Political Solutions for a Broken Nation

Hello, I'm Alyssa Adwarney and this is NPR's Book of the Day . So high gas prices and inflation have essentially wiped out any wage gains we everyday people in America have felt over the last year. I know, it's intense . Everything seems more expensive . And yet the company SpaceX just went public and a handful of people became millionaires in one day , I mean, that doesn't seem like a fair economic reality . So how did we get here? Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut writes about the policies he said created this unequal economy in his new book Crisis of the Common Good, the fight for meaning and connection in a broken America. He spoke with NPR's Leila Foddle about how destructive ideas are undermining American society and what he thinks the solutions are. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut believes there is a rot festering in the American soul , a quote, callousness towards our neighbors, a mefer selfishness, a relentless focus on getting mine, even if it leaves others behind. I think you see it in all sorts of ways , rising rates of self harm and suicide , rising rates of political violence, rising rates of addiction . But it all comes from a similar place. There are fewer and fewer people are who wake up every day knowing what their place is in the world, knowing what their purpose and their meaning is. In his new book titled Crisis of the Common Good, Senator Murphy argues that the country is in a spiritual unravel ing, worshiping prophet over people , and he wants the country to find its way back to a place of connection and common good. We've come under the spell of six cults in this country , the cult of profit, that we should only measure the economy based on how much profit companies make instead of how healthy their workforce is, the cult of consumption , that you're being a good American by buying stuff. Instead of your being a good American by giving back to your community, the cult of globalism, the idea that we should just be citizens of the world and that we should give up on local places being healthy and unique, the cult of technology , that technology is always going to be a net good. Social media is proof that there are many technologies out there that can be dangerous net negatives . The cult of credentialism, the idea that we've sorted this country into the haves and the have nots based on whether you have a college degree, and then the cult of corruption, the idea that if you win in our economy and you win in our politics, you should just take whatever is available to you. But when I look at these cults and I look at the solutions , they're really not right left solutions . And what this book is really about in the end is saying that if you really do a deep dive into what's making people feel so bad in this country, the solutions actually unite people . But it does feel almost polyannish in this moment, because Americans , when you talk to them, do feel so divided in a way that they didn't feel ten, twenty years ago , is it possible with the Washington that you're working in that you're trying to serve your constituents in . We have a sick country and Trump is the symptom of that sickness. And so what's most important is not that we beat Trump electorally, it's that we fix that spiritual rot. And I just see and maybe I'm too optimistic about this lots of opportunities for right and left to come together around addressing that spiritual rot . I just wonder as a politician , how much you see yourself, not you individually, but yourself and other politicians to blame for this moment and how much is it how the world is changing? Oh, I think I'm to blame . I think my colleagues are to blame. One of the things I talk about in this book is this revolutionary phrase in the Declaration of Independence that government exists to guarantee people the right to pursue happiness. We've made a lot of decisions in government to strip work of purpose and dignity and to make it a lot harder for people to find positive connections and friendships and relationships in their life. When I interview people in this country, they don't feel like anybody represents them really. We're close to another midterm . Does your party now have a message that will resonate? I mean, I worry that we have not learned the lessons from twenty twenty four . And that is that people are not interested in marginal incremental changes . They think that the culture, the economy , and the democracy is rigged . And they just don't believe that our solutions are big enough right now . Trump thinks about the emotional state of the country . The tariff message and the immigration messages are messages about power and control . They're hapless, irresponsible, ineffective policies , but he's speaking to people emotionally, these things that feel out of your control that I'm going to put back in our control . I want Democrats to think the same way about our message that we're going to talk to people about the way that they feel that low wages don't give them control of their life, how they have to make these awful choices between medicine and tuition . And that our answer, a big increase in the minimum wage is about making you feel powerful in your life again. When you say I want people to feel powerful , what is the Democrats' answer or your answer when people say how do I make sense of why things feel so bad? And how do I understand your solution ? So I'm not talking about copying Trump or learning from Trump, but it is just true that somebody is getting screwed in this country and somebody is doing the screwing . It's just not immigrants and Muslims and gay kids and drag shows . It's corporations and billionaires and super packs. So yeah, I think we have to be adversarial and pugilistic and confrontational in our politics as Democrats, and we just are going to pick the right targets rather than the convenient and wrong targets as Trump chooses . I wondered as you wrote this in this moment, why you felt you wanted this out in the world now . So you could have written one term of Donald Trump off as an anomaly , but the second time around everybody knew who he was. And I think we'd just be so foolish to think that we can move on as a country by just winning another election . I think we'd make such a mistake if we didn't as a country think hard about what is broken in America and how both parties contributed to breaking a country that used to care more about the we than the me . And I wanted to spell out why we're stuck with Trump. It's not just because he's a good politician, it's because there's some broken things in the country. But I also wanted to spell out a path forward to repair from that brokenness that is actually a potential for unity and not a prescription for just continuing this right left fight, but on a different set of issues . Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, he's the author of Crisis of the Common Good, The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. Thank you for your time. Thanks for having me.