As political theorists from Aristotle to Machiavelli have argued, power matters — and ideas cannot ‘move the world’ without it. Ben Sasse should know as much.
The outgoing Senator Ben Sasse’s closing Wall Street Journal op-ed, “America’s True Divide: Pluralists vs. Zealots,” arrived in my inbox this afternoon. As I’ve made clear in the past, I’m of the opinion that Mr. Sasse is a perfect fit for his upcoming position as college president but was a less-than-perfect fit for his eight-year tenure as a U.S. senator. His diagnosis of the republic’s present ills in the Journal provides an insight into why.
“The most important divide in American politics isn’t red versus blue,” Sasse declares in the opening line. “It’s civic pluralists versus political zealots.” The former “understand that ideas move the world more than power does, which is why pluralists value debate and persuasion.” The latter “reject this, holding that society starts and ends with power.” He continues:
More than anything else, zealots—on the right and the left—seek total victory in the public square. They believe that the center of life is government power. They preach jeremiads of victimhood and decline. On the left, they want a powerful bureaucracy. On the right, they want a strongman. But they agree on a central tenet: Americans are too weak to solve problems with persuasion. They need the state to do it.
While there are, of course, right-wingers who resemble Sasse’s characterization — desirous of a strongman, enamored of state power, contemptuous of the American people’s general capacity for self-rule — Sasse’s critique of the view of power he attributes to the “zealots” implicates a much larger set of issues. Nowhere in the senator’s op-ed is there any acknowledgment that “power” means more than just “the state”; nowhere is there any recognition of the fact that one need not be a “pajama-boy Nazi,” to use Sasse’s phrase, to reject the premise that ideas alone are the prime movers of History.
But as political theorists from Aristotle to Machiavelli have argued, power matters — and ideas, while important, cannot “move the world” without it. Sasse should know as much. In the opening paragraph of his (generally excellent) college thesis — an examination of the roots of modern secularization — Sasse argued: “Public institutions did de-Protestantize in the middle third of the century; the ACLU and other actors did scheme to facilitate this shift; and many constitutional experts did share popular doubts about the evolving interpretation of the establishment clause and the consequent legal secularization.” Secularization came from ideas, yes — namely, an “evolving interpretation of the establishment clause” — but those ideas were themselves only made manifest by the “schemes” of powerful activist groups such as the ACLU, and their enactment in a number of “important church-state” court cases that Sasse cites as having played a pivotal role in America’s de-Christianization.
The “evolving interpretation of the establishment clause” would have meant little if it were not embraced and championed by powerful institutional players, and it would not have succeeded in transforming American life if it were not applied aggressively in a series of court rulings. Would Christianity be the world’s largest religion if it were not made the official religion of the Roman Empire? Would the United States be, as Sasse puts it, “the best home freedom has ever had” if it were not for the armed rebellion of the patriots of ’76? For all the powerful arguments against chattel slavery, would that institution have been abolished were it not for the Civil War? Was persuasion alone enough to overturn Roe v. Wade? Given that American public opinion on abortion has remained largely static for decades — and that overturning Roe consistently polled as deeply unpopular — it’s not clear how it could have been. It was the grassroots mobilization, institution-building, political lobbying, and construction of an entire pro-life movement — a movement that was actively interested in attaining, maintaining, and wielding power — that won the day.
“Truth,” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in God and Man at Yale, “can never win unless it is promulgated. Truth does not carry within itself an antitoxin to falsehood. The cause of truth must be championed, and it must be championed dynamically.” To champion truth, one must possess the power to do so. That does not require, as Sasse seems to imply, an embrace of big government or a rejection of political liberty. But it does require a proactive attitude and posture toward “debate and persuasion” that recognizes that it is insufficient to simply articulate one’s ideas well; good ideas can and often have been drowned out by bad ones in environments where the purveyors of the latter have more resources, a larger platform, and louder megaphones than the former. Sasse was one of the Senate’s most articulate champions of ideas. But he was rarely much more than that. I wish him the best at the University of Florida.