Former Sen. Ben Sasse said in an interview Thursday that America’s political and media ecosystem has become a distraction from deeper cultural decay.
“We’re not going to talk about politics at all,” Sasse told Ross Douthat of The New York Times during the “Interesting Times” podcast as he undergoes treatment for stage 4 pancreatic cancer. “What we’re going to talk about is the fact that we were living through a technological revolution… and we were living through institutional collapse.”
Sasse, who left the Senate in 2023 after eight years, described his diagnosis as a “death sentence” but used the conversation to frame a broader critique of American public life, arguing that politics and media have shrunk into reactive, tribal spaces.
He said the rise of digital technology has reshaped how Americans think, interact and form community, pulling attention away from real-world relationships and toward fragmented online engagement. According to Sasse, this shift has hollowed out institutions while amplifying extreme voices.
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“The weirdos are crowding everybody else out,” Sasse said. “All of our outlets have an incentive to go narrow and deep, there isn’t any 60 percent audience that’s ever going to exist again.”
He argued that both political parties and media ecosystems increasingly rely on amplifying fringe behavior from the opposing side, rather than solving substantive problems.
“There’s a ton of incentive to find some nut job on the left or some nut job on the right,” Sasse said. “The problem with that kind of nut picking is it doesn’t ever solve a problem.”
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He reflected on his own time in the Senate, acknowledging that his approach, focusing on civic norms and institutional reform, often clashed with the incentives of modern politics.
“I wasn’t a very good politician,” he said. “I am way too idealistic about what I believe in America to be a very good dealmaker.”
Sasse reiterated that view, arguing that political institutions have failed to keep pace with broader societal changes driven by technology and cultural fragmentation.
“Politics barely matters for what we’re going through right now,” he said. “This institution is filled with blowhards.”
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He warned that the digital age has replaced shared national experiences with individualized content streams, weakening social cohesion and making constructive dialogue more difficult.
“We don’t have any shared cultural data anymore,” he said, contrasting today’s media environment with earlier eras when Americans consumed common programming and could engage more easily with one another.
Sasse expressed cautious optimism that Americans may eventually adapt to the current information environment, learning to filter out misinformation and extreme rhetoric.
“If we survive, one thing that I’m nearly certain of is we will figure out how to have discussions in spite of all of the noise,” he said.
“There’s going to be a lot more normies who show up and roll their eyes,” he added.
