Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) speaks to the media during the weekly Senate Democratic leadership press conference, at the Capitol in Washington, November 7, 2023.
“I am very convinced that America is in the middle of a spiritual crisis,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told the Prospect over the phone. It was an unexpected entry point for him to explain the impetus for a new interview series the senator launched on social media earlier this month, focused on monopoly power and its various ills. The topics of the first three episodes—the merger between airline giants JetBlue and Spirit, and the monopolization cases against Google and Amazon—don’t exactly come off as matters for a theological seminary.
However, this unsecular turn in Murphy’s thinking is not entirely surprising if you’ve followed any of his speeches and signature policy issues over recent months.
To Murphy, the issue of corporate concentration runs deeper than just consumer pricing and equitable growth. It strikes at the core of why Americans feel powerless about the fate of the country. People have a palpable, though not always articulable, sense that the most crucial decisions governing their daily lives are now being made far away from their communities in corporate boardrooms, rather than by elected officials in the halls of government or by extension themselves. Many of the country’s morbid symptoms, in Murphy’s estimations, trace back to this friction between the public and their corporate overlords.
“The disease is a really deep, insidious one rooted in the fact that people feel like they have no control over their lives any longer … in politics we often treat the symptoms, not the disease, and that’s what I’m trying to address,” Murphy said, evoking themes akin to the “malaise speech” from President Jimmy Carter in 1979, who, ironically given the first episode of the series, actually deregulated the airlines, paving the way for today’s industry consolidation.
So far, he has held discussions with former Biden competition czar Tim Wu, airline expert William McGee, and Institute for Local Self-Reliance co-director Stacy Mitchell. The interview series is part of a political transformation Murphy has undergone recently, marking such a stark departure that it reads as though he himself is perhaps experiencing some kind of spiritual restlessness.
Since taking office in 2013, shortly after the Sandy Hook school shooting, Murphy has primarily championed gun control legislation and dovish foreign-policy views, fairly standard issues for a liberal senator. One reason for that is his committee assignments. He does not sit on the Judiciary or Banking Committees, which are more central in legislating matters involving corporate power. Most recently, he has helped lead negotiations with Republicans on a border security deal.
But his work of late is now colored with a recurring theme of the psychic damage to the country wrought by “forty years of neoliberal policies,” which he’s derided in numerous op-eds. “He’s really trying to rethink philosophy … and understand why everyone is so miserable,” said Matt Stoller, policy and research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, whom Murphy quotes in a Substack post introducing the interview series. “That led him to question neoliberalism, and then to center that questioning on monopoly and finance.”
OVER THE SUMMER, MURPHY RECEIVED NATIONAL ATTENTION, and raised a few eyebrows, for making a pilgrimage of sorts from his home state Connecticut to visit Boone, North Carolina, in the heart of Appalachia. The trip was meant to feature the core problems with neoliberalism that have left swaths of the country behind. Those include deindustrialization, business-friendly trade policies, declining unionization rates, and runaway poverty.
The trip also tied into another one of Murphy’s crusades against the “epidemic of loneliness” plaguing the country, which he believes appears in rising deaths of despair, drug addiction, and lower life expectancy. Murphy even thinks it’s one of the underlying factors fueling right-wing extremism, as some research suggests.
The senator’s adoption of a post-neoliberal school of thought maps alongside the Biden administration’s own break from the economic orthodoxy of previous decades, and readoption of New Deal–style spending programs, industrial policy, and antitrust enforcement.
But in certain key respects, Murphy has staked out more quixotic causes for a liberal senator, which has won him both praise and scorn. For one, he’s publicized frequent meetings that he’s held with religious leaders and bemoaned the collapse of churches as part of the fabric of local civic society—a critique that tends to emanate more from social conservatives.
To Murphy, the issue of corporate concentration strikes at the core of why Americans feel powerless about the fate of the country.
Murphy praised a new book, Of Boys and Men by the Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves, whose research examines why young men are falling behind in many metrics, such as higher-education rates and holding down steady employment. Though the book’s policy recommendations take a progressive bent, some commentators have pointed to the overlaps in the premise of the work with Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) new book, Manhood.
The horseshoe theory suspicions seemed to be validated when Sen. Murphy defended the viral hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond” by musician Oliver Anthony. Though Murphy explained that he didn’t care for the anti-tax and anti-welfare quips in the song, he believed it gave voice to justified anguish people felt, and anger about the failure of political leadership.
“Anthony sings about the soullessness of work, shit wages and the power of the elites. All problems the left has better solutions to than the right,” Murphy posted on X at the time. It “shows the path of realignment.”
As Murphy explains it, his diagnosis of the spiritual crisis is part of a broader shift to focus on winning back groups of voters that the party has lost, mainly working-class voters without college degrees.
His talk of “realignment” has picked up interest from populist figures on the Catholic right, such as Sohrab Ahmari, author of recent book Tyranny Inc., which offers a conservative critique of the free-market economic paradigm.
“I’m deeply impressed by him and his recent thinking on ‘de-alignment’ between Democrats and the working class,” Ahmari told me. “Of course there’s a link between how we structure economic power and how people feel spiritually and their sense of belonging.”
MURPHY SEES HIS INTERVIEW SERIES ON ANTITRUST as another path toward rethinking how the Democratic Party came up short with voters and can regain its footing. Murphy readily admits that just a few years ago he wouldn’t be focusing on this topic for a series.
“I was guilty of accepting this paradigm we were stuck in and in which we assumed we had to live with this massive concentration of corporate power,” said Murphy. “I had no living memory of government using its power to break up monopolies.”
Elected to the House in 2007 and the Senate in 2013, Murphy’s political career began amid a more lax stance from both the Bush and Obama administrations on antitrust enforcement, especially of Big Tech, which at the time was seen by most Democrats as partner in the march toward progress.
“When you make those first pilgrimages out to Silicon Valley, it’s easy to get sucked into the idea that they sell you that they are just working for the common good and don’t pay attention to how big we get, because in the end, we’re trying to solve the same problems you’re trying to solve,” Murphy said.
It wasn’t until the Biden administration’s executive order on competition, and enforcement actions by Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter, that the spell broke for Murphy.
In large part, the series, as Murphy describes it, is dedicated to shedding light on the work being done by Khan and Kanter at the FTC and DOJ to rein in corporate power. With ubiquitous products and platforms like Google, Amazon, and air travel, Murphy is focusing on monopoly issues that feel close to home for voters. He believes that the public’s lack of awareness of these antitrust actions has something to do with President Biden’s languishing approval rating and voter disenchantment about the state of the economy.
Murphy’s shift on antitrust speaks to a broader evolution that’s taken place in the Democratic Party under President Biden. But a total overhaul is not complete.
I pressed Murphy about why, despite executive actions, Democrats in Congress weren’t able to move forward in the last session on new antitrust legislation, such as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act or the Open App Markets Act, when they controlled both the House and Senate. He didn’t blame it on Senate Republicans or on party leadership, despite ample reporting that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was the main impediment holding up votes on both bills last year. His theory was more systemic, in opposition to colleagues like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who led the legislative push at the time and insisted that she had the votes.
“I think there is still a sizable portion of the Democratic Party that is sort of stuck in its addictions to neoliberal economics that concentrated and globally integrated markets can deliver prosperity. I still think this party has not made a firm break from neoliberalism,” said Murphy.
For his part, Murphy has not taken up a signature antitrust issue yet, but is more focused on highlighting where existing antitrust law can be enforced more stringently. In some key areas, his past policy work has some overlap with antitrust. A duopoly on gun ammunition production has corrosive effects on consumer access to firearms, as well as increasing costs for local and state governments forced to purchase from them to supply police forces. Consolidation in military suppliers has hollowed out the country’s defense industrial base.
“There is growing concentrated power in virtually every industry,” Murphy said. “So no matter what area of policy you care about you’re going to very quickly confront the impacts of that power on the market.”
