Among the hundreds of books I read during my years as a critic for The Washington Post, only three proved so paralyzingly pointless that, upon reaching the last page, I found I had nothing to say. One was an unnecessary memoir, another a dispiriting manifesto. The third book was “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal” by Senator Ben Sasse.
It’s not that “Them” is a terrible book; I have read and reviewed worse. Bad books can be valuable, even delightful, to read and critique, as long as their shortcomings lead to worthwhile questions or send readers down unexpected paths. But “Them,” which came out in 2018, offers few such consolations. Sasse, the junior senator from Nebraska and now the sole finalist to become president of the University of Florida, delivered a generic, forgettable work: packed with big-think buzzwords rehashing old arguments, clichés and metaphors passing for analysis, thought-leader-ese masquerading as vision. It was not compelling enough to dislike in public. At least not then.
I was reminded of “Them” when I read the Republican senator’s brief statement on his potential move to Gainesville — a possibility that has elicited campus protests and varying reactions from state and national leaders. Sasse wrote that the University of Florida is “the most interesting university in America right now,” and that he would be delighted to help it become the nation’s “most dynamic, bold, future-oriented university.” Interesting. Dynamic. Bold. The future! It sounded a lot like “Them.” Nothing the book or statement says seems really wrong, but only because they both say so little.
The central message of “Them” is that community life in the United States is in decline because of various cultural, technological and political forces, and that the isolation and anger replacing them threaten American democracy. This phenomenon has been documented and discussed at length for decades, yet the senator approaches it with a big-reveal vibe. “Something is really wrong here,” he writes. “Something deeper is going on.” Americans have a “nagging sense that something bigger is wrong.” The mayhem of the 2016 presidential election was “only the consequence of deeper problems.”
The problems may be deep, but Sasse clings to the surface of things. “America seems to be tearing apart at the seams,” he writes, so much so that “there are, today, effectively, two different Americas.” (Somewhere, John Edwards is tearing out his $400 hair.) The term “disruption” recurs throughout the book, a reliable sign that an author was vaguely tech-savvy a decade ago. Facebook and Twitter are frowned upon, naturally, while italics are strategically deployed throughout the text to give concepts a weighty air. “Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only a recovery of rootedness can heal us,” he writes, and the word “connections” is occasionally rendered as “connections,” which I gather makes it more significant. Sasse has a weakness for the melodramatic single-sentence paragraph. “We’re hyperconnected, and we’re disconnected.” Or: “We live — and work — in unusual times.” And, in case you hadn’t heard: “America is an idea.”
“Them” relies on exactly the roster of social scientists and assorted thinkers you’d expect to see in a work of this kind. Kudos to the senator for reading Robert Putnam, Bill Bishop and many other luminaries of the America-is-coming-apart genre, but their presence only underscores the book’s secondhand feel. (Chapter one relies so heavily on Putnam that the senator could have skipped it and just encouraged readers to pick up “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids.”) Sasse summons the ghosts of the American Revolution, but in the most Founders 101 way possible. Ben Franklin makes an appearance to say, “A republic, if you can keep it,” whereas James Madison shows up to remind us that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” I learned more from “Hamilton,” and I never even saw it with the original cast.
I may have expected too much from this book; my impressions are likely colored by my disappointment. In addition to his time in the Senate, Sasse is a scholar (with a Ph.D. in history) and an educator (the former president of Midland University in Nebraska), and with his early willingness to question Donald Trump’s candidacy he seemed a promising and thoughtful new voice on the shrinking center-right. Published just weeks before the 2018 midterms — when Trump was promising to make the elections all about migrant caravans and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation — “Them” was an opportunity for this lawmaker-teacher-historian to offer a meaningful alternative to the politics he decried.
Instead, “Them” is on the dulling edge of political thought, a book that can safely be omitted from the syllabus of any University of Florida seminar unless Sasse himself teaches it. “Genuine wisdom will require not just acknowledging the disruption of our ways of making a living, but also our way of thinking about ourselves, our identities and our places in the world,” Sasse offers in a typically vapid sentence. He cautions us not to tackle America’s troubles with a “formula” or a “silver bullet” or a “one-size-fits-all solution,” an impressive trifecta of triteness.
Sasse, who was against Trump before he supported him before he was against him once again, is disappointed by both Fox News and MSNBC. (Same.) At the end of the book, after lamenting how a politics-obsessed country has split into us-versus-them factions, he urges Americans to resist partisan tribalism, de-emphasize politics and spend more time with their families. That’s fine, except the inverse of your problem is not its solution. It’s just another way of phrasing the same problem.
Books, like politicians, can impress on their own merits, or they can just sound good compared to the competition. No doubt, Sasse is more intellectually stimulating than the election-denying conspiracists who have overrun his Republican Party. But shouldn’t the bar remain higher than that?
Unfortunately, “Them” is that familar type of book, one that serves only to affirm the author’s rep as a Washington intellectual or — what journalists call people with “Master of the Senate” in their Skype backgrounds — a “student of history.” Sasse, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Cold War-era debates over religion in American public life, requires no such validation. But he is committed to the bit.
“Them” followed the senator’s 2017 volume, “The Vanishing American Adult,” which extols the value of hard work, self-reliance and adversity for young people — listen up here, Gators — lest their passivity torpedo the nation’s freedoms and entrepreneurialism. The links between greater individualism (book one) and greater community (book two) as the cures to America’s ills seem intriguing enough to explore, but the author takes a pass. Maybe he’ll write another book on campus.
In hindsight, “Them” hinted at Sasse’s discontent with the world’s greatest nondeliberative body. “It was not Washington, D.C., that gave America its vitality,” he writes, one of many times he dings the capital and his role in it. “Deep, enduring change does not come through legislation or elections,” Sasse writes, but from “the tight bonds that give our lives meaning, happiness and hope.”
In a Q. and A. at the University of Florida on Monday, Sasse said that he looks forward to “the opportunity to step back from politics.” That opportunity seems unlikely to materialize should he win the top job. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, whose office issued a statement calling Sasse a “deep thinker” and a “good candidate” for university president, has made a culture war out of the state’s education system at multiple levels, and Sasse must now take sides in those battles.
Former President Trump reacted to the news in his usual measured tones, predicting that the university would “soon regret” hiring “Liddle’ Ben Sasse,” calling him a “lightweight” and a “weak and ineffective RINO.” And the students who protested during Sasse’s visit denounced the opacity of the university’s selection process and the senator’s past positions on same-sex marriage. (Sasse has stated that though he disagrees with the protesters, he “intellectually and constitutionally” welcomes them.)
Based on the senator’s Twitter statement, “Them”-style ideas may be on their way to Gainesville. “The University of Florida is uniquely positioned to lead this country through an era of disruption,” Sasse wrote. (Disruption: check.) “Technology is changing everything about where, when, why, what and how Americans work.” (Technology: check.) “Washington partisanship isn’t going to solve these work force challenges” (Washington, bad: check). And Sasse is “delighted to be in conversation with the leadership of this special community about how we might together build a vision.”
If having conversations about maybe building visions is the job on offer here, Sasse is the right guy for it, and “Them” the right blueprint.
I guess I could have reviewed the book after all.
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