser for our National Press Club journalism Institute which does so much good work throughout the year so senator sass thank you very much for being here with us today we have a small gift for you we present one of these to each of our estimate speakers you are an esteemed speaker we hope that you use it in good health for many years to come thank you for being here and I do have one last question for you which is do you think the Nebraska Huskers really do have a chance of winning against Ohio State this weekend absolutely there you have it thank you everyone senator sass is going to be signing copies of his book over here to your right if you haven't purchased one yet they are for sale outside just outside the doors but if you would please line up along here in front of the podium senators asks inside those copies of the books for you and we are adjourned thank you all

Channel: National Press Club Live

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Keywords: National Press Club, NPC, Ben Sasse, U.S. Senate, Them, Book, Luncheon, Senator, Trump

Id: CtLhivl3JoA

Length: 63min 36sec (3816 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018