Courtesy | Ben Sasse on Facebook

The day after Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in mid-December, conservatives came together to pay respects to a real winner.

AmericaFest provided a three-day flashpoint of an ongoing conflict, as “Make America Great Again” and “America First” traded blows on a national stage. The day after, conservatives were reminded how trivial it all was. For a few precious moments, the loudest voices on both sides stopped claiming victory, and instead united to celebrate a man three years removed from the national stage who had announced his impending death.

Ben Sasse revealed in a beautiful and lengthy X post Dec. 22 that he has metastasized stage-four pancreatic cancer and expects to die soon.

If you had forgotten Ben Sasse, he served as president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, before becoming a U.S. senator in 2014 and resigning in January 2023 to become president of the University of Florida. He hired several Hillsdale graduates over the years. The legacy he left in Washington was that of the consummate political leper: An anti-Trump, uncompromising conservative.

Yet when Sasse announced his cancer diagnosis, the same figures in government and media who had criticized, denounced, and otherwise branded him as a coward and loser for his entire career didn’t just send their sympathies — they actively praised him as the best among us. If you didn’t read the posts that flooded social media, they’re still there. Come to find out, Ben Sasse was always the good guy.

We’re often told that, in today’s world, politics isn’t real life. That’s very true, and many of us resent politics on that basis. Nonetheless, we play the game. In the name of winning, we ally with characters we’d never like to see in our neighborhoods and denounce folks we’d trust in all other walks of life — AmericaFest was as good an example as any.

And then there is Ben Sasse. At one time, America loved and hated Sasse for the same thing: He treated politics like real life when the rest of us didn’t. More to the point, Sasse’s politics were and still are indistinct from his real life. He remains fully devoted to cultivating personal responsibility. This is not a gospel of self-help, but an acknowledgement of the long-forsaken duty at the heart of family, church, and civilization that we are all guilty of ignoring. 

He asks the one question that electoral politics forbids candidates from asking when faced with the much-lamented problems of America: What if they’re simply a mirror? What if they’re my fault and yours as much as anyone else’s? Or as he poses in his book “The Vanishing American Adult” — which is among the most influential works I’ve ever read — “Could we perhaps be rearing a generation that might not be tough enough to be good Americans?”

Needless to say, the politics of real life made him useless to our parties. He spoke sparingly and frankly, waiting a full year after his election to deliver his first remarks on the Senate floor (if you haven’t read his maiden speech, read it). He refused to use hearings as opportunities to generate clips, so he incidentally generated the best of them (if you haven’t heard his exchange with Neil Gorsuch, listen to it). Most famously, he refrained from ever endorsing Donald Trump because he found both the man and his movement deficient in character.

More than all this, Sasse practiced and still practices everything he preaches. That’s why reactions to his diagnosis offer nothing but unmitigated praise. He is exactly what he claims to be. The Sasse family is a testament to the kind of neighbors, Christians, and citizens that are created through sacrifice, responsibility, and hard work. As accidental friends of the Sasses, my family and I have seen it up close for many years. For a man who worries about the toughness of Gen Z, the toughness of the two young adults and one teenager that he and Melissa raised is legendary. 

And now, as he begins what he knows will be a losing fight for his real life, Sasse looks to Christ and speaks a message of profound hope: “The eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet. Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective: ‘When we’ve been there 10,000 years … We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise.’” As if that real-life win wasn’t enough, the same city that once reviled him as a coward, loser, and political heretic now understands how dearly it misses him.

That’s because the politics of politics will always bow before the politics of real life, most especially in death. Athens executed Socrates just to end up with Plato. Jesus died on a Roman cross, Rome martyred his church for 300 years, and yet it’s no secret how that ended. Then the Roman Catholic Church saw its hegemony shattered by the “birds” Jan Hus foretold as he burned on a stake.

With AmericaFest in mind, the American right’s many political victories have delivered almost nothing but chaos to actual conservatives. We’re growing tired of winning, as then-candidate Trump famously predicted might happen back in 2016. Good.

Let us hope that losing at politics will reinvigorate us to win at real life. Today, Ben Sasse prepares to finish his race. It’s time we start running ours.

Lewis Thune is a senior studying politics.