ICYMI: The New York Times - The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses
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August 20, 2024
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The New York Times - The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses
By James Pogue
August 19, 2024
In December 2022, early into what he now describes as his political journey, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a speech warning his fellow Democrats that they were ignoring a crisis staring them in the face.
For over a year, President Biden and his allies had been promoting data showing an economic miracle, as friendly pundits described it — a record-setting stock market, low unemployment and G.D.P. growth outpacing that of almost every other Western nation. But very few voters believed the story those metrics were telling. In poll after poll, they expressed a bleak view of the economy — to the frustration of both Democrats and many economists.
Mr. Murphy thought he knew why. “The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical,” he told the crowd. “They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.”
[…] As the Democrats gather for their national convention this week, with Kamala Harris as their candidate for president, the party has a long way to go toward confronting the crisis Mr. Murphy sees.
America’s leaders — from both parties — have long been guided by what’s often called the neoliberal consensus: the idea that “barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation and empowered citizen-consumers would be the keys to prosperity, happiness and strong democracy,” as Mr. Murphy put it. More simply, it’s a shared assumption that what’s good for markets is good for society.
This assumption shapes our politics so deeply that it’s almost invisible. But the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel. You can look at statistics about suicide, depression, overdoses and declining life expectancy. You can point to the fact that roughly 70 percent of wild animals on Earth have disappeared since 1970 or examine the astonishingly pervasive sense of loneliness that now seems to color so many American lives. But no statistics really capture the feeling, shared by growing numbers of Americans, that the world is just getting worse.
[…] It’s a “metaphysical” problem, as Mr. Murphy put it. And he began to think that the economic metrics used by economists and presidents to capture the state of the nation were masking a vast “spiritual crisis.”
He didn’t know it then, but he was homing in on a problem that Democrats have yet to figure out how to address. Donald Trump and the movement around him have tapped into a sense of deep alienation and national malaise. Democrats often have trouble even acknowledging those feelings are real.
[…] Academics, think tanks and magazines are buzzing with conversations about how to undo the damage wrought by half a century of misguided economic policies. On the right, that debate has already spilled out into the public view. But on the center-left, at least, very few politicians seem to be aware of this conversation — or at least willing to talk about it in front of voters.
Mr. Murphy has been warning for years that by failing to offer a clear vision of the future, Democrats risk losing to a “postdemocracy” Republican Party that might rig the electoral system “in order to make sure Democrats never win again.” His warnings may sound out of place with the sudden mood shift in the party over the past few weeks. But behind the scenes, he is far from the only Democrat raising these concerns. Just a few days before the convention, Mr. Murphy’s good friend Ben Rhodes, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told me that in the age of Mr. Trump, Democrats have found themselves in a “trap”: How can they present themselves as the party of fundamental change when they spent the past eight years arguing that America’s institutions need to be shored up against the urgent threat of Trumpism?
In October 2022, three months after we first talked, Mr. Murphy emailed me a piece he’d just written for The Atlantic, titled “The Wreckage of Neoliberalism.” He said it was going to be the start of a public push to advance his new line of thinking. He argued that Democrats, facing the possibility of a “postdemocracy” Republican Party seizing the levers of state after the 2024 election, risked political extinction if they waved away the deep sense of malaise and resentment that brought Mr. Trump to power the first time. Mr. Murphy described a program of “a pro-family platform of economic nationalism salted with a bit of healthy tech skepticism” and offered it as a salve for a deeper crisis of meaning and belief in our national project.
[…] I asked Mr. Murphy if I was right that his aim really was to unmake the neoliberal system as we knew it. “You are,” he said. He anticipated my next question, about whether it would ever be possible to translate this kind of big-picture conversation to mainstream politics. I mentioned that I’d seen brutal responses to his testing posts online. “I get a lot of pushback from the left, as you’ve seen,” he said, “and I get a lot of it privately as well.”
As if anticipating the Harris/Trump race, he described an electoral landscape where Democratic candidates who won a majority of the popular vote might still lose the presidency if they couldn’t win states in the Upper Midwest. “I think that our coalition is bound to lose if we don’t find a way to reach out to some element of the folks who have been hoodwinked by Donald Trump. We don’t have to win over 25 percent of his voters. We have to win 5 or 10 percent of his voters. I’m just fed up with the political people who say, ‘Why is this going to be bad for us, as the left?’ I’m engaged in a bigger project,” Mr. Murphy said. “I think that we are more likely to protect a woman’s right to choose if we win bigger majorities and expand our coalition a little bit by bringing in people who might occasionally disagree with us on social issues but prioritize our agreement on anti-neoliberalism issues.”
We went out for drinks that evening. The conversation got looser. A beer or two in, I asked him if, given the program of economic nationalism he’d proposed, he considered himself an American nationalist. He demurred. “But I do believe,” he said, “that we have to tell a story about what makes America different. To make people proud of being American. And make them believe that that identity is more important than their individual political identity.”
It was on some level a question that went to the heart of his project and the issue of how it differed from the plans emerging on the right. “We have to build a uniquely American economy,” he said. “We have to convince people that there is a uniquely American identity while understanding that there are still important moments where you have to engage the rest of the world. That’s not a bumper sticker.” He paused. “That’s what makes this project really hard.”
Read the full story HERE.
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