Reset Reason #3: Why Are We Here?

In the first two essays of this series, I argued that Bay Area Republicans need a “reset” — to build a positive agenda that attracts voters and to help steady the Republic at a fragile moment.

Today I want to go one level deeper and consider how we Republicans could help our fellow citizens grapple with a deep, fundamental question: Why are we here? What is our purpose on earth — as citizens, parents, neighbors — in the year 2026?

Recently I listened to an interview with Ben Sasse, the former U.S. Senator and university president, conducted after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he might have as few as three months to live. Now he sleeps much of the day, writes on morphine, and is launching a podcast titled Not Dead Yet. He says he is trying “to redeem the time.”

That phrase — redeem the time — comes from the Puritans. It means that we have been given a finite number of days and that those days are not ours to waste. Sasse’s diagnosis has forced him to confront that reality more directly than most of us. But we all have numbered days. We just don’t know the number.

When you absorb that fact, much of modern political life begins to look distorted.

Sasse suggests that politics deserves “one or two cheers” — never zero and never three. Constitutional order matters. Government can be a force for good. But politics is not ultimate. It is, in his memorable image, the silver frame — not the golden apple. It secures the space in which families, churches, schools, businesses, and civic associations can flourish. When politics becomes our primary love — entertainment, identity, and moral drama rolled into one — it deforms everything around it.

That deformation is obvious in the digital age. Sasse notes that only about 14 percent of Americans pay attention to politics on a daily basis, yet those hyper-engaged few dominate our public conversation. The loudest voices, amplified by social media, set the tone. The “weirdos,” as he bluntly calls them, shape the culture of politics, while the broad middle retreats.

The result is a politics that rewards spectacle over seriousness, grievance over responsibility, performance over persuasion.

America is not held together by tribe or blood. We are what Sasse calls a credal nation. We are bound by a shared conviction that rights are not granted by government but are inherent; that government exists to secure those rights; and that even those with whom we disagree possess equal dignity. These are extraordinary claims in human history. They do not perpetuate themselves automatically — they must be deliberately transmitted from generation to generation.

For at least half a century, we have grown lax in that transmission. As we became wealthier and more comfortable, we assumed that prosperity would carry our civic culture forward. Meanwhile, the digital revolution accelerated our distraction. We read less. Our attention spans shrank. Deliberation — the patient weighing of competing claims — began to feel unnatural.

We are told that artificial intelligence and robotics will usher in unprecedented material abundance. But even if that’s true, abundance does not answer the question of purpose. The primary problem facing our society is not material scarcity but a deficit of civic virtue — self-restraint, truthfulness, neighbor-love, and civic responsibility — in a culture increasingly unsure of what freedom is for.

Markets are powerful engines of prosperity, and conservatives are right to defend them. But markets do not form character. They can generate wealth; they cannot generate wisdom. They do not teach children how to find purpose larger than self-interest. If freedom is understood merely as the absence of constraint, it collapses under the weight of abundance. Freedom must be ordered toward something: truth, responsibility, and the common good.

This is why we need a Republican Reset — here in the Bay Area and across the nation. If Republicans cannot articulate why freedom exists — if we reduce our message to tax rates, outrage, or anti-progressive reflex — we won’t get much of a hearing in deep blue places like the Bay Area and we’ll squander the opportunity to speak to people’s deeper longings.

When asked whether America is in irreversible decline, Sasse described our present turmoil as a “phase.” He compared it to the late nineteenth century, when industrialization and urbanization disrupted established patterns of life. Those decades were chaotic and disorienting — yet Americans built new institutions that allowed self-government to endure in a radically altered environment.

The digital revolution may be even more disruptive — the first truly intragenerational revolution in human history. What happens next depends on whether we are willing to rebuild institutions capable of sustaining deliberation, transmitting civic creed, and forming character in our present distracted age.

Here in the Bay Area, we are uniquely positioned to attempt this work.

We live at the epicenter of technological innovation. We see firsthand both the promise of abundance and the erosion of shared meaning. We are well-educated. We are home to thousands of immigrants who often grasp the promise and fragility of America more clearly than those of us who were born here. The Bay Area shapes the nation’s culture and economy. That gives us not just influence, but responsibility.

Back to our original question: Why are we here?

We are here to love and serve the people closest to us—our families, our neighbors, our communities—and to help sustain the institutions that make ordered liberty possible. We are here to discover and pursue what is good and true and beautiful, rather than settling for what is merely self-gratifying or profitable. We are here to do useful work for our communities and the wider world and to solve problems that burden our neighbors. We are here to nurture the next generation and transmit the credal commitments that make our nation possible.

Because self-government is not self-sustaining — it depends on the character of the people who practice it — we are here not simply to enjoy freedom, but to become the kind of people who are worthy of it.

Sasse ended his interview by reading from Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

“Ring out the grief that saps the mind…

Ring out the feud of rich and poor…

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand…”

Bay Area Republicans, let’s take a step back from the grievance and anger that dominates our politics today. Let’s ring out the narrowing lust for power and ring in a larger heart. Let’s build the relationships and find the language necessary to persuade our fellow citizens to embrace limited government that enforces the rule of law, safeguards equal rights, and then gets out of the way of families and communities doing the deeper work.

In this way, we’ll not only build a better political future for ourselves in this deep blue region, we’ll also help our fellow citizens rediscover what freedom is for.