Former Sen Ben Sasse says politics ‘barely matters’ amid cancer battle
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America’s political and media ecosystem is starting to drift away from deeper cultural rot, former Sen. Ben Sasse said in an interview Thursday.
“We’re not going to talk about politics at all,” Sasse told Ross Douthat of the New York Times. “Interesting Times” podcast He is being treated for stage 4 pancreatic cancer. “What we’re going to talk about is the fact that we’re experiencing a technological revolution and we’re experiencing an institutional collapse.”
Sasse, who is leaving the Senate in 2023 after eight years, described his diagnosis as a “death sentence” but used the speech to frame a broader critique of American public life, arguing that politics and media had shrunk into reactive, tribal spaces.
The rise of digital technology is reshaping the way Americans think, interact and build community, he said, shifting attention away from real-world relationships and toward fragmented online interaction. According to Sasse, this change has strengthened extreme voices while hollowing out institutions.
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New-onset diabetes or worsening blood sugar control may be an early indicator in some patients. (Getty Images/iStock)
“The weirdos leave everyone else out,” Sasse said. “All of our outlets have an incentive to go narrow and deep; there’s no 60 percent audience that will ever exist again.”
He argued that both political parties and media ecosystems are increasingly relying on reinforcing the marginal behavior of the opposing party rather than solving fundamental problems.
“There are tons of incentives to get a nut job on the left or a nut job on the right,” Sasse said. “The problem with this type of nut picking is that it never solves a problem.”
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An early morning visitor to the National Mall is silhouetted against a dawn orange sky behind the U.S. Capitol Dome on April 1, 2026 in Washington, DC. (J. David Ake/Getty Images)
He reflected on his time in the Senate and acknowledged that his approach, focused on civic norms and institutional reforms, often clashed with the incentives of modern politics.
“I wasn’t a very good politician,” he said. “I’m too idealistic in my beliefs to be a good deal maker in America.”
Sasse echoed this view, arguing that political institutions have failed to keep pace with broader social changes brought about by technology and cultural fragmentation.
“Politics don’t matter in the face of the situation we’re in right now,” he said. “This institution is full of blowhards.”
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He warned that the digital age is replacing shared national experiences with streams of personalized content, weakening social cohesion and making constructive dialogue even more difficult.
“We don’t have any common cultural data anymore,” he said, comparing today’s media environment to earlier eras when Americans consumed common programming and could more easily interact with each other.
Sasse expressed cautious optimism that Americans will eventually be able to adapt to the current information environment and learn to filter out misinformation and extreme rhetoric.
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“The one thing I’m almost certain of if we survive is that we’ll figure out how to conduct the debate despite all the noise,” he said.
“There will be a lot more normal people showing up and rolling their eyes,” he added.
