Don't trust politicians to solve our problems, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse tells Iowa crowd

Don’t look to politics to solve the pressing problems in American culture or address looming technological and economic changes that will rearrange American society, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse told an Iowa audience Saturday.

Politicians, he said, simply aren’t up to the task.

“Friends, there is no politician who’s going to save America,” Sasse told a crowd of about 500 Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “Friends, there is no election that’s going to transform your life to become so much better than it is right now.”

Sasse, a conservative Nebraska Republican with a decidedly academic bent to his political approach, was the featured speaker at a fundraiser for the Iowa Family Leader, the politically prominent Christian advocacy group headed by Bob Vander Plaats.

In remarks that name-checked Aristotle and William Wilberforce and included a long soliloquy on Alexis de Tocqueville, Sasse argued that Americans must minimize the presence of partisan politics in their lives, and strengthen instead relationships within their families, churches and communities.

“The only way to be a good citizen, the only way … to be a good Republican, is to be a great American first, and a great American doesn’t put politics anywhere near the center of our identity,” he said.

In an interview afterward, Sasse called the Democratic and Republican parties alike “disastrously sick.”

“I think that the Republican Party doesn’t have clarity of any long-term vision that it communicates to the American people,” he said. “That’s why in the 2016 presidential election you saw it ripe for a pretty fundamental attack on its platform.”

Sasse is known as a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, a fellow Republican, writing a widely shared and harshly critical Facebook post of then-candidate Trump in early 2016 and continuing to publicly challenge him even as recently as last month.

The GOP today, he said Saturday, is divided between out-of-touch elitists and a dangerous “populist majoritarianism” — both of which fail to represent their constituents.

“Those two sides of the Republican Party — you can call it a Wall Street-K Street continuum and a Bannonite populism — both of them are unpersuasive to moms and dads in Iowa and Nebraska who are thinking about what kind of country they want to give their kids in 10 and 20 years,” Sasse said.

The senator was all but disinvited from the state last summer by the Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann because of that criticism. On stage at a Trump rally in Cedar Rapids last June, Kaufmann told Sasse that he “should stay on your side of the Missouri River” if he isn’t willing to back the president.

Saturday’s speech marked Sasse’s second visit to the state since Kaufmann’s excoriation. The first was in July, when he attended a Story County GOP dinner and drove an Uber in Des Moines to settle a college football bet with a reporter.

Two visits to first-in-the-nation Iowa could raise questions about Sasse's presidential ambitions, and, indeed, he has been tagged as a potential candidate in 2020. As in previous interviews, though, Sasse on Saturday downplayed the notion that he might be making introductions for a later candidacy.

“I have no intention of talking about 2016 at all tonight, or, frankly, 2012 or 2020 or 2024,” Sasse said at the top of his speech. “I have no intention of talking about Republicans and Democrats tonight.”

(In an April 2016 visit, he similarly deflected on future aspirations, telling the Des Moines Register that he was in the state to scout offensive lineman for Nebraska's football team.)