An oil painting by Italian Baroque master Caravaggio shows the risen Christ guiding a man's hand into an open wound at his side, as two men look on with fascination. Only after putting his hand into Jesus's side does Saint Thomas believe what the apostles said about Jesus's resurrection. In a passage from Saint John's Gospel, Jesus says: "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."
This particular passage resonates with Ben Nelson, a conservative Democrat who served as governor of Nebraska from 1991 to 1999 before serving in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2013. It's a story about how people come to doubt things they cannot see. "We've become sophists," Nelson says from his Omaha home, "which is worse than skepticism." In his fine new book Death of the Senate: My Front Row Seat to the Demise of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (Potomac Books, 2021), Nelson situates the decline of bipartisanship within broader trends of declining trust in government, erosion of rules and norms, and perceptions of inauthenticity among a new generation of elected officials. The lack of authenticity seems to bother him the most. "People don’t want somebody playing a role," he says, going on to explain how creeping doubts in a politician's trustworthiness can undermine public confidence in the institutions that politicians lead. “We don’t have to keep changing our points of view.”
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