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.
The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.” This may sound like strange talk from a middle-of-the-road Democratic senator, who up until that point had never seemed to believe that the system that orders our world was on the verge of falling. He campaigned for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primaries, and his most visible political stance up until then was his work on gun control after the Sandy Hook shooting.
Thoughtful but prone to speaking in talking points, he still comes off more like a polished Connecticut dad than a champion of the disaffected. But Mr. Murphy was then in the full flush of discovering a new way of understanding the state of the nation, and it had set him on a journey that even he has struggled sometimes to describe: to understand how the version of liberalism we’d adopted — defined by its emphasis on free markets, globalization and consumer choice — had begun to feel to many like a dead end and to come up with a new vision for the Democratic Party.
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Mr. Murphy is a team player and has publicly been fully supportive of Ms. Harris, but he also wants Democrats to squarely acknowledge the crisis he believes the country is facing and to offer a vision to unmake the “massive concentration of corporate power” that he thinks is the source of these feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Only by offering a “firm break” with the past, he believes, can Democrats compete with Republicans like JD Vance, who, with outlines like Project 2025, have a plan to remake American statecraft in their image and who are campaigning on a decisive break with the status quo.
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.
The piece was noticeably short on specifics of how he hoped to reshape our economy. He still doesn’t seem very clear on the subject
you first have to diagnose why people are feeling so shitty and to really understand what you need to do next.
Balance needs to be returned to the economy. Reagonomics is a disaster, and trickle-down sounds like being pissed on for a reason. In the 60s a sole middle class breadwinner afforded a nice house and supported a family of 4. Kids today are lucky if they can afford to live on their own. You need a dual income now to afford kids comfortably and good luck with a mortgage. Building equity? That is for boomers.
Tax the rich. Tax corporations till they bleed, and cut taxes too the middle class and poor. Legislate actual worker rights and social benefits that are well funded to give people a chance again.
The wealthy have been squeezing the life out of America and while receiving Government subsidies to do it.
One thing that has started bugging me this election cycle is the term “middle class.” I feel stupid for not realizing it sooner, but your point about a single earner supporting a whole family with a house and 2.5 kids and usually 2 cars is incredibly important.
Is there a meaningfully large middle class in America any more, at least in those terms? I know people who manage to fund a whole household on their salary alone but those are low-ish 6-figure salaries (~$170k). Even then, a few curveballs come in and suddenly they’re screwed.
We need to recouple the productivity of the American worker with their income. We need more and stronger unions. We need to abolish so called “right to work” laws. We need to override Citizens United. We need to break up these huge monopolies & oligopolies.
We can do some of that if we elect Harris/Walz.
We desperately need some trust busting too.
Is there a meaningfully large middle class in America any more, at least in those terms? I know people who manage to fund a whole household on their salary alone but those are low-ish 6-figure salaries (~$170k). Even then, a few curveballs come in and suddenly they’re screwed.
No, there really isn’t. People who would have been middle class in the 60s are now squarely lower middle class or outright poor. The only people who can still be considered Middle class are what we previously would have referred to as Upper Middle Class, eg: the professional class with mostly advanced degrees.
You can cheat somewhat by being a DINK couple but you’re still restricted to House or Kids (pick one) and pray you don’t develop a chronic health condition.
Wall St going all in on buying homes certainly isn’t helping either, many DINK couples can’t afford a house in the higher CoL areas where salaries would have been high enough for them to previously.
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It led him to seek out and engage with a roster of heterodox and conservative thinkers many liberals regard with distrust or even loathing. 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.” It has all rapidly built him into a singular figure in the party, someone who is being whispered about as a future presidential candidate.
Oh my fucking god, the New York Times opinion writers are never going to stop calling for the next great moderate. If these whispers even exist they’re the most discrete and quiet whispers ever. No one is talking about Chris Murphy as a presidential hopeful, and even when writing to a topic of people-focused economic populism, they still treat the only credible source of inspiration as conservatives. “The Democrats’ risk from neoliberal economics is that they haven’t been listening to conservatives enough!”
Mr. Murphy was coming fresh to these questions and exuded the excitement of a college student discovering a line of thought that suddenly seemed to explain the whole world. 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.
The absolute only reason a senator from Connecticut, a state a stones throw from where Occupy Wall Street happened and from the tiny part of the country that elects both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would need to be inspired by the New Right is that his politics is doggedly devoted to suppressing the left. This isn’t a “spiritual problem”, it’s an economic one, and people on the left have been talking about it for years. Maybe instead of trying to make mainstream Democrats more like alt-right conservatives, he should actually think about just moving the mainstream left. The progressives have been presenting critiques and solutions for years now and the main reason they haven’t been able to get any traction is people like Senator Murphy.
Yeah what the fuck
I actually came here (without reading the article! It is NYT it’s not my fault) to say hey it would have been nice for you to have noticed this in like 1995 but I’ll take it, it is still an unusual POV in Washington and that is absolutely fueling a certain level of rebellion against the entire system as a whole
But if NYT is just trying to hijack populism to drive some new kind of bad faith conservative bullshit and say that Sanders and Warren need to get with this guy then as always fuck 'em
Nailed it.
Democrats to listen to, learn from and try to win over social conservatives with a “pro-family, pro-community program of economic nationalism.” It has all rapidly built him into a singular figure in the party, someone who is being whispered about as a future presidential candidate
“What would really help Democrats win is if they were Republicans!”
Yeah… No thanks.
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.
Well, if vocally campaigning to make shit much worse qualifies as “spilled out into the public view”, then yeah I guess it has
Un-paywalled, archived link: https://archive.ph/3x5lj
