Habits for Americans in an Age of Disruption
Ben Sasse
Habits for Americans in an Age of Disruption
Remarks at Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Award Dinner, May 6, 2026
The Social Order, Technology and Innovation
May 13, 2026<br>/ Share
Photo: Joseph Spiteri Photography
/ Eye on the News
The Social Order, Technology and Innovation
May 13 2026<br>/ Share
When you’re 54 and you get a terminal diagnosis, people start to act like you’re a lot wiser than they thought you were when you were 54 and you didn’t have a terminal diagnosis. So I’ll just say broadly, thank you for many friends and for lots of kindness in this room. Many of you have been extraordinarily generous to me and to my family.
I’m on the clock tonight in more ways than one, so I want to make every minute count. I think the problems that we face collectively are problems of habits, love, and community, not chiefly of policy. So I’d like to spend our time together tonight thinking about families and especially about younger parents. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and all those of us who’ve earned the titles of aunts and uncles to our friends’ kids have a role to play in this, of course, but my thoughts at this moment in America are aimed primarily at parents: the blurry eyed, overcaffeinated, ever-doubtful moms and dads who know the truth of the aphorism, “the days are long and the years are short,” who are in the business of raising souls and raising citizens. As Americans, our experiment in self-government and our pioneering spirit has always depended on wisdom and self-control. And these are not exactly the things that policy or Washington is known for and certainly not the things that politicians or bureaucrats could ever impart. Also, these are not exactly the things and the virtues that are fostered by technology’s illusion of endless consumption, infinite optionality, and cost-free disembodiment.
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No, the virtues for a life well lived are taught, modeled, and practiced in the daily life of society’s smallest but most important platoons, the republic’s thickest yet pre-political institutions, chief among them the family. So I want to start with a big prediction and it is this. In the coming decades, if AI continues to progress as it has, America is going to have a big, messy debate about UBI, universal basic income. And in its long-term implications, this debate is going to dwarf the fights we had more than a decade ago about Obamacare and even the debates we’ve had about the Great Society and the New Deal.
To be perfectly blunt, it’s unlikely that I’m going to be around for this debate, but for the record, I am strongly against UBI. I think it’s terrible policy. But either way, whether we end up with UBI or we don’t, whether we end at the sunny uplands of abundance or the hellscape of an actual jobs apocalypse, Americans are going to need better habits than we have right now to help our people, our citizens, and our republic thrive. Because virtue has always been at the heart of what it takes to keep a republic. To borrow Lincoln’s metaphor, it’s the golden apple in the silver frame. Politics, the silver frame, is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty, but life—the daily stuff that’s made up of community, affections, and habits—that’s the golden apple at the center.
The state’s job isn’t to define that, but it’s to secure the preconditions, the silver frame that enable all the little platoons and communities to pursue the golden apples. That’s what needs to be protected. And no matter what the illiberal Left or the increasingly illiberal subset of the historic Right claims, that cannot be done with policy levers in Washington, D.C. We are never just one piece of legislation away from civilizational recovery. Politics are merely means. The bigger questions are teleological, and there, souls are central.
I just made a big claim about the future. Typically, historians don’t do that. So it might be helpful for us to level-set a bit on where we stand right now because we are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of institutional decline.
The consequences are all around us. We’re lonely. The share of Americans who tell pollsters that they have no close friends, none, has quadrupled since 1990. A study last month from the University of Arizona found that over the last 15 years, people average 338 fewer spoken words per day than the year before. That’s 120,000 less words per year. We don’t trust our institutions. Over the past 50 years, decade over decade, and regardless of which political...