Ben Sasse Rips His Own Party as ‘Increasingly’ Focused on the ‘Grievances of the Angriest, Oldest Folks’ and Wanting a ‘Strongman Daddy Figure’
Republican Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) offered some tough love to his own party in a speech on Thursday night.
Sasse spent much of the speech — at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library as part of its “A Time for Choosing” series — tearing into the leadership of the Democratic Party, but also offered a strong rebuke to the rising isolationism in the GOP and what he described as his party’s focus on victimhood and grievance politics.
“The American people don’t like feckless leaders who humiliate the nation, as the last and current administrations did in bowing to the Taliban,” Sasse said, taking a shot at both former President Donald Trump, who wanted to invite the Taliban to Camp David, and President Joe Biden.
Sasse was one of 7 GOP senators who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and has since walked a tight rope between criticizing Trump and the far-right of his party and also keeping close ties with the conservative base of the GOP.
“The American people don’t like defeat. But defeat is exactly where the loud isolationists – long of the left and now of the right – have demanded we go,” Sasse added.
“The catastrophe in Afghanistan is a stark example of how defeat-ism at home produces chaos abroad,” Sasse argued, adding:
The new isolationists present themselves as hardheaded realists, but it’s not true. They’re the ones with stars in their eyes as they ostrich-see only one side of a balance sheet. They pretend that retreat from the world can focus us on ‘nation-building at home,’ and that this can come at no cost. But in reality, national security involves actual trade-offs. And the retreat they champion comes at a hard, high price.
Sasse spoke of the recent divides between the Republican and Democratic Party, charactizing the overwhelming sentiments in each as, “The left wants a powerful, nameless but supposedly benevolent bureaucracy, the right wants a strongman daddy figure” – warning of rising authoritarianism on the right.
“But the loudest of them all agree on one thing: America — the one the founders gave us, the one kept for us by our parents and grandparents — it doesn’t work anymore,” he said, lamenting the doom and gloom in our current politics.
Sasse went on to say that “Blame America First” has been a long-held mantra of the left, but that the right has now coopted it.
“What’s different now is that we have so many on the right who have joined them,” Sasse argued.
“We Republicans, we have a big choice to make. We can either continue to drift as a party that exists increasingly as a vehicle for the grievances of the angriest, oldest folk or we can be a future-focused party of 2030, with policies centered on the future of work and the future of war,” he continued.
Sasse went on to blame the infotainment on cable news as a driving force behind the grievance politics he argues are gripping his party.
“The median age of an MSNBC viewer, what do you think it is? Sixty-eight. CNN, basically the same. Fox evening programming has an even more geriatric audience,” Sasse claimed.
“Politicians who spend all day shouting in Congress so they can spend all night shouting on cable, they’re peddling crack. Most of it to people who are already addicted, but also with some glittery hopes of finding a new, angry octogenarian out there,” he concluded.
Watch the full speech above, via YouTube
