Tag: Ben Sasse

God's Ways May Be the Tea Party's

Published on by D. G. Hart17 Comments

We just don’t know.

The Republican primary for the Senate is entering its last week and our friend and confessional 2k Presbyterian, Ben Sasse, appears to be in the lead:

With less than two weeks to go until the Republican primary, Sasse has appeared to have moved to the head of a multi-candidate pack featuring two other major hopefuls. There’s a lot resting on the next 10 days not only for Sasse, but also for the likes of the Club for Growth, Senate Conservatives Fund, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Sarah Palin, who have all joined Sasse in one of the most intense primary campaigns of 2014.

Sasse, the president of Midland University, may represent the best chance for the national tea party movement to claim victory in a contested Senate primary this year. While Republican senators have been swarmed by primary challengers, most have fizzled amid intense scrutiny and a robust attempt by the establishment to define them early as outside the mainstream candidates. The open race in Nebraska presents an opportunity for the tea party to claim an early win against that backdrop. . . .

To say the race has been nasty and personal would be an understatement. Osborn is casting Sasse as soft on Obamacare in a television ad campaign that Sasse’s campaign says takes his words out of context. In response, Sasse has launched a TV ad in which his daughters defend his opposition to the health-care law and say that they “always pray for the opposing candidates at breakfast.” . . .

What happens in Nebraska on May 13 could set a tone for other primaries happening soon. A Sasse loss is the last thing tea party groups need heading into a stretch of primaries during the next eight weeks including contests in Kentucky, Mississippi and Kansas, where insurgent conservatives remain underdogs in their quests to defeat incumbent Republican senators.

It would also prompt a fresh round of questions about endorsement criteria. Sasse once supported Medicare Part D, for example, which the Club for growth adamantly opposes.

But a Sasse win could light a fire under the national tea party movement. Tea party groups will soon have another opportunity in an open Oklahoma race, where they have begun to coalesce around former state House speaker T.W. Shannon (R) in a contest looking more competitive for him.

This Old Lifer is pulling for Sasse. But I also believe that Ben knows enough theology to understand that God’s ways will be served no matter who wins next week (or in November).

Not a 2K Candidate

Published on by D. G. Hart26 Comments

John Miller’s recent piece in the National Review on Ben Sasse’s efforts to gain the Republican nomination for the Senate in Nebraska is well worth reading. Here is a part that stood out from an OL perspective because it is silent about Sasse’s religion (which happens to be 2k Reformed Protestant):

After growing up in Fremont, where he was the high-school valedictorian, Sasse left for Harvard: “Not because of superior academics, but because of inferior athletics,” he jokes. He wrestled for two years and specialized in head-butting his opponents. Sasse has a long scar at the top of his forehead, along his hairline, from falling off a hayloft as a boy. “I have no feeling there,” he says. “It gave me a small advantage.” He left the wrestling team to spend his junior year abroad, and then earned a degree in government. Next came an itinerant career in business consulting, combining full-time employment with full-time study. He roamed the country, working with clients such as Ameritech and Northwest Airlines, while he also pursued a master’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and then a Ph.D. in history from Yale. His dissertation, on populist conservatism from the 1950s to the 1970s, won a pair of prestigious campus prizes. “He’s insanely disciplined and incredibly hard-working,” says Will Inboden, a University of Texas professor who lived across the street from Sasse when they were graduate students at Yale. “It’s amazing how much he did.” The virtue of work is a constant theme in Sasse’s speeches and conversation. “Work is where meaning is,” he says. “I don’t know how capitalism and America function if people work to get beyond working, just so they can get to leisure.” One of his favorite recent books is Coming Apart, by Charles Murray, especially for its section on the importance of industriousness.

As a boy, Sasse embodied industriousness: He spent his summers “walking beans and detasseling corn” — i.e., weeding soybean fields and controlling corn pollination. He describes cool and wet mornings, hot and humid afternoons, muddy furrows, sore ankles, spider bites, sunburns, and “corn rash,” which forms on hands, arms, and faces when corn stalks deliver nicks and bruises hour after hour, day after day. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and the most formative experience of my life,” he says. “When you survive a season of this, you’re a different person at the end.” He worries that young people don’t learn the same lessons today. “We have a crisis in the work ethic,” he says. “Politics can’t fix our culture, but politics can lie to us long enough to keep us from focusing on the cultural issues in our own lives.”

Sasse’s candidacy presents 2kers with a potential problem — namely, endorsing candidates who agree with our political theology. And that’s a problem because it would mean we are like the BeeBees. The affairs of the civil and temporal realm are one thing, the politics of God’s kingdom another. Just because a candidate may agree with that theological proposition does not mean he is best suited to serve as a congressman.

For that reason, support for Sasse should come from concerns about our common life, not from a desire to have our theological position vindicated. And given Sasse’s understanding of health care and the crisis that it represents, he has real merits. But this is above my pay grade. It belongs to Nebraska.

More Winning?

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

Regular readers should understand by now that 2k has less to do with politics than with the church and her ministry. On that anti-2kers and 2kers agree. But sometimes 2k does arise even among those who are engaged in the business of doing or theorizing about politics. On the political front, then, 2kers may be intrigued to know about a couple of recent items.

The first is the candidacy of Ben Sasse for the Republican Senate nomination in Nebraska. Those familiar with Ben from his associations with Modern Reformation may know of his Lutheran-turned-Reformed ecclesiastical background and I can personally vouch for his 2k outlook. Ben served in HHS for the George W. Bush administration and has spent a lot of time recently thinking about health care in the United States. Slate recently interviewed Sasse about the subject (and others). Surprise, no Lordship of Christ or Satanhood of Democrats came up in his answers:

Well, let’s go back. In Medicaid, there’s no demonstrable evidence right now that people with Medicaid have better health outcomes than people who have no insurance. So, just saying, “I empathize and I feel your pain and I want to therefore make the government solve all these problems,” we don’t have evidence that that actually works. So if you want to actually help people, what we need to do is create a society that has a lot more people who are healthfully and steadily and stability in a middle class and believe that there is a growth economy, and that there’s opportunities for their kids and grandkids that are as great as what our grandparents knew, when we felt like America was still on the upswing. America should still be on the upswing, but our optimism should be about the American people, and about the ability of communities and neighborhoods and schools and small businesses to solve these problems. Big government programs haven’t demonstrated that they actually ameliorate these problems that you’re talking about. I mean to you, point about Oregon or West Virginia, more Medicaid signups, you can put more names and more numbers on government programs, but it isn’t clear that that actually benefits them, so I think we need to go back to the drawing board.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net. But if there are 3–5 million hard-to-insure people right now, why are we disrupting the 165 million persons in an employer-sponsored insurance market? As of now we don’t know how many enrollees there are in these programs, but we know that millions of people have been kicked off their plans already because of Obamacare. The president said if you want to keep your plan you can keep it. We know that’s not true and right now we don’t even know that the benefits, in scare quotes, of the new exchange programs are even going to add up to the amount of people that lost their individual market insurance in New Jersey and Florida and Nebraska. So I think that this is hugely disruptive, and trying to solve a problem it’s creating unintended consequences that are creating more problems than its even solving. And it’s at a price tag we can’t afford. There are better solutions.

The other item of note is the new book by Jeff Taylor, who teaches political science at the very Kuyperian Dort College. Here is an excerpt from a review of Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism:

Jeff Taylor, the chair of a political science department at a private college in northern Iowa, successfully shifts the focus on federalism from its institutional moorings to the way it was scuttled in the Twentieth Century by party politics gone astray. In this respect, the book is unique. What one learns by thinking about decentralization through the lens of political party evolution is that the rush for electoral advantage in building national coalitions came at the cost of sacrificing a good deal of liberty and sanity. Most critically, the hunger for power and national scale led to a forfeiture of politics on a human scale: the politics of decentralism.

Nowadays, we have 315 million Americans spread across 3.8 million square miles of American territory. Oddly, the higher the population and wider the range of policy preferences, the more intense the push becomes to settle on one brand of economic justice, one approach to health care, one ideological conception of best practices, and one oversized approach to national defense. Lost in this cacophony for centralization are the sober voices who remind that symbolic diversity in the face of considerable constraints upon community autonomy is a hollow pursuit.

If Jeff Taylor’s book was merely a retelling of the benefits of federalism, it would have less value. Political scientists like Thomas R. Dye have already made the case that federalism—rooted in multiple, independent governments with considerable responsibility for the welfare of people within their jurisdictions—protects important political values such as individual liberty, pluralism, party competition, political participation, and the management of conflict (American Federalism: Competition Among Governments, 1990, 175). While Taylor’s book addresses these considerations, it is much more focused on the idea that decentralization helps nourish attitudes, understandings and relationships that are central to real human flourishing.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming that Taylor is 2k. But a word search at Amazon of the book indicates that the words “kingdom” and “Lordship” are absent, which is an indication — in addition to Taylor’s own blogging at Front Porch Republic — that despite his Kuyperian surroundings, he is not running his studies through a neo-Calvinist grid.