The End of Political Decency

Ours is a time of moral confusion. That much is clear. Skeptics might note that each age has had its periods of chaos and disorder, and that’s true. But we have to look at the facts. And they’re sobering, because they tell us the institutions and habits that normally would help each of us develop our character are in steep decline.

To wit: We’ve witnessed the decline of religious practice in the United States, with some twenty-eight percent of the public identifying as unaffiliated. We no longer think of schooling as formative. Rather, it’s something that gets you a career. And we’re a culture that no longer reads. Fifty-four percent of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to the National Literacy Institute. Instead of reading, we’re watching television or going online: according to YouGov, more than twenty-five percent of us consume at least five hours of media per day.

Also, marriage rates are declining, with fifty-four percent of adults unmarried.

I list these realities not to complain but to diagnose. Ours is a time not of flourishing but of attenuation. And none of this happens in a vacuum. It affects everything, including public life.

I thought of this while I was watching Peter Robinson’s interview with former senator Ben Sasse on Uncommon Knowledge. Sasse, who served about a term and a half, announced back in December that he’d been diagnosed with terminal stage-four pancreatic cancer.

The interview was doubly tragic—because Sasse is dying and because he spoke clearly on how much our public life has degraded. In some ways, it felt like an elegy for the one of the last decent politicians we’ve had and for decency and decorum generally.

Sasse should be commended for facing death in such a dignified way. It speaks to his character. He’s started a podcast; he’s joined the American Enterprise Institute as a non-resident fellow. He’s doing this because, as he pointed out in the interview, ”you can play a lot of basketball in the last 60 seconds.” He’s also been open about what stage-four cancer is like—the pain he’s in, the experience of chemotherapy. But Sasse is known for being funny online, so his reflections aren’t somber. Back in January, he posted an amusing thread on X, formerly Twitter, about how green-colored NFL teams had lost their games that weekend. He admitted he was high on morphine while writing it.

Note how all of this is other-directed. Sasse, it should be said, is doing all of this as a way to continue to serve the country. Which shouldn’t be surprising. It’s what he’s done his entire life. He’s been an academic, a president of a college and a university, a senator. He’s written books. He even drove for Uber so he could “work alongside and for Nebraskans.”

Sasse is a religious man—raised Lutheran and later joining the Presbyterian Church in America. He seems to have come from a good family. He received an excellent education, earning an MA at Saint John’s College, renowned for its great-books program, and a PhD in history from Yale. And he’s a devoted husband and father of three children.

In short, he’s someone who has been properly formed. He understands the most permanent of human concerns—that since we are finite creatures, we are to give of ourselves fully while we are alive, and in so doing, we’ll realize that there are things more important than seeking adulation and attention. There is a greater glory than the one that would be circumscribed by the fleeting present. That’s why, in the interview, Sasse says each of us must “redeem the time,” echoing Saint Paul.

But we no longer have a shared understanding of what it means to be human, which is why formation is difficult. As is politics. Sasse points out that we’re going to have to figure out how to do “politics in an era of disintermediated conversation. We don’t have a lot of shared facts.” Sasse says we don’t know how to have conversations because we give voice to the loudest and angriest people.

Noise doesn’t equate action, though. Sasse reminds us that the American order was designed to constrain power because, as he put it, the Founders assumed that those in authority would “want to do stuff” and would be “ambitious.” But the legislature has a “collective action problem.”

Most people in the legislature, he said, want to be TikTok stars and merely want a platform to grandstand. They don’t want to do anything, which means legislation doesn’t get passed.

Now let’s return to the moral confusion I mentioned earlier. Human beings, without reason and limits, are pure appetites. The proper aim for a human being is virtue but appetites push us toward vice. And when you see politics functioning for years as an alternative form of celebrity and entertainment, you assume that’s what it’s supposed to be. Which means unserious people will keep getting elected. And since our leaders, like it or not, provide an example for us, the state of things will become more unserious and more decadent, damaging the political order ever-further. It’s like paint on a house. Originally, it’ll be bright and bold, but slowly, over time, weather will weaken the paint, causing it to chip.

It’s tragic when anyone dies. But someone of Sasse’s caliber needs to be in our public life, because there aren’t many people like him who are willing to serve. So that he’s dying—and that morally serious people are withdrawing from public life, leaving only the attention-seeking types—means the paint of the body politic will continue to weather and chip until it all goes away.