By John McCormack
Monday, June 01, 2026
NEW YORK—When Ben Sasse arrives at the hotel lobby bar of
the Hyatt Grand Central in Midtown Manhattan, he tells me in an upbeat tone
that he feels like he has a “new lease on life.” He tells the waiter he’ll have
a Jack and Coke.
Since doctors told Sasse six months ago that he had three
to four months left to live due to Stage IV metastatic pancreatic cancer, the
former senator and college president has become something of an expert
on gallows humor. The reason he says he feels like he has a “new lease
on life” is because he has just finished puking in the hotel lobby bathroom—a
side effect of chemotherapy—and he’s feeling more energetic after his latest
wave of nausea has subsided.
Watching Sasse sip a whiskey drink also seems a bit like
watching him laugh at death.
His pancreatic cancer has metastasized into five types of
cancer, including liver cancer, and liver failure is what will likely kill him.
At one appointment, he asked one of his cancer doctors, whom he described as a
salty 70-year-old, if his advanced liver cancer meant he should abstain from
alcohol.
“Hell no, you’re in such bad shape, you can’t really mess
up your liver anymore with alcohol,” the doctor replied.
“But now I want to be clear, as a medical professional,
it’s my job to emphasize moderation,” the doctor continued. “Think about me.
I’m not a cancer patient. I deal with alcohol in moderation—it’s the name of
the game—because I only drink in two contexts … alone and with people.”
“It felt very Irish,” Sasse says of the oncologist’s
advice.
Sasse even encourages gallows humor among his own family.
When he launched his podcast Not Dead Yet—borrowing a phrase from Monty
Python—with his friend Chris Stirewalt in
February, Sasse relayed that his wife Melissa had suggested the title Dead
Man Talking. (Stirewalt’s wife suggested: I’d Rather Die Than Do a
Podcast). Sasse tells me that all three of his children, aged 15 to 24,
have “some particularly hearty” gallows humor jokes.
There is a serious point beneath all the jokes. “Gallows
humor,” Sasse explained in one of his first
podcast appearances following his terminal diagnosis, “is actually a little
bit of work that we get to do in common to say this isn’t the end.”
***
Sasse has been suffering a lot since the fall, when his
pancreatic cancer, which had silently been growing for years, became
symptomatic with tumors pressing against his spine. He mistakenly believed he
had injured his back while training for a triathlon, and found himself running
nearly scalding water in the shower over his back multiple times a night to try
to ease the pain.
Sasse experienced a far worse sort of pain in
mid-December when doctors told him what was actually wrong and he faced the
reality that, barring a miracle, he would not walk his two daughters down the
aisle or send his son off to college.
At Christmas, as Sasse’s family and close friends
gathered in Nebraska, “there were moments of intense grieving,” Sasse’s friend
Dan Bryant told me.
Bryant has known Sasse for decades, and the two friends
have been groomsmen in perhaps a dozen weddings together over the years. “We’re
roughly the same height, and depending on who the wedding coordinator was, I
would either be the person supposedly slightly taller than him in the line of
groomsmen or slightly shorter,” Bryant said. “So we always stand up on our toes
a little bit around each other.”
When Byant arrived in Nebraska on December 26, there was
no question who was taller. “My body’s already breaking down,” Sasse told
Bryant. “I’m shorter than you.”
“It was a hard moment,” Bryant recalled through tears.
“Because I want him to be taller than me.”
Sasse’s pain is all too real. But so is the joy that he
finds in his family, his friends, his work, and, most of all, in God and the
promise of eternal life. Rather than retreat from public life following his
terminal diagnosis, Sasse believes his calling to “redeem the time,” as he puts
it, includes talking about what really matters in life in interviews and his
own podcast, the subtitle of which is: “A Joyful Rebellion.”
Over two rounds of drinks and one quesadilla al pastor at
the Hyatt Grand Central, Sasse and I spoke about many topics—from his childhood
to politics to Heaven; his regrets and his joys; and why his message is
resonating with millions of people.
***
Every night before he goes to bed, Sasse ingests an
experimental chemotherapy drug an hour after taking a dose of morphine. He
considers it a blessing that doctors permitted him to move his dose from midday
to nighttime. “I imagine there are lots of people who are so drugged out they
can’t distinguish between night and day,” he says. “So I have a lot of sympathy
for them.” Sasse qualified for a clinical trial of the chemotherapy drug
Daraxonrasib at the start of the year after testing indicated genetic mutations
caused his pancreatic cancer rather than any environmental factor.
“You take this poison, and bad stuff happens to your body
half an hour later,” he says. Most nights, the sequence of morphine before
chemotherapy allows him to sleep 11 hours straight: “When I wake up in the
morning, it’s a sense that it’s morning and there’s stuff I want to get done to
serve people.”
Though Sasse has turned down the overwhelming majority of
interview requests since his diagnosis, several of the interviews he has done
have gone viral. “I think some of it is because a lot of people are dying of
cancer” and “don’t know how to process what they’re going through,” Sasse tells
me. “We feel like we ought to have better language for how to talk about
death,” he adds. “I believe that death is evil. Death is an enemy, but death is
the final enemy, and getting to put the word ‘final’ on it is a win. And a lot
of people don’t have any language for that.”
In one of his first podcast appearances in February, following his
terminal diagnosis, Sasse meditated on the shortest verse in the Bible—“Jesus
wept”—which occurs right after Jesus is informed that his friend Lazarus is
dead. “Jesus weeps there, and he knows that he’s gonna raise Lazarus five
minutes later,” Sasse told Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution. “So it’s
an amazing story because he is acknowledging that death is terrible and yet
death doesn’t win.”
There’s certainly something to Sasse’s theory about why
his public comments have gotten widespread attention—more than 600,000
Americans will die this year of cancer. He also happens to be “accidentally
dying in public,” as he puts it, at a time when euthanasia—called
“medical aid in dying” by advocates—is on the rise in Canada and the United States. Sasse’s example of “redeeming the time” amid
physical pain and a terminal diagnosis provides a different vision of what
death with dignity actually looks like.
Asked what he’d say to someone suffering from a painful
terminal illness tempted by euthanasia, Sasse tells me: “I have empathy for
them, but it seems to me that what you need is people to come and hold your
hand and sing with you, not to say the solution here is kill yourself.” While
he thinks it’s perfectly valid to decline aggressive treatments like chemo, he
rejects the idea of “deciding to play God and deciding to snuff out a life. We
can’t create life, so we shouldn’t end the life of the vulnerable, including
your own vulnerability.”
***
Sasse’s appeal extends far beyond the terminally ill and
their families, of course. His willingness, in the face of death, to speak
candidly about his religious faith is what’s moving the young and the old
alike.
During an April video
appearance on New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast,
Sasse’s face was bloodied and covered in scabs—the chemotherapy shrinking his
tumors inhibits the growth of skin cells—but Sasse was his typical jocular and
jovial self. He made light of the scabs—even though he said his face felt
“nuclear”—and joked about the idea of taking up smoking cigarettes outside of
M.D. Anderson, the cancer hospital in Houston where he is being treated (lung
cancer is one of his five cancers). Sasse also talked broadly about American
politics, academia, and his cancer diagnosis, but it was the last 10 minutes of
the podcast that were particularly moving.
“Are you angry at God ever?” Douthat asked.
“No,” Sasse said.
“Not at all?” Douthat followed up.
“No,” Sasse replied. “I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to
defer to all of my prayers with a yes. I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what
the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I
know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit
because it is a winnowing. I’m filled with dross. This suffering is not
salvific, but it’s sanctifying, and I’m grateful for it.”
He then relayed what fellow Presbyterian Tim Keller, the
respected and famous pastor who died of pancreatic cancer in 2023, said about
the disease: “I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anyone, but I
would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer
of pancreatic cancer.”
Asked what he would say to someone who finds Sasse’s
faith delusional, Sasse replied he’d invite them to read the New Testament book
of Romans together. “You have to start with a fundamental question about what
do you do with this moral issue of our own conscience,” Sasse said,
paraphrasing the Apostle Paul.
“Does the individual in your hypothetical really start
with the claim that things are right in your soul? Because I can’t relate to
that. Things are not right in my soul,” Sasse continued. “My soul thinks Ben
should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty grateful
that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.”
Did he feel ready to die? “I don’t feel ready. But to
whom would I go?” Sasse replied. He said he had confidence in Jesus’ words that “you can’t keep the children from me,”
adding: “We’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach
the divine and call him Daddy—Abba, Father. That’s pretty glorious. And I know
that that’s what I need.”
Douthat then choked up on camera. In response, Sasse
joshed that he had gotten Douthat to “open up a can of pansy ass” (thus
expanding the lexicon of millions of Americans who had previously believed they
could only open up a can of whoop ass).
Douthat is far from the only person who was moved by
Sasse’s appearance. In a recent lecture,
John Piper, the 80-year-old respected and popular Reformed
Baptist theologian, said of Sasse’s appearance on Douthat’s podcast: “I was
just in awe.”
“What people are seeing is not an act. Those are real
dimensions of the real Ben that are showing through,” Sasse’s longtime friend
Dan Bryant told me.
 |
Sen. Ben Sasse questions witnesses during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on February 23, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) |
The day after Sasse and I talked, he spoke to a group of young professionals at the tech company Palantir—which is naming a new fellowship program after Sasse—before he received the Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Award and delivered a keynote speech at the think tank’s gala that night.
“I want to thank you for your conversation with Ross the
other week,” one young man said to Sasse during the question-and-answer portion
of his Palantir presentation. “It actually moved me to tears.” After the event
ended, a long line of young professionals lined up to ask Sasse questions
one-on-one. “How do you deal with the fear?” asked one young man, who
was left nearly in tears as he walked away.
As we wait for the elevator, I ask Sasse what he had told
that young man. “I don’t really feel much fear,” Sasse replies. “I believe the
stuff I believe theologically,” so “I’m not afraid of death, but the dying part
doesn’t sound very fun.”
Where does such faith come from? Sasse tells me he has
never doubted the existence of God or that God is the God of the Christian
Bible. “I was blessed to be raised in the church and to be catechized, and
always believed myself to be a sinner,” he says. “I’ve never, never doubted the
need for a substitute for me.”
A self-described “Lutero-Calvinist,” Sasse grew up in the
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and after a period of evangelical exploration
in college, became an adherent of Reformed theology (most often associated with
the belief in Calvinism). After graduating from Harvard in 1994, Sasse was
mentored by Reformed theologian Michael Horton and then became executive
director for Horton’s evangelical ministry Christians United For Reformation in
1995.
Despite his Harvard education, including a semester
abroad at Oxford, Sasse still felt a sense that he hadn’t properly grappled
with life’s great questions, so he went on to earn a master’s degree at St.
John’s, the great books college in Annapolis, in 1998, and a Ph.D. in history
at Yale in 2004.
In other words, perhaps Sasse speaks so fluently about
death now because he’s been trying to think deeply about it for decades. “Death
is the hardest question, and in an age that gives short shrift to the
transmission of wisdom from old to young, it is not surprising that death is
the single most obvious fact of life from which we constantly insulate our
kids,” Sasse wrote in The Vanishing American Adult, his 2017 New
York Times bestselling book. “We have, to our detriment, created a cult of
denial about our own mortality. Life needs to be lived and prioritized with the
understanding that it is limited. An awareness of one’s mortality makes life
richer because the important can be emphasized and the trivial marginalized.”
“If we recognize that we’re going to die someday,” he
wrote, “the least we can do is prepare to die well.”
***
The Vanishing American Adult focuses on the
failure of American adults to raise kids to practice the virtues of hard work
and grit. These were virtues Sasse’s own family in Nebraska instilled in him
early on. “I’m incredibly grateful to have lots of family lines of people who
just work their tails off,” he says.
Benjamin Eric Sasse was born in Plainview, Nebraska, on
February 22, 1972. His parents, Linda and Gary, married young and divorced when
their son was just a year old, but he has had a close relationship with both
parents his entire life. “Divorce is terrible,” Sasse said in an April
podcast appearance, but his parents handled it in the “least-bad way”
possible. They maintained a collegial relationship for their son—for example,
they would walk together with him at any parents’ night for athletics or
academics, rather than make him feel awkward by walking up with one adult or
four. “My parents could do any of that kind of stuff together,” Sasse says. But
even the least-bad situation was still difficult: “Home isn’t what home should
be like … when you don’t have the table with everybody around it reconciled.”
Though his mother was given primary custody, Sasse
proposed splitting time equally when he was 11 years old. “I love my parents
equally,” he says. “I gave her a calendar, and I started mapping a deal.” Both
parents remarried, and Sasse grew up the oldest of three children in his
mother’s home and the middle of three children in his father’s home.
Hard work was just a fact of life when Sasse was a child.
His father was a football and wrestling coach who helped his son become a star
high-school athlete who wrestled in college. In the summer, Sasse would go work
on the farm with extended family. Detasseling corn and the attendant “corn
rash”—think of tiny paper cuts all over your exposed skin—taught him that work
entails suffering.
“I sort of knew the farmer mindset that you never knew
when the rain was going to come, so you better get your work done when you
could,” he says. “You better plant when you could. You better harvest when you
could.”
And when the day’s work was done, the night spent playing
cards and enjoying time with grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles on the
farm felt “like a medieval festival,” Sasse recalls. It taught him that if you
“worked first and played later, then play was a lot more fun, because it wasn’t
like you were cheating on something.”
In The Vanishing American Adult, Sasse discusses a
concept he regularly returns to now in his public comments: “redeeming the
time.”
“At the heart of the Puritan attitude toward work was the
Apostle Paul’s warning against wasting time; we should be ‘redeeming the time’
instead,” Sasse wrote. The Puritans “were emphatic that human works do not save
us, but rather that our works come in response to the grace already shown to
us. To them, ‘redeeming the time’ meant ordering your daily life according to
godly principles—not to earn salvation, but with the compulsion of gratitude
for having already been saved.”
So what does “redeeming the time” mean after doctors told
him he has months to live? It includes “the chance to hug on my wife this
morning and to love my kids,” Sasse said in a February podcast appearance, as well as “trying
to figure out what the important things are ... the eternal questions you need
to wrestle through.”
Strangely enough, that calling led Sasse to move forward
after his diagnosis with his idea to launch a podcast with Stirewalt. “We’re
all under a death sentence. We’ve all got numbered days. And just because you
get a more precise or a more finite number doesn’t change the fact that you
need to redeem the time,” Sasse said in the introductory episode of the
podcast. “And it’s really boring to be dying for a while. Okay, you gotta do
something with yourself.”
 |
Sen. John McCain talks with Sen. Ben Sasse and Sen. Tom Cotton on Capitol Hill, May 18, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) |
Sasse and Stirewalt have interviewed stars from the fields of music, comedy, acting, law, academia, and journalism about their craft and how they got to the top. But a recurring theme from many of those same guests is that family is infinitely more important to them than their careers.
Country music star Clint Black recalled how he was
troubled by Billy Joel’s remark that he spent so much time on tour that when he
returned home to his children he felt like “Uncle Daddy.” Black read a book
about attachment theory and decided to take three years off when
his daughter was born, knowing full well his career would take a hit.
In another episode, comedian Conan O’Brien recalled
what he thought while holding his daughter and first child in the hospital:
“Oh, I get it, I don’t matter anymore.”
Journalist Caitlin Flanagan recalled how she was
“attacked early in my career because I was really standing up for at-home
mothers and the value of that work and the joy of it.” Looking back at her own
life, she has no regrets: “What the hell could I ever have done? What could I
have done with my life? … It’s just a level of joy that you don’t know it
unless you do it.”
Sasse certainly shares that sentiment. “It’s just hard to
look back on a life and see anything on the same order of magnitude as
important as what you did trying to invest in your kids,” he tells me. “There’s
nothing that I can ever imagine wanting more than you want the well-being of
your kids.”
He continues to emphasize the virtue of hard work, while
also confessing that he has been guilty of the vice of workaholism at times to
the detriment of his family.
“If I had it to do over again, dinner would be more
precious. Sundays would be different. Digital fasts would be more common,” he
says. Sasse, who worked as a business consultant while pursuing advanced
degrees, also wishes he had limited work travel.
“I think one of the strangest adult experiences I’ve ever
had is dropping my oldest kid off at college and just being crushed,” he says.
“I thought that middle decade of childhood was gonna last for many, many, many,
many decades.”
One way to tell if you’re embracing the virtue of hard
work or the vice of workaholism is whether “the Lord’s Day is the beginning or
the end of your week,” Sasse says. “If the first day is grace, then everything
else is gratitude. You’re not forming your identity [around work]. You’re just
trying to live out a life of love [for] your neighbor in response to what’s
been done for you.”
Though Sasse is still writing essays, delivering
speeches, giving interviews, and recording podcasts, he says it is strange for
him to have to slow down from his usual pace and let his kids help him. “It’s
weird to get weaker and to lose a lot of weight, lose a lot of muscle, because
when your kids are sick and they’re young, you say to them, ‘I’d like to do
anything I could to take this pain from you,’” he says. Now, Sasse needs “to
let them help serve me on some stuff. But it’s also super satisfying to see
them as independent figures who are ready to love and serve other people,
because that’s what you raised them to do.”
Though Sasse has been highlighting a handful of parenting
regrets in interviews, there’s no doubt that he and his wife Melissa got a lot
more right than wrong. Sasse’s younger daughter Alex wrote a moving
tribute to both her father and mother last week for The Free
Press about how her parents raised their kids to live a life of service for
others. She recounted how her father often asked each child: “Tell me three
true things about yourself.”
“After any success or failure, whether jumping with
excitement or drenched in tears, my dad asked us to recite three things: one
that reaffirmed our relationship with God; one that reaffirmed our family’s
unconditional love for us; and one that reaffirmed qualities we most valued,
like perseverance and grit,” she wrote.
Alex graduated a semester early from the University of
Florida in December and took the MCAT this spring in the hope of becoming a
doctor. Her older sister Corrie graduated in 2024 from Harvard, where she was
in the ROTC program, and is now training to be a pilot for the Air Force. Their
father tells me that “it’s a lot of fun to watch” his three kids “embracing
their identity as servants.”
When I mention to Sasse that he has said the primary
reason he decided to go forward with chemotherapy was extra time with his
15-year-old son Breck—who could benefit the most from some “more hugs” and
“slaps upside the head”—he replies: “I’ve said that a lot, and it’s true. I’ve
also been amazed at the growing friendship with my wife in the last four
months.”
Sasse describes his wife Melissa, to whom he’s been
married for 31 years, as his best friend of 33 years. They met through mutual
friends in college, when Melissa was a student at the University of Alabama.
She and Ben were both involved in a Christian ministry project one summer at a
public housing project on the South Side of Chicago.
“Witnessing poverty, drugs, deprivation, and despair that
summer caused us to wrestle through some big problems. Wrestling and
questioning together is intimate, so it often brings people close,” Sasse wrote
in Them, his 2018 New York Times bestselling book about the
social ills plaguing America. He recounted witnessing the way Melissa comforted
prostitutes and the way she “cradled the heads of weeping children.”
“She’s just an amazing human,” he tells me.
He adds: “It is insane that she and I could ever have a
petty fight about anything, and yet we still sometimes do.” Sasse confesses he
can be “annoyingly relentless” when arguing, especially early in marriage when
he thought following biblical
command to not let the sun set on one’s anger meant he and his wife needed
to get to “intellectual coherence” on points of disagreement that now seem
small.
Then he pauses. “I don’t want to get teary on you,” he
says. After some banter, he explains: “I don’t care about being right anymore,
and that is an unbelievable comfort.”
Prior to Sasse’s terminal diagnosis in December, the
Sasse family’s greatest trial occurred when Melissa suffered a tear in an artery in her neck and a series of strokes when
their daughters were just 3 and 5 years old. It wasn’t clear if Melissa would
live. She not only survived but made an almost-complete cognitive recovery.
“She almost died one time on January 25 and so we named
that Death Day—as in a reprieve from death, a gift that God gave us that we’ve
had so much more family life with Melissa,” Sasse recalled in a February
podcast discussion with his close friends Dan Bryant and Michael Horton. Every
January 25 when they were in Nebraska, Ben and Melissa would go to their own
burial plots in a cemetery of the Lutheran church where Ben’s maternal
grandfather carved the altarpiece. “It’s always ugly cold in January on this big
hillside in Nebraska, so it’s iced over and everything. But we walk around all
these plots, and it’s a really good way to focus the mind, and frankly, to get
back to a moderate view of how you do these worldly callings.”
***
Looking back on his life, Sasse thinks it was a mistake
to ever run for the United States Senate.
In one episode of Not Dead Yet, Sasse explained that he
got drafted into the Senate campaign after serving as college president and
turning around Midland University, a small Lutheran college in Nebraska where
the same Sasse grandfather who built the church altarpiece had worked for three decades. (Attendance had cratered to 590 before Sasse took the job in 2010 and had jumped to
more than 1,300 by the time he left the job in 2014; it’s still thriving today
with more than 1,700 students).
“I don’t really want to be a senator, but campaigning
would be fun,” Sasse said of his decision to run in 2013.
When I ask Sasse to unpack his statement that he didn’t
“really want to be a senator,” he offers two reasons. “First, I didn’t count
the cost enough about the family commute.” He and his wife Melissa had relied
on a mix of homeschooling, tutoring, and private school for their children.
That allowed the family to be together four months a year—roughly the spring
semester—but eight months a year Sasse was missing family dinner four or five
nights a week while he was in D.C.
 |
Sen. Ben Sasse speaks on his cell phone as he walks through the U.S. Capitol Building on September 28, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) |
Second, he says, he hadn’t counted on the Senate being so “small of an institution” that its members would not seriously debate weighty issues. Sasse said he was “stunned” at the start of the COVID pandemic that most Republicans “were completely fine with functionally a Bernie Sanders view of the world.” Congress decided to set a baseline unemployment benefit well above the median salary, which Sasse believes will help pave the way one day for Universal Basic Income (UBI). For more than a decade, Sasse has been obsessed with the idea that the rise of artificial intelligence will create a huge incentive for UBI. “I think doing big UBI is small-r republic-imperiling,” Sasse tells me. “I just don’t think there’s really any doubt that that destroys human agency and initiative.”
“When I said that I was not persuaded that being away
from your family was worth it,” he continues, “it was chiefly because of the
unwillingness of the Senate to wrestle with those big issues.”
When Sasse left the Senate, it was a blow to the remnant
of conservatives who think it’s important both to tell the truth about Donald
Trump and not abandon core principles in the service of attacking Trump. Sasse
sounded the alarm before January 6, 2021, that Trump was pointing a “loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government,” and
he voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. He also remained an
outspoken advocate of religious liberty and the right to life.
At times, Sasse was not as outspoken about Trump as
Trump’s most vociferous opponents would have liked, but Sasse was also serving
as a pragmatic example for other red-state senators that they could survive
politically while being a lot more forthright than they were. In 2020, he
defeated a primary challenger 75 percent to 25 percent after winning Trump’s
primary endorsement without ever endorsing or committing to vote for Trump.
It’s true that Sasse was cagey about who he was voting for in 2020—he ended up
casting a vote for a second time for Mike Pence—but he continued to speak out
against Trump during the 2020 general election when Sasse thought he crossed important lines.
In June 2020, after non-violent protesters were
forcefully removed outside the White House before Trump posed with a Bible
outside a nearby church that had been torched the night before, Sasse said: “There is a fundamental—a constitutional—right to
protest, and I’m against clearing out a peaceful protest for a photo op that
treats the Word of God as a political prop.” In August 2020, after Sasse called
executive orders issued by Trump “unconstitutional slop,” Trump wrote on social
media that “RINO Ben Sasse” has “gone rogue, again.” That November, Sasse ran 19 points ahead of Trump in Nebraska.
During his time in the Senate, Sasse was proud of his work on the Senate Intelligence
Committee to address the China threat, cyber warfare, and the Judiciary
Committee, where he was an early advocate of placing Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme
Court. In an episode of Not Dead Yet with Barrett as the guest, Sasse
said Trump identified him in private conversations as the senator obsessed with
“that Catholic lady from Notre Dame.”
A common criticism of Sasse’s tenure in the Senate was
that he wasn’t in the thick of legislative negotiations, and he has said he
regrets he wasn’t more of a pragmatic dealmaker.
Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute first
got to know Sasse when he was gearing up for a Senate run in 2013. “He had an
ambition to kind of model himself as a senator on Daniel Patrick Moynihan,”
Levin said, referring to the New York Democrat who was known for being both a
public intellectual and active legislator. “I think that there wasn’t going to
be another Daniel Patrick Moynihan, because the Senate that Ben entered was
just very different from the one that Moynihan did.”
Sasse did excel at one side of the Moynihan model—“being
a kind of public intellectual who was a senator and tried to speak to some
public problems in a very sophisticated way, while also being a public
official,” Levin said. “He wasn’t an active legislator, I don’t think he would
quibble with that, but he was a voice and force for good. And I think he was a
great senator in a moment when there weren’t a lot.”
In a 2019 interview, I pressed Sasse—who had served as an
assistant secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W.
Bush—on why he had time to write two books but wasn’t actively involved in 2017
during the failed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. (Answer: He was just
a freshman and concluded only a small number of congressional Republicans had
an interest in real reform.) In hindsight, Sasse’s two books and his speeches will prove to be a much more enduring legacy
than any piece of unpassed legislation. They diagnose what’s ailing America and
offer a vision of what individual,
familial, and national renewal would look like.
But there was no question that he was deeply frustrated
with the Senate. In the same 2019 interview, I asked Sasse why he was even
running for another term in 2020. He named his committee work and his desire to
address the threat of UBI, but he also said he had a “calling” as “a
Tocquevillian or a principled pluralist or a constitutionalist” to fight for
his own faction within the Republican Party, which he had come to realize was
smaller than he had previously thought.
In 2022, when Sasse decided to leave the Senate to serve
as president of the University of Florida, I asked him how he squared his 2019
comment with his decision to leave. “Tocquevillian society is about building
things. The center of America really isn’t political power,” Sasse told me. He
quickly built up the Hamilton Center, which focuses on a liberal arts
curriculum and will become its own college within the university, according to
Sasse. He departed his role in 2024 amid Melissa’s health challenges, including
seizures related to the strokes she suffered earlier in life.
At the Hyatt Grand Central, as Sasse polishes off his
second Jack and Coke and I finish my second Coors Light, I ask him if there’s
any point to people with his Tocquevillian and Reaganite principles engaging in
politics. Should they look elsewhere to make a difference? What’s the point of
telling the truth if few people in either party will listen?
“Identity beyond the grave is bigger and more important
than all this,” he replies.
Second, he says, we do need people in the public square
defending pluralism and constitutionalism. “Absolutely you have to defend the
public square as a defined place that is freedom-centric, not statist,” he
says, “to defend the right and the responsibility of parents to raise their
kids.”
“Pragmatically, what happens from here?” Sasse continues.
“There’s a very decent chance that what comes next is a Reaganite reform in the
form of something like Marco,” he says, referring to Secretary of State Marco
Rubio. “I don’t want to drift anywhere near a headline, but if you sort of
built a semifinals in a Republican primary from here, man, I’d rather be Marco
than be postliberal,” he adds. (Vice President J.D. Vance, considered by many
to be the 2028 GOP front-runner, has described himself as a “postliberal.”)
What would he tell someone with his politics considering
running for office? “I dissuade people from running all the time, because I
don’t think it makes sense to run if you have little kids at home right now,”
he says. But “if you’re a little bit older and you don’t have day-to-day family
obligations and you’re content to lose, man, it’d be great if a lot more people
who had—I don’t want to say ‘F-you money,’ but like ‘F-you life
circumstances’—ran and defended an American vision of political skepticism of
politics as the central community.”
“It would be great if we had a lot more healthy normies
run for office right now,” he says.
For Sasse, politics is just one way of many to serve your
neighbor and one more way to redeem the time. For now, it’s something we have
to care about because we are residents of both the City of Man and the City of
God.
“In Augustinian theology, there’s the phrase about ‘the
already and the not yet.’ We're already in the kingdom, and yet the kingdom is
not yet,” Sasse says, referring to ideas in Augustine’s City of God,
which expounds on how Christians are residents of both an earthly city and a
heavenly city. “And so redeeming the time seems to me to be a prudent way to
acknowledge our finitude and our humility—when I'm mostly not accomplishing
anything, I'm just being saved, and then once you're saved, you get a chance to
work it out by loving your neighbor. But don't ever become hubristic to think
that that's an enduring project.”
***
As a pilgrim passing through the City of Man, Sasse has
always been more interested in his permanent home, the City of God, and so am I
as the clock ticks during our interview.
Sasse tells me he had been thinking a lot before we spoke
about the Gospel of John. It’s “pretty amazing that Jesus’ first miracle is to
have a great party at a feast,” Sasse says, referring to the miracle of Jesus
turning water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana described in the
book’s second chapter.
Later in the Gospel, “it’s kind of amazing that Jesus is
just not that concerned with Roman oppression. He is telling sinners that there
is an opportunity to come to God, the Father, and call him Daddy, and so many
people want him to be the reigning king,” Sasse says. “He’s absolutely the suffering
servant first. And to me, there’s kind of a great comfort in that if you regard
yourself as a sinner.”
“There’s the old aphorism that Christians can never be
arrogant about being redeemed, because we’re not announcing that we
accomplished anything, we’re just beggars telling other people where you can
find food,” he adds. “And it feels to me that Jesus is the great physician
beckoning the needy and the sick and the wounded and the finite, which is all
of us, to come to Him.”
 |
Sen. Ben Sasse speaks as Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the third day of her Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on October 14, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Hilary Swift-Pool/Getty Images) |
What does Sasse think life will be like in Heaven? “I don’t know, but I believe that every good thing will be there and more,” he tells me. He thinks of a line from J.R.R. Tolkien that all things sad will come untrue.
The Christian doctrine that “God creates humanity and
desires relationship with us” is “mind-blowingly crazy,” he says. “And yet, if
you believe it, it’s euphoric.”
I ask Sasse if any particular passages from St. Augustine
are resonating with him right now. His son Breck is actually named Augustine,
but Sasse likes to say they call him Breck because “Augustine” is a bit “too
theologically heavy” to cheer at a Little League game.
When Breck was younger, “we were reading a lot of
Augustine to him, and I could have quoted a specific passage to you. City of
God is obviously relevant to a lot of the two kingdoms theology I have, but
the Confessions feel pretty powerful as he’s acknowledging the nature of
his sin,” Sasse tells me.
Some lines from Augustine that I first read my freshman
year of college have come to mind almost every time I’ve seen Sasse in the
media since his diagnosis. The lines repeatedly cross my mind throughout our
conversation—when Sasse tells me his scalp “itches like hell” from his
chemotherapy; when he tells me how doctors described in detail how his body
will shut down before he dies; when he tells me about his love for his wife and
his children. But I can’t bring myself to say them to Sasse.
I don’t want to tempt a dying man to respond with some
self-effacing, untrue rebuttal, and I don’t want to cry in front of him.
“The same fire that makes gold shine makes chaff smoke,”
Augustine wrote in City of God. “What matters is the nature of the
sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings.”
No comments:
Post a Comment