Opinion | The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses - The... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...chris-murphy-democrats.html
senator culture crisis US American idea reform ideological critique

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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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no statistics really capture the feeling, shared by growing numbers of Americans, that the world is just getting worse.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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?
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“Can you reform that system so much that it ceases to be that and starts to be something else?” Mr. Rhodes asked me. “Or does it have to be blown up?
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Many on the center-left worry that, absent a liberal vision for how this reform may work, Americans will opt to blow things up.
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He has worked with Republicans like Mr. Vance, who share much of his criticism of our current order, and he has pushed for Democrats to listen to, learn from and try to win over social conservatives with a “pro-family, pro-community program of economic nationalism.
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It has all rapidly built him into a singular figure in the party, someone who is being whispered about as a future presidential candidate.
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“The postwar neoliberal economic project is nearing its end, and the survival of American democracy relies on how we respond.”
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“What I discovered, much to my chagrin,” he told me when we met last fall in his Senate office, “was that the right — some really irresponsible corners of the right — were having a conversation about the spiritual state of America that was in ways much more relevant than conversations that were happening on the left.”
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I had written the piece because I was interested in critiques like those from New Right-ish thinkers like the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, who had been arguing that the story we often tell ourselves — of a society constantly getting better through an inexorable process of economic growth and technological advancement — was too simple and benefited the powerful corporations and political elites that profit most from the status quo.
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This story, they say, suggested that there was no possible alternative to the world where technological gadgets had colonized our brains and every aspect of our existence seemed to be reduced to a set of decisions determined by corporations in a market system. We were, after all, supposed to be richer and better off than any humans who lived before us. Why would anyone complain?
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He was worried that the New Right was offering two things mainstream Democrats were not: a politics that spoke directly to feelings of alienation from America as we know it today and a political vision of what a rupture with that system might look like.
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I recommended David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent best seller, “The Dawn of Everything,” which critiques the story of progress from the left, and Mr. Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed.”
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he began to engage with a small but increasingly influential political ecosystem of heterodox thinkers who write for magazines like the journal Compact or receive funding from networks like the Hewlett Foundation’s economy and society initiative, which advances a view that neoliberalism “has outlived its usefulness.
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Julius Krein, the founder of the quarterly American Affairs, which publishes the work of many figures on the New Righ
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the labor theorist Oren Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, who soured on pro-business policies and who has been the key figure in pushing Republicans toward a conservative vision of worker power.
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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
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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.
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“Talking openly about spiritualism is true to the best traditions of the left,” Mr. Murphy told me. “So there’s no reason why this conversation about the emotional state of America and the good life has to be a conversation that only the right has. Some of the left’s most inspiring leaders have talked in these terms. But I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that you first have to diagnose why people are feeling so shitty and to really understand what you need to do next.”
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he started a Substack. He began to post slightly searching thoughts on his journey and often drew bafflement or outrage from liberals who knew him best as a gun control advocate
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“The Reason to Care About the Plight of Men,” a piece he later told me his teenage son had warned him might be too edgy for prime time.
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He also published a piece he titled “What We Can Learn From Rich Men North of Richmond,” about the Oliver Anthony hit, arguing that the song resonated with more than just conservatives and that the left was making a mistake if it ignored the vein of alienation from and anger with the “new world” that Mr. Anthony sang about.
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Mr. Murphy’s program of “pro-family, pro-community economic nationalism” is less one of social welfare than an attempt to give regular people agency in the face of the supersized corporations he believes wield far too much influence today
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He calls for sectorwide collective bargaining of the kind that exists in some European countries, an expansion of antimonopoly efforts and something like a reimagining of our political value system: “We’re going to have to upset this cult of efficiency,” he told me recently, “establishing a clear preference for local ownership, local industry.”
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Last fall, after working on the issue with Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, Mr. Murphy introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, a bill to fight the epidemic of loneliness that he believes has been driven by the pervasive communications technology and malignant commercialization of American life.
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It’s hard to believe that even Mr. Murphy thinks that a metaphysical crisis can be meaningfully addressed with a few million dollars for research or directives to federal agencies to address loneliness.
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serve a calculated purpose: to push our politics toward a national discussion of the “emotional state of America” and to show that highly placed people in both parties are coming to believe that this presents a state of real crisis.
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he has tried to work with Republicans on immigration. He was the lead Democratic negotiator on the bipartisan immigration bill that came very close to passage in February
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Without much fanfare, the Biden administration has already embraced many of the policies Mr. Murphy is calling for: industrial policy, tariffs, a campaign against corporate monopolies
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His vision of economic nationalism can look very similar to the one offered by “America First” Republicans, but the specifics reveal very different priorities; Mr. Murphy supports far higher levels of immigration and paid family leave over the child tax credits increasingly favored by conservatives
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they have a common goal: to remake the incentive structure of our economy. “The core issue is that our economy became one based on extracting rents,” Mr. Krein told me, “rather than building things.” It rewards those who invent clever ways to squeeze money out of government and regular people
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This is the simple explanation for why so many jobs feel soulless and so many Americans feel harried and troubled amid the vast material wealth our country produces.
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“That’s what people are really complaining about when they talk about neoliberalism,” Mr. Krein said. “But that’s tough to fit on a bumper sticker.”
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“Great leaders tell stories that fit within the cultural and religious contexts of nations,” the Bay Area representative Ro Khanna told me. He helped write the CHIPS and Science Act, but he thought that the Demo
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“Politics is not just about policy,” he said. “It’s about the vision of a nation. It’s about signaling that we’re heading somewhere.”
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Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a vision for the future. It begins with plans to fire thousands of civil servants in an attempt to unmake the so-called administrative state, which they believe promotes liberal values and has enveloped America in bureaucracy. They seek to pull back from the internationalist foreign policy and free-trade policies that have guided both parties for decades. They hope to increase America’s birthrate and cut immigration and may pursue steps like reducing the value of the dollar, which they argue would help American-produced goods compete in an international marketplace
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the people there represented a decent cross-section of American political views, from people keeping the Sanders-style left-wing populist faith to centrist civil servants to more or less avowed reactionaries.
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All the attendees seemed to take for granted that the neoliberal era was nearing its endpoint — a fact notable only because it reflected a consensus that has still barely filtered into our mainstream political conversations.
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Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime chief White House strategist, late last year, he was very clear that he didn’t think Mr. Murphy’s vision went far enough. Mr. Bannon has frequently praised Mr. Khanna — jocularly accusing him of stealing “our” ideas in his proposals to rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity. But Mr. Bannon was savagely and profanely dismissive of Mr. Murphy
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“He has a very tough road ahead, and here’s why,” Mr. Bannon said. “There’s no audience for what he’s saying on the Democratic side. Democratic voters like the system.”
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Unlike many on both the right and left, he has shown little desire to unmake the complex military and financial systems that critics on both sides often describe as the American Empire.
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The trouble is that orienting the American economy back toward producing things and building a strong middle class may mean reassessing those old ideas and asking tough questions about whether we can afford to maintain our military might or continue financing the federal government with deb
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These are now common talking points on the right, and at a time when Mr. Trump and his allies hint at ideas like withdrawing from NATO and curtailing the independence of the Federal Reserve, even a critic of the globalized economic order like Mr. Murphy can end up looking like a milquetoast defender of the status quo.
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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
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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
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“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.”
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“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.”