This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
In one of his first news conferences as president in 1981, Ronald Reagan famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Today, a different phrase terrifies me whenever it’s uttered by pundits, strategists, or politicians playacting as pundit or strategist: “Here’s what the Democrats should do.”
Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America
By Chris Murphy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The constant public musing over how the Democratic Party should position itself on every issue, not as a matter of first principles but calibrated for mass acceptance from the small slice of swing voters believed to determine national elections, creates an overwhelming impression that the party and its leaders stand for nothing. It diminishes any role for politics other than market research and instructs the electorate that a politician’s views are forever up for grabs. And it misreads what Americans in the 21st century appear to want in their elected officials: some sense that they are human beings who believe in something, not poll-tested weather vanes.
Sen. Chris Murphy has served in public office for the entirety of this century, elected first to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1998 at the age of 25. He has lived through this era of many leading Democrats hewing their views to what they think can win the most votes, rather than what might help the most people. And judging from his new book Crisis of the Common Good, Murphy is sick of this perpetual self-doubt and wants to let people in on his belief system.
The book doesn’t open with a legislative fight or a congressional hearing, but with Murphy watching his son play youth hockey and hearing that he cannot record the game to show to other family members, because if he does, his son’s team will be penalized. Private equity–backed Black Bear Sports Group instituted the ban because it sells access to a subscription-based video service of every game for up to $50 a month. What concerns Murphy is this loss of control, much of it driven by corporate power, the same helplessness many of his constituents feel doing battle with modern life. You can see this in the historic recent drop in consumer sentiment to levels below the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, despite relatively low unemployment and, before the Strait of Hormuz crisis, only modestly elevated inflation. The only way to reconcile this is by understanding that it’s about more than high prices or insecure jobs: Americans have a pervasive sense that they are under siege and outgunned. Even youth sports have become a profit opportunity; proud parents have become disempowered by corporate forces that dictate the terms and structure of the marketplace.
There was once a time when our politicians reckoned with moral crises, and the moment appears ripe for a return to it.
Murphy describes this not just in economic terms but as a spiritual crisis. I take him to mean a collapse of moral authority. When things we once took for granted are commodified and when simple pleasures are limited to those who can afford them, we’ve diminished something decent and proper. When presidents solicit bribes with a meme coin and when lives are occupied with gambling instead of participating, we’ve lost something inside ourselves. When friendship is intermediated through social media and when civic pride is harder to muster amid homogenized, hollowed-out Main Streets, we grow lonely and alienated.
None of this sounds like a typical politician’s book, but the intellectual work of someone wrestling with why people are so stultifyingly unhappy today. This is not a book promising that economic growth will solve all ills: It directly calls out “false idols that … offered abundance but left us feeling empty.” There once was a time when our politicians reckoned with moral crises, and the moment appears ripe for a return to it.
MURPHY DRAWS ON THE WORK of philosophers, social scientists, health researchers, and his own reporting and personal experiences. He identifies six “cults” that he believes represent the greatest threat to an America he once knew. While there’s a tendency to lapse into nostalgia in the narrative—Murphy is careful not to wholly idealize the past, noting that Trump’s version of Make America Great Again longs for a “white, male-dominated order”—it’s hard to argue with his identification of society’s ills.
The Cult of Profit prioritizes corporate rewards above the needs of workers and the health, both literal and figurative, of communities. He uses the example of Broyhill, the mid-century furniture manufacturer that was a fixture in rural North Carolina, paying a living wage and giving the region an identity. The value proposition was that people would pay a little more for high-quality, durable products, and that this prosperity could be broadly shared. Big-box stores deserting quality suppliers for cheaper disposable goods made that bet impossible. Broyhill was sold in 1980, and investment firms engaged in familiar rounds of asset-stripping. Carolina pride and worker agency was lost in the bargain.
The Cult of Everywhere highlights the flattening of America and the erasure of local uniqueness. The nation’s landscape can often feel like the poorly rendered background of a video game, with the same four storefronts popping up over and over again. (I just spent some time in Omaha, Nebraska, parts of which have this desperately generic feel.) Murphy laments the loss of a market in his hometown of Wethersfield, Connecticut, where the shopkeeper would slice a thin cut of cheese as a free sample for kids. Vanishing Main Streets eliminates opportunities for shared activity and fellowship, but also it means wealth roams outside the community, leaving nobody with a stake in its future. As Murphy writes, the country has taken on a gated feel, with the rich reserved the best seats for the ball game or the shortest lines for the plane, taking painstaking steps to avoid overlapping with the rabble.
The Cult of Technology is about the isolating, atomizing power of the smartphone, social media, and AI, which has diminished human friendship, personal happiness, and even moral reasoning. Murphy is surprisingly candid here about “feeling isolated and increasingly guarded” from “years of being in the public eye, constantly watched and evaluated.” But he more deftly relates the retreat behind screens as antithetical to human survival instincts, which historically demanded cooperation and ingenuity.
The Cult of Consumption sublimates meaning in consumerism, as when George W. Bush told Americans the best thing they could do after 9/11 was to go shopping. Purchases can be undertaken for the collective good, like Liberty Bonds after World War I. But locating common cause in adding to a multinational corporation’s stock price feels hollow. The Cult of Credentialism focuses on how the growing requirement for a college degree in professions that don’t really need it breeds social resentment and widens an education divide that has become a political one.
Finally, the Cult of Corruption was once called the culture of corruption 20 years ago, when lobbyist Jack Abramoff pled guilty to bribing public officials. But it has accelerated in both the brazen self-dealing of the Trump regime and the more mundane debasement of the Democratic National Committee’s “call room,” where elected officials spend hours dialing for dollars, talking to millionaires about their money instead of talking to constituents about their needs. I don’t totally buy Murphy’s point that public admiration for business leaders has enabled their infiltration into politics and a winner-take-all mindset in public life, but the self-perpetuating influence of big money is undeniable. Here’s how Murphy describes the cycle: “Wealth purchases influence, influence shapes law, law generates wealth.”
The ethical dimension to Murphy’s narrative is apparent when he condemns prediction markets, which allow people to bet on tragedy and gamify misfortune. “When war and elections and famine become just another opportunity for enrichment,” he writes, “they lose their moral weight.”
THIS IS A CAMPAIGN BOOK for a possible 2028 contender, so Murphy does fill it with ideas for how to dismantle the six cults. There are some familiar proposals, like higher wages, unionization, stronger antitrust enforcement, accountability for social media, and public financing for campaigns. There are some not-so-familiar ones, too, like forcing higher corporate tax rates on dominant firms, or canceling private-sector concierges for the rich like the airport security facilitators at Clear, or establishing a Social Capital Fund to support community spaces that bind us together.
But the thought process that led to the policy menu is much more interesting. Murphy is interested in the part of our founding documents that declares a right to pursue happiness. He rightly sees government as having that obligation, not just by enabling financial success but by empowering social connection, community spirit, and psychic benefit.
Murphy is not the first politician to identify a country in a moral crisis. Jimmy Carter gave a whole angst-ridden speech about it in 1979, hoping to also shake the country out of a stupor and reunify around common principles. Amid an orgy of Washington corruption and a Middle East energy crisis, Carter went into isolation at Camp David and emerged to tell Americans about “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives” and “the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.” He criticized “self-indulgence and consumption,” and reported on “a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.” He recounted the damage of voter alienation, collapsed faith in institutions, and diminished expectations for the future. “This is not a message of happiness or reassurance,” Carter said, “but it is the truth and it is a warning.”
Sound familiar?
It’s been lost to history that the public greatly appreciated Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech. His approval ratings soared for a few days until he fired his entire cabinet and reinstituted the very doubts he attempted to remove. Moreover, Carter’s drive for deregulation and austerity showed that moral convictions do not always translate into sound policy or effective politics. Yet the parallels between Carter’s speech and Murphy’s book are clear: Both are reckonings with an undercurrent of anger, sadness, and missing hope. Both look to an idealized version of our past and speak to the need for renewal of purpose. Both respond to a nation in turmoil, rather than recede to comfortable terrain in Washington.
There is a massive deficit in moral leadership in this country. Carter’s victory in 1976 was predicated on a similar dejection among the population after Watergate. Between roving ICE kidnappings, war and brutality in the doomscroll, AI anxiety, and the sickness of for-profit health care, the public is stirring for someone to make sense of the maelstrom. Texas Senate candidate and Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, whose campaign stops have the feel of tent revivals, suffused with demands to make politics about helping our neighbors and protecting the downtrodden, wouldn’t have raised $27 million in a quarter if there wasn’t.
The deepened partisanship of the modern age could make this a tough sell. Sometimes, there are opportunities for consensus: Witness the Senate unanimously banning trading on prediction markets by members and staffs. But while Murphy takes pains to cite how Democrats and Republicans alike reject runaway profit-seeking, endless corruption, privatization, social media addiction, and empty consumerism, he’s been tripped up before in his search for common ground.
When Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” song went viral, echoing the immorality of predatory capitalism and the tyranny of the powerful, Murphy tried to show solidarity, posting on social media about the opportunity for realignment around fighting elite control. He was absolutely hammered, as liberals dismissed Anthony as a white supremacist and racist with no entry into a Democratic coalition.
Murphy thinks that’s a shame, that “we have blinded ourselves to the possibility of scrambling our politics.” But he gets a little more real shortly thereafter. “It is also not clear Democrats are fully committed to an agenda that breaks up corporate power … Wall Street interests, technology industry and university elites, and anonymous donors have all gained strong footholds in our party’s power structure.” He goes on to talk about how those interests seemed to be winning in 2024, when Kamala Harris’s donors urged her to dump former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan from a future administration. (There’s an amusing section of the book where Murphy goes to Silicon Valley and hears CEOs obsessed with Khan.) This lack of cohesion in the party about the nature of American crisis may be more critical than whether partisan divides can be bridged while trying to fix it.
But elsewhere, the yearning for something like the vision Murphy outlines is palpable. The greatest validation for his belief in returning to a moral politics was seen this winter in Minneapolis and Greater Minnesota, in blue bastions and red towns, where ordinary citizens put their bodies, their freedom, and even their lives on the line for their immigrant neighbors. They got groceries for those afraid to leave the house; they took in children when the parents were deported; they stood watch to protect people they didn’t know. They did it because they felt a responsibility to the residents of their community, and a belief that everyone matters. And this work gave them meaning and purpose.
It would be better if such a social transformation didn’t have to be forged while fighting one’s own government.
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
