‘Optimism is insufficient’: The final lesson of Ben Sasse
When former Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) announced last week just before Christmas Day that he is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, the political world reacted with the expected mix of shock and eulogy. But for those of us who have followed the former senator from Nebraska and faithfully read his written work, the tone of his farewell tweet was not a surprise. It was a confirmation.
Before returning to academia as a university president, Sasse had been operating less as a politician and more as a cultural radiologist, diagnosing the twin cancers eating at the American soul: our crippling passivity and our profound loneliness. Now that he is facing his own mortality, the diagnosis serves as a somber news hook to revisit his two essential manuals for modern living: The Vanishing American Adult (2017) and Them (2018).
Sasse’s diagnosis is tragic on a human level, but his response to it is a vindication of the worldview he laid out in his work. In The Vanishing American Adult, Sasse warned that we were raising a generation of “Peter Pans” — perpetual adolescents trapped in a state of extended dependence. He argued that we had confused “schooling” with “education,” creating a culture of safetyism that insulated people from the very friction necessary to build character.
He didn’t just theorize; he offered a curriculum of hardship. He recounted sending his fourteen-year-old daughter, Corrie, to work on a cattle ranch, dragging her away from air conditioning and screens to experience the physical reality of labor. He wrote about the necessity of “production over consumption,” arguing that human dignity is found in being needed — in the knowledge that if you don’t do your job, the animal doesn’t eat, the fence falls down, the community suffers.
“We are stripping our kids of the ability to know that they are needed,” he wrote. “We are protecting them from the very things that would make them strong.”
When Sasse writes in his farewell letter that “optimism is insufficient” and that death requires “stiffer stuff,” he is referencing the muscle memory built by that kind of active resilience. He is proving that the antidote to fragility isn’t a government program or a self-help book; it’s the calloused hands of a life lived with purpose. He is facing the end not as a victim, but as the fully formed adult he begged us all to become.
But if The Vanishing American Adult was about the internal character we need to survive, his follow-up, Them, was about the external fortress we need to build. Them is perhaps the most prescient political book of the last ten years because it isn’t really about politics at all. It’s about the “loneliness epidemic” that has left Americans spiritually homeless and the one government official who at least recognized this crisis.
In Them, Sasse utilized the sociology of “rootless cosmopolitans” versus “somewheres.” He argued that as we lost our local tethers — our Rotary clubs, our bowling leagues, our pews — we tried to fill the void with national politics. We turned cable news anchors into our high priests and partisan warfare into our liturgy. He warned that this was a recipe for impotent misery. (“You can’t shovel your neighbor’s driveway with a retweet.”)
Among the parables and parallels he identifies is the 1995 Chicago heat wave, where the difference between life and death wasn’t wealth or race, but social capital. In neighborhoods where people knew each other, the elderly survived because neighbors checked on them. In atomized neighborhoods, they died alone behind locked doors.
This is the lesson Sasse is leaning on now. His farewell message was notably devoid of political grievances. There was no mention of the machinations of partisan Washington or his on-again-off-again feud with President Donald Trump. Instead, he spoke of that “little platoon” — his wife, his children, and his buddies. He is approaching this unknown with grit not because he was a U.S. Senator but because he invested in the local, tangible relationships that he told us were the only things that truly matter.
“The center of life is not in Washington, D.C.,” he wrote in Them. “The center of life is the family, the neighborhood, the community.”
It is a tragedy that Ben Sasse is leaving us too soon. But he has left us the blueprints. In The Vanishing American Adult, he taught us how to be strong enough to stand alone. In Them, he taught us why we shouldn’t have to. We would do well to pick them up again and read them, not as policy wonkery, but as guides for the journey of life.
Publius Pax is a tenth-generation Bucks Countian, political consultant, and author.
