Sasse: I'm Betting on America

Press Release

U.S. Senator Ben Sasse delivered a speech as part of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute's A Time for Choosing Speaker Series.

"Right now, we have a government of the weirdos, by the weirdos, for the weirdos. Most real people are tuning out -- regrettably, but understandably -- and they're letting the very-online, very-angry dominate politics. Our politicians now consistently act like jackwagons, they do it for a reason:

It's because they're primarily performing -- for other jackwagons.

Echo-chamber politicians drinking their own bathwater isn't entirely new, of course,
…but what is new, and something is new here, it's the instant feedback of social media. Politicians increasingly addicted to likes and retweets, they act and think -- but mostly they feel -- like social media is where real life happens.

Happily, they're very wrong."

...

"The time is now: There has arguably never been a better time to make this the majority party than at a moment when so many Americans are hungry for something bigger. They know disruption is on the horizon. And they want something optimistic, frankly they'd probably just settle for something sane."

...

"American conservatives don't traffic in grievance. We don't believe in whining. Our party must reject politicians who tell the American people that we're victims. We embrace leaders who tell the American people that we can write our destiny. Americans have never wallowed in self-pity.
Our history is filled with men and women who refused to settle, who smashed barriers -- men and women who built a better nation for us:

The Harriet Tubmans and George Washingtons, Susan B. Anthony and MLK,
Neil Armstrong and Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart and Jackie Robinson -- and the cheery Ronald Reagan. We embrace leaders who understand that America makes legends, not victims.

American conservatives don't peddle cheap nostalgia. Our moment requires leaders who look the American people in the eye and tell hard truths -- but without sacrificing optimism and idealism and aspiration. Americans have the confidence to innovate our way through challenges. Innovation is this nation's lifeblood. We invented the assembly line -- and the lightbulb. The Wright Brothers captured the world at Kitty Hawk. Americans walked on the moon and American companies built the vaccines that defeated COVID."

The full transcript of the speech can be found below:

We live in an odd time, so let's start with an odd fact: The vast majority of Americans now say that it feels like we're in decline. 80% of the Left; more than that of the middle; and breaking 90% of the Right. say they think the country is headed in the wrong direction and they think we might be on permanent decline.

It's not hard to see why: Fatherlessness, the epidemic of opioids and suicide, loss of community, foreign policy humiliations, runaway inflation, the addictive horror of the 24-hour news cycle. It feels like we're inundated with terrible news. And that feels new, because as Americans we aren't used to thinking about bad news as the thing that floods over us. We think of ourselves as an optimistic people, or we used to anyway.

But in another sense, this angst isn't entirely new.

In self-government, freedom is always fragile, and the stakes always high. Which means that the to-do list before us always feels a bit pressure-filled. The nagging sense that we might be on the verge of decline makes some sense when we remember that each generation has to pass this republic on to the next generation. And passing it on isn't inevitable, it takes work. It feels a bit daunting--partly because it should feel a bit daunting.

But when President Reagan reminded us that freedom is "never more than one generation away from extinction," he wasn't saying it with a heavy heart. He was laying out a challenge -- a challenge that flows from a blessing. His point was this: it's up to us. No king is going to it for us. It's up to you and to me to pass this unbelievable American nation onto the next generation. Yeah, it feels a bit daunting. But it can't incapacitate us, it can't render us passive.

Every generation has a choice, to get off the couch and build, or to resign as the rich kid who lets the family business fall apart. Because make no mistake, the loss of confidence we're experiencing has disastrous real-world effects.

Let's look at the case study of how our entitlement, our drifting, our lack of self-confidence over the last decade -- how it produced the debacle in Afghanistan.

The American people, as President Reagan regularly reminded us, have an uncommon gift for common sense -- on those issues they choose to tune in to. Unfortunately, most folks tuned out on Afghanistan, and painful consequences (the scars that will last) followed from decisions made by the weak isolationists in two consecutive Administrations -- that chose decline over honor, fantasy over facts.

The American people had better ideas. The American people never thought for a minute that the Taliban could be trusted.

The American people never endorsed our surrender agreement at Doha.

The American people didn't think that sticking to that foolish agreement (even as the Taliban were brazenly breaking their word) could be spun as "an extraordinary success."

The American people didn't like being lied to about what was happening at Karzai Airport, or the absurd decision to abandon Bagram Air Force Base, that had been secured with so much blood.

No, the American people over the last year have seen the world as it is, not as flacks told them to pretend-see.

The American people looked at desperate Afghans -- many interpreters and drivers who'd risked their lives for our troops (and to whom we in turn had given our word) -- we saw them fall off of C17 wheel wells, and we felt sick, as we should've.

We looked at anguished parents handing their babies over barbed wire to strangers, and we wept.

We looked at the ass-covering and blame-shifting of the permanent inhabitants of Washington -- and regular moms and dads in Nebraska, and regular moms and dads in Southern California, were indignant.

The American people don't like feckless leaders who humiliate the nation, the last two administrations bowed to the Taliban. The American people don't like defeat.

But defeat is exactly where the loud isolationists -- long of the left and now of the right -- have demanded we go. The catastrophe in Afghanistan is a stark example of how defeat-ism at home produces chaos abroad that can then boomerang back on us.

And we're in for more of it if we submit to the demands of the prophets of doom and dismay that we must retreat even more broadly. Thorough-going isolationism will neither rationalize our national security priorities, nor drive us to more hard-nosed alliances and partnerships. These isolationists offer the mirage of fortress-security as they instead what they're really doing is handing power to global forces seeking to make the world more unstable, more dangerous. The new isolationists present themselves as hardheaded realists, but it's not true.

They're the ones with stars in their eyes as they ostrich-see only one side of a balance sheet. They pretend that retreat from the world can us focus on "nation-building at home," and that this can happen pollyannish miracle with no cost at all. But in reality, national security involves actual trade-offs. And the retreat they champion comes at a hard, high price.

Here's the reality:

The last 75 years, with the US as the globe's unrivaled superpower, we have seen shocking peace and shockingly prosperity, by every historical measure. Too often, we pit idealism and realism against each other in ivory tower, philosophy-seminar kinda way that don't really grapple with the world we've actually inherited.

For in flesh-and-blood lived experience, American idealism about human dignity helped create immense realist, geopolitical stability. And American military, our might, enabled the spread of human rights and broader representation, and private property rights and land reform, and unleashed entrepreneurial innovation on every continent, thereby uplifting millions of families and innumerable communities. That's the reality of the last 75 years.

Stated more brass-tacks: American military and economic engagement wasn't some charity. After the Second World War, our grandparents literally built the world.

We created a global infrastructure of trade organizations and military alliances that became dang-near beautiful, like the pictures of Ellis Island in the President's office upstairs, Reagan leading us to avert WW3 and win the Cold War, barely having to fire a shot.

But this creative process wasn't born of altruism. Although it was indeed very good for the world, but we did it because it was good for America.

There's a reason that we're 4% of global population and 24% of global GDP.

If "America First" just becomes shorthand for "America Alone," then it's a dumb slogan and an even dumber meaning: "America poorer and America less safe."

Engagement, by which we really mean "leadership", can't be romantic. It can't be naive, for there is no international law that's handed down by some all-knowing, benevolent, placeless global legislator.

The handwringing and happy talk that oozes out of the United Nations (where genocidal regimes can chair the so-called "human rights" commission) is perhaps useful for the occasional sternly-worded letter, but none of those processes do anything to make us safer. There is no abstract "international law." But what there is a system of rules and norms -- like the free navigation of the seas -- that we built, and that our parents and grandparents enforced, until recently.

The US did this because if we didn't, someone else would've set the rules -- and every human on earth would've been worse off over the last three quarters of a century.

This system has kept Americans safe.

This system has made Americans prosperous.

The system won the Cold War. And the result has been that the US, and lots and lots of other nations as well, have become safer and richer than they would have been without U.S. leadership. It's been very positive-sum.

Isolationists like to quote John Quincy Adams's warning about an America going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy." But we're not knights-errant, and never have been.

What we've been doing for the last several decades is establishing, by every means at our disposal, ways to keep the monsters at bay.

Because monsters try to come back. Because monsters always threaten. Just ask Zelensky -- ask the moms of Mariupol.

America has a decisive role to play on the global stage -- and that role is more urgent now in a new era of great-power politics. The Pax Americana that prevailed after the Cold War has badly frayed -- and on the horizon are new adversaries eager to exploit our decline, to expedite our fall. It will be mostly our choice whether they succeed.

The biggest threat to the American-led order is the Chinese Communist Party -- and the technologies they think their centralized system will harness faster and better than our decentralized system. The rise of this belligerent, confident, expansionistic, indeed imperialist Communist Party is the competitive challenge that will define much of the next half century.

Beijing is not only an economic competitor, although they do have a strong hand over global trade and currency flows that subvert markets and the liberty markets make possible.

Beijing is not only a military competitor, although their advances in AI-enabled autonomous vehicles threaten many links of American technological superiority.

Most fundamentally, 21st century Beijing is now a competitor on the field of ideas -- with a different vision of humanity. Beijing proposes a new way of life -- an unprecedented digital totalitarianism that would govern and regulate the most intimate details of individual and family and communal life, turning every person and the devices they carry into the eyes and ears of the regime, that's what we face.

We have already felt how the CCP"s tentacles can reach into daily life on this continent:

We've seen the OPM hack of more than 20 million Americans confidential information, including sexual histories and infidelities and drug experiences told to FBI security-clearance background investigators. China has all of that data from your SF-86s.

We've seen TikTok and 23 and Me compile massive location and genetic data on private American citizens.

We've seen how Chairman Xi can use corporate lust for access to China's consumer markets as a tool to squeeze cowardly concessions from American businesses and American sports leagues -- concessions like firing employees for saying "Stand with Hong Kong," or the despicable cowardice of C-suites willing to keep silent about the genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang -- including the organ-harvesting that has been disclosed publicly in new ways in the last 72 hours.

A tightly interconnected world makes it possible for Xi's thugs to export digital totalitarianism around the world. But technological development isn't something we can wish away, nor should it be.

This must be a reality-based party, and that means admitting that the world, though disorientingly smaller than in the past, is still larger today than it will be a year out and a decade out.

The world will become more linked, that is inevitable, and thus smaller still evermore into the future -- for good and for ill. These threats are real and China's power-hungry leadership is coming for us, whether we reflect sufficiently on this reality or not. No amount of pretending or ignoring or hiding is going to make it go away.

The defining national security question of the next two decades is whether we will have a second "American Century," or whether it will be a CCP-led order.

I know which side I'm on.

But if America is going to lead the next century, it's going to require us getting our act together and do some big, hard things -- and soon. This won't be easy: it's been a long time since this country did something big and hard together.

But we've done this before. We come from generations of people called upon to rise and protect this place, and to do the hard work of building. It's great news what we've inherited, but it also means we're a bunch of kids who've been living off our grandparents inheritance from World War II and the Cold War, and that the money is starting to run out unless we do something. That can either be really bad news, or it can be a chance for us to build something big and hopeful again, like they did and like they bequeathed to us.

I know what I want.

This "American rebuild" agenda depends first and foremost on the American people. We need a revival of American self-confidence. We need leaders who live and breathe that self-confidence so we can inspire a generation of self-confident Americans and American families and American communities and American start-ups.

This is a nation-wide challenge, a whole-of-society calling, but here, just for a second, I want to talk just to my own party. We Republicans have a choice to make: We can either continue to drift as a party that exists as a vehicle for the grievances of the angriest, oldest folks, or we can be the future-focused party of 2030 -- with policies centered on the future of work and the future of war.

We need to give Americans confidence again as they enter a dizzying world where the digital revolution is remaking every segment of the economy and is going to end lifelong work for almost everyone. The American people are second to none; we can outcompete and outperform anyone -- but we're going to need massively reformed institutions -- and a wave of new institutions -- that champion reward hustle and grit -- that help every hungry American develop the skills he and she need to flourish.

This is going to require a lot of new educational and job-retraining institutions -- obviously for ages 15-25 -- but also, because life-long learning will now be required for every domain and every job, we are going to need these new institutions for ages 30 and 35, 40 and 45. And no civilization has ever built a community of lifelong learners before. We're going to have to, whether we like it or not. That's just reality and ours must be a reality-based party. So…

Let's break up the higher education accreditation cartels and make education a dynamic sector, rather than a soulless 19th century assembly line.
Let's encourage corporate-level certification programs, so workers can focus on developing portable skills that will never again be one-and-done.
Let's stop pretending like every college experience has to look like an Ivy League college, and that every class should be 3 hours per week, and every semester 15 weeks, and every degree 8 semesters -- and let's instead unleash social entrepreneurs to build a cornucopia of opportunities and new arrangements for kids to build skills for jobs today, and for jobs in data science that don't even exist yet. And let's also experiment with hundreds more entry points to lifelong education, because we need tens of millions more of our kids shout "aha!" when the lightbulb goes off, and to fall in love with learning.
Let's promote portable healthcare benefits and job credentialing -- so that workers take their policies and their degrees, and their stackable micro-credentials and certifications, with them across job and geographic change.
Let's take the free-market lessons we learned from Project Warp Speed and apply them to other strategic innovations -- computer chips, 5G, next generation batteries, and synthetic biology.
Let's eliminate every single marriage penalty in the federal code, let's promote families and reverse the stagnation of bureaucrat-first central planning.
Let's make sure that our party is known as a champion of both immigrants and strong and smart borders. Let's put technology to use securing our border and preventing visa overstays. Let's clear the logjam of cases by sending sufficient resources to expedite the review of asylum cases. Smart technology and clear policy, not shouted symbolism, must be our answers. But the key to doing border security to stop illegal immigration and welcome immigrants who want their kids to grow up in the freest nation on earth.
The new technologies that are disrupting our communities in unprecedented ways are, like so many tech developments over time, they're pro and con, they're a mixed bag. They've simultaneously made us the richest consumers in human history, but more stuff alone satiates none of our deepest longings. Work and productivity and community -- meaningful ways to serve, and to be needed -- are so much more important than just more marginal consumption. These enriching technologies also come addictive and isolating and alienating temptations -- frightening, soul-deadening risks with these super tools.

People don't always know how to say it, but our neighbors feel it. Our neighbors feel less stable. They understandably worry about this loss of control; they feel loss of agency. Our domestic policy must be laser-focused on the disruption of work, giving people the tools they need to remain valuable -- and valued. This is part of why merely relitigating policy fights from 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, just with more anger added, is so dumb. It does nothing to solve the problems, nothing to comfort those Americans freaked out by the instability of job and neighborhood, economy and culture. We should be tackling these real problems.

But somewhat counterintuitively, the biggest riddle in our national security policy is tightly linked to this same domestic policy riddle. And that's because our primary geopolitical challenge is the coming decade's technology race with the Chinese Communist Party. The bad guys keep asserting, and indeed now persuading many of our sometimes-allies, that only central planners can possibly address the destabilization technology is birthing in our time. "More strong men," Chairman Xi tells our allies. We have to have an answer, a better answer than he has. As Republicans we know that more central planning, and less freedom, can't possibly be the best human dignity-affirming pathway to political and economic stability. But we need to put up or shut up; we need to demonstrate that a decentralized system of free peoples (and the communities we build) can thrive during this unprecedented, fluid time.

So, in a sense, our number one foreign-policy concern remains the same as our number one domestic policy concern -- the self-confidence of Americans to navigate this brave new world. But right after that, we must also admit as well that a smart public sector for 2030 will be an America that again sees itself as, and actually acts like, a superpower again.

We meet here this week exactly forty years after President Reagan addressed Parliament with a plan to revivify American leadership of the Free World. And much like your Reagan Institute's "Westminster 2.0 Working Group" report released earlier this week argues: we should lead a system of alliances that not only fortifies the healthy countries but also inspires the repressed inside the unhealthy countries.

We've got a lot of work to do. So...

Let's pass a trillion-dollar defense budget, but let's radically cut the share that goes to legacy systems and platforms that employ an army of lobbyists. In a new era of cyber and asymmetric war, let's make sure we're getting maximum lethal capacity for every taxpayer dollar spent -- by overhauling procurement policies that aren't just too expensive but primarily way, way too slow.
Let's build a "NATO for the Pacific." We need allies to get back on the offensive against the CCP, and those allies need US leadership. NATO in Europe has been the greatest treaty organization in history. It held the line against the Soviets, and it's now holding the line against bloody Putin. But as Chairman Xi looks to expand his sphere of influence, we need a new military alliance centered far out into the Pacific. This is our main foreign policy work.
Let's streamline our intel agencies so we can win a shadow war with the Chinese Communist Party.
Let's arm the Taiwanese military to the teeth. Let's amend the Taiwan Relations Act directly to make our security guarantee explicit. No more strategic ambiguity.
Let's pair military partnerships with economic partnerships and end the nonsense anti-trade policies of the last two administrations. Pacific NATO should be a free-trade zone, too. Trade is a win-win because when Americans compete, we win.
Nobody out-thinks, out-hustles, or out-works the American people. We built an American order that saw us through the Cold War. We can build a new American order that will see us through the coming conflict with the Beijing tyrant -- that's seeking to export his dehumanizing surveillance-state autocracy and the related technologies.

Now I know that faster than I can get the words out, a legion of pessimists on the Left and the Right will be lined up to tell us why we can't do it.

Their pessimism is poison.

And we have lots of peddlers of it. On the left, and the right, legions of prophets of decline.

You know since the earliest days of the Progressive Movement (a hundred years ago), we've always had a "Blame America First" crowd that was ready to tell us why America was evil, then why America could not possibly beat the Soviets, why America could never be anything more than the sum of her sins.

It's a long tradition, it inspired Teddy Roosevelt's beautiful homage to the "Man in the Arena" -- and his slapdown of the tireless whiny, anti-America critics.

The blame-America-first tradition -- the Americans-are-too-weak-to-build-or-fix-anything tradition is old. Here's what's new…What's different now…is that we have so many on the Right who've joined the whining. More false prophets of pessimism, just from a different heretical sect. Fundamentally, they have the same message.

In the 2016 Presidential campaign, you had two candidates with wildly different solutions, but their fundamental diagnosis was the same: "The system is rigged; you're getting screwed; you're a victim; this country is going down the tubes."

You're victims.

The left wants a powerful nameless-but-supposedly-benevolent bureaucracy; the right wants a strong-man daddy figure. But the loudest all agree on one thing: America (the one given to us by the Founders, the one kept for us by our parents and grandparents) doesn't work anymore -- it can't work anymore.

These are not the good faith positions of two big healthy political parties, just with competing visions of leadership. These are predators circling the carcass of the American body politic, two petty factions ready to fight each other to the death about which of them will get to rule us.

We should reject all such warped visions of this glorious inheritance we've received.

I don't want a nanny state caring for me from cradle to grave, and I've already got a good dad, thank you very much. I want us to be America again.

It's liars who tell us that our Constitution is obsolete; that principled pluralism can't possibly work anymore, that the very act of believing we can make it work again is quaint.

Since persuasion is dead, they tell us, the only thing to do is to use the government to smash the other side -- to weaponize the state to go after your domestic opponents -- who we're told we have to regard not as just wrong on a policy here or there, but as evil.

They tell us the other political party is the root of everything that ails us. They're full of crap.

The prophets of doom (right and left) disagree about almost every particular policy, but they almost always sound like twins -- because they agree that the solution to domestic squabbles is to give the federal government loads more power.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC -- it's choose your own dictatorial adventure.

Matt Gaetz and Madison Cawthorn, they might as well be from the far left -- because like all prophets of doom, they love ranting to the American people that we're just victims.

The prophets of doom tradition has always told us that our problems are too big, they're too insurmountable. They tell us we have no agency. We're powerless.

But when people feel powerless, when they identify as the victims in their stories -- instead of the children of heroes and the authors of our own destiny -- we slip into the lazy, comfortable slouch of decline.

You hear it everywhere today: "We're backsliding as a nation," "we're rotten to the core," "we need to turn inward," "the country used to be great."

These stories are wrong -- but they're dominant today, and if they long dominate (in self-government), perception can become reality.

America is an idea -- and ideas depend on stories -- shared stories.

And therefore the stories that we tell ourselves -- they matter.

Being resigned toward decline that's the wrong story.

Finding adreneline rush in endlessly droning on about the worst 2% on the other side -- it's the wrong story.

The truth…is that America still has an amazing story to tell.

We are the only country that started as an idea -- a wild, optimistic, world-shaking, history-changing idea. It's this: universal human dignity.

People are fallen, but we're also ensouled, and big -- and filled with potential -- and meant to rule ourselves.

The American idea is: universal human dignity and limitless potential safeguarded by limited government. Government matters, politics matter -- but they can't be the center of our community, or of our animosities -- they certainly can't be the center of our loves.

This Republic isn't perfect, of course, but it is this:

It's better than anything else the world has ever had to offer.

It's the best form of government, ever.

Each generation has worked to make it better, to build a more perfect union across two and a half centuries.

The Americans who we inherited this from they knew where our strength lies.

America's strength isn't in Wall Street -- or Silicon Valley -- or the Pentagon -- it isn't some bureaucracy. Our strength is measured by the confidence of the American people in our shared American idea -- about the dignity of people, and what people can build.

Yes, there are doom scrollers, there are grifters, there are people making money off prophesying decline -- some of them literally mocking their own audiences when the cameras are turned off.

Some of these folks are even partly right about what is broken, but they're wrong about the biggest things.

They're wrong that the American people are weak, that we're content with decline.

They're wrong that Americans, some of the grittiest people across history's pages, are okay with passivity.

They're wrong about our will and resolve.

They're wrong about our strength -- and its wellsprings.

For we're actually strong if we believe that our system works.

We are strong if we believe that we can -- and indeed we should -- make a more perfect union.

We are strong if we believe that all are created equal.

What makes America great is understanding that it is God (not government), that gives us dignity and rights -- regardless of skin pigment, regardless of gender, regardless of place of birth.

We are strong if we believe that our ideas about liberty are great -- and that our constitution is good and that's never more relevant than it is tonight.

These are basic truths -- "self-evident" as our Founders said. And the American people need to again hear these truths -- this honest, optimistic American story.

But let's be clear: If we don't tell it, the prophets of decline will win, as they help make America lose.

I believe that America (still the most powerful nation in the world) still has its best days ahead of it.

The story of our forefathers, and the mothers of liberty in our ancestry….their story…is ours…if we can keep the republic.

But to keep the republic means reclaiming our politics --from those who want power politics to dominate every national conversation -- as so many (left and right) currently want.

This won't be easy, but few things worth doing ever are.

American revival won't be easy because we're facing not just dysfunctional government but also endless fuel from rage peddlers who want just this dysfunction, who lust only for performative shouting.

Right now, we have a government of the weirdos, by the weirdos, for the weirdos. Most real people are tuning out -- regrettably, but understandably -- and they're letting the very-online, very-angry dominate politics. Our politicians now consistently act like jackwagons, they do it for a reason:

It's because they're primarily performing -- for other jackwagons.

Echo-chamber politicians drinking their own bathwater isn't entirely new, of course, but what is new, and something is new here, it's the instant feedback of social media. Politicians increasingly addicted to likes and retweets, they act and think -- but mostly they feel -- like social media is where real life happens.

Happily, they're very wrong.

Yes, there is lots of grandstanding going on, but the grandstands are small and mostly empty.

Political twitter isn't real. Only 22% of Americans use it, and more than half of that 1/5 of never follow politics on Twitter. The vast majority of traffic on Twitter is driven by well under 2% of the public. And yet politicians -- again, left and right are barely distinguishable -- in seeking to cater to this tiny minority and the algorithms that drive addicted-engagement.

Political algorithms run on rage.

Nobody goes viral for making a good faith argument.

Nobody goes viral for admitting there are policy trade-offs.

Nobody goes viral for being honest that 280 characters probably won't allow the space to have an honest debate. It's dumb to talk about a particular piece of federal legislation as either the arrival of Heaven on earth or the harbinger of Hell by Tuesday.

Nonetheless, the loudest politicians and the media demagogues who enable and encourage them still daily go viral just by preaching to their little siloed choirs. They get clicks for divisive headlines and outrageous overstatement, telling their audience that, if you're not with us entirely and immediately, then you're the enemy.

Cable-television suffers from the same problem. Tucker Carlson had the most watched show on cable this year, checking in at 3 million and 30,000 viewers one night last month. Lawrence O'Donnell clocked in less than half that, and Anderson Cooper on CNN about 800,000. It sorta sounds like a lot, until we remember that this gorgeous continental nation has north of 330 million souls.

To review: On a typical day, less than 2% of the nation is watching all the cable news combined.

And this 2% is not remotely representative of the country. The median age of an MSNBC viewer is 68. CNN, basically the same. Fox evening programming has an even more geriatric audience. Gen-Xers and Millennials and Zoomers (the generations that make up our entire future) are not listening to any of the fanservice media.

Politicians who spend their days shouting in Congress, so they can spend their nights shouting on cable, are peddling crack -- mostly to the already addicted, but also with glittery hopes of finding a new angry octogenarian out there.

We don't have time to talk about today's headlines, but think about our daily supply. Michael Avenatti was convicted or sentenced to multiple years in prison today -- for being a liar. Boy that was a shocker. And this carnival-barker was a guy that CNN used to have on dozens and dozens of time every single month -- at one point deciding to push him as a presidential candidate. Why? because he was good at carnival barking.

The circus might be funny if it weren't so serious. America's junk food media diet of politi-tainment matters, because self-government depends on an actually informed citizenry. We need shared facts. But politicized newsrooms and clickbait culture don't just make us dumber; the main thing they do is also exhaust and alienate almost all of America. And so our neighbors check out, allowing the very online with their rage addiction to dominate -- again to the exclusion of the overwhelming majority of our citizens.

So there are the headwinds; There are naysayers and doom-peddlers content with broken politics and managed decline, so long as they get in a really good "burn" on the other side as America's republic dies out.

But here's the good news: The American people are much, much better than that. Much more interesting than that. All this disengagement by the big majority, although problematic, really can be the source of some glimmers of hope.

Why are these folks disengaging? Because most Americans have no interest in endlessly scrolling on politicized social media or watching the repetitive cable sorta-news that pickles your brain night after night -- there's a reason they don't want to do this: They care about other stuff, and lots of it is more important than what they're turning off.

Most Americans much prefer to be raising their families and building things than engaging in sludge. One of the biggest things we need in American politics is pretty mundane; we need a lot more of these normies to show up just a bit more often, and to roll their eyes a lot more often at performative weirdness.

The opportunity is here if we'll see it: When you ask the American people if they consider themselves more Republican or more Democrat, and you don't give them the chance to say "none of the above," "none of the above" still wins overwhelmingly as people object to the framing of the question.

About 28% of Americans now see themselves as members of our Republican Party; and about 28% considers themselves Democrats -- while well over 40% say, "To hell with your question, I don't want anything to do with either of those parties."

I'm convinced that if you ask the question in this way, and allow people to identify as "mostly disconnected from both political parties," rather than feeling at home in one of them, well over half of all respondents would answer "Other".

Who is speaking to those Americans? Who is offering them the optimistic, future-focused vision? Who's reminding them of their glorious civics inheritance?

Almost no one. Why not us?

Think how long it's been since the American people have heard a big, optimistic, Reagan-like aspirational message. A 33-year-old American has seen a Republican President win the popular vote only once in her entire lifetime (and that was in the aftermath of 9/11, when the Dems decided to run an heiress-marrying, throwback anti-war candidate from the "60s). That is the only time a Republican has won the vote in the lifetime of anyone 33 and under in this country.

Shouldn't the Republican party have something to say to her? We've got to do better. We've got to be speaking to people who tuned both parties out a decade ago. We've got to be speaking to men and women who can't stand preach-to-the-choir-politics because in the real world they're the ones getting things done, they don't want mere performance, they don't want mere shouting.

The time is now: There has arguably never been a better time to make this the majority party than at a moment when so many Americans are hungry for something bigger. They know disruption is on the horizon. And they want something optimistic, frankly they'd probably just settle for something sane.

This is our moment if we'll take it.

The other party is increasingly drunk on elite leftism at the national level, woefully disconnected from their historic working-class base in places like Nebraska. There is little room for honest debate inside the Democrats right now, when so many are sprinting from the somewhat-left to the far-left, frantically trying to recast themselves as mini-Bernie Sanders bobbleheads.

Their current student loan forgiveness proposal is a massive transfer from median Americans to richer Americans.

Our current president won their primary and then he was elected by claiming he'd be responsible and moderate, but then promptly handed the staffing of his White House to far left 20-somethings and a chief of staff who literally lives on Twitter. That is Ron Klain's constituency.

This is a disconnected national party right now and they are trying to choose between "shout your abortion" and "defund the police" -- oh, and by the way they have two moderates. And why is it that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema get so many vile threats from their own party?

Their party has no room for intellectual diversity even though they claim that one of its touchstones is diversity. There isn't any, and it's monotonous, predictable, and stale -- and really unattractive to the fastest growing demographic in the country (Hispanics) and to the big winnable middle of this country more broadly. I want to be clear, the Democratic Party's appeal-to-the-farthest-left-10% nonsense it's not good for the country, I wish there was a more credible Democrat party right now, but it's reality and it gives us an opening.

We shouldn't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Facing this kinda shoot-yourself-in-the-foot stupid tribalism, why the heck would our party want to try to mirror the same thing? Debate sharpens ideas. Debate wins voters -- by treating them like adults. The namesake of this building preached that someone who agrees with you on 80 or 90% of issues, or even just on the majority of values, is an almost-all-the-time friend and ally friend, not a slippery-slope tainted enemy.

This party should be a big tent. We've got fiscal conservatives. We've got social conservatives. We've got budget hawks and defense hawks. We've got populists and constitutionalists. Like some of the best things in life, it's complicated, and it's messy --and it's great. It's what makes this party strong. And frankly it's what makes me optimistic about the future.

What this party cannot be is a cult of personality and grievance. Those are the hallmarks of anti-conservatism. I'm a Republican because I'm a conservative. And I'm a conservative because I believe in gratitude.

Everyone born here is immensely blessed -- and the heart of keeping the Republic always starts with gratitude.

American conservatives don't traffic in grievance. Our party must reject politicians who tell the American people that we're victims. We embrace leaders who tell the American people that we can write our own destiny. Americans have never wallowed in self-pity. The people who built this country and passed it on us to us sought to make it better and more expansive and more inclusive. They weren't whining.

Our history is dominated with people who refused to settle, people who smashed barriers -- men and women built a better nation for us and bequeathed it to us: The Harriet Tubmans and George Washingtons, Susan B. Anthony and MLK, Neil Armstrong and Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart and Jackie Robinson -- and the ever-cheerful Ronald Reagan. We in this country and in this party embrace leaders who understand that America makes legends, not victims.

American conservatives don't peddle cheap nostalgia. Our moment requires leaders who look the American people in the eye and tell them hard truths -- but not sacrifice the optimism and idealism and aspiration. Americans have the confidence to innovate our way through challenges. Innovation is this nation's lifeblood. We invented the assembly line -- and the lightbulb. The Wright Brothers captured the world at Kitty Hawk. Americans walked on the moon and American companies just built the vaccines that defeated COVID.

We're in the middle of a digital revolution that is going to upend a lot -- it's gonna jostle society. It's happening whether we like it or not. Politicians who sell false promises of a return to a 1950s economy are selling opioids and dependency. It's the leaders who tell the truth about how Americans can go now and build the economy of the 2050s-- those are the people who empower our citizens. We embrace leaders who understand that America has innovated, can innovate, and will innovate.

Conservatives don't shrink meekly away from the global stage. We embrace leaders who have the strength to stand up to despots.

Americans ended slavery. Americans defeated Nazis. Americans prevailed over communism.

Americans must stand for freedom-loving people around the world. Don't listen to leaders who will make excuses for Xi or Putin. Don't listen to leaders who cut deals with the Taliban.

Don't listen to leaders who play footsie with genocidal maniacs.

We embrace leaders who tell the stories of the freedom-fighters, who defend our allies, who champion human dignity, who celebrate Hong Kongers in the streets, who arm Ukrainians, who sound the alarm for Taiwan, and who refuse to disguise the weakness of isolationism with the cynical false pretense of realism.

This is indeed A Time for Choosing.

This is our moment…to choose to reject decline -- and to build better.

Americans have never believed that this is as good as it gets, or that our best days are in the rearview mirror -- and we're not about to start now.

This is our moment to reject the weirdness-addicted, political-bingers who preach jeremiads of despair to their little choirs. Healthy Americans have always known that politics and politicians should definitely not be the center of American life.

This is our moment to engage the world, not cower and shrink away. Americans have always understood that we are strong because we are good.

This is our moment to build an American-led future. This is our moment to out-innovate, out-compete, and out-perform the Chinese Communist Party, formidable though it is. Because the totalitarian certainty is that humans are small and weak and tamable. Well they're wrong.

That is not America's anthropology. That is not America's idea of Americans -- or of anyone created in God's image.

Our view is that men and women, though flawed, are glorious.

That government, although necessary, isn't the point of it all.

Lincoln's judgment at the Lyceum -- that "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher; As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide" -- heavy stuff, dire, obviously.

But it is also implicitly filled with hope.

Because he's saying that we're big. We're big enough that no outside force alone can beat us, big enough that we can resolve to reform and return and revive and rebuild.

The choice really is ours. This is America's moment.

The American people are ready -- they want better; they want more.

This ought to be the Republican Party's moment. The question is whether we -- the party of Lincoln and Reagan -- will again make that big American choice.

I know what I'm betting on.

Let's call the American people to join us again.

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