Chris Murphy has built a reputation on his ability to make policy on the most emotionally fraught issues in America, from gun safety (where he managed to get a law passed for the first time in three decades) to the border crisis (where he got a bipartisan committee to agree on a bill, only to see it fall apart after Trump pressured the party).

He’s also someone who thinks deeply about the background conditions of American life, as with his book from some years ago on the role of violence in American life. Rare among American politicians, he has an ability to be both in the arena and up in the stands, observing the whole scene.

Lately, he’s been thinking about something that we have, too: the role of emotion in the fraught political life of America in 2024. It is an anxious, fearful, tumultuous period in the country’s history. We’ve been arguing in this newsletter than the political left needs to take emotional appeal more seriously. And Murphy has been thinking along similar lines.

We talked to him just after he’d finished work on the 2024 edition of the World Happiness Report, a process that got him to recognize how the country’s democratic crisis is rooted in deep emotional distress.

We believe Democratic leaders have failed to help Americans cope with the crisis of anxiety and unhappiness they face in a transformed world — and this failure of change management has had dire political consequences.

When we see people unsettled by it, discombobulated, a lot of them are just trying to get their heads around all that a new era is asking of them. And the authoritarians are getting to them earlier and more effectively than pro-democratic movements. And so people who start out as merely disoriented by change are radicalized into fanatics.

Murphy says that Democrats simply cannot leave emotion to the Republicans — it just plays directly into a classic authoritarian strategy. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has told us:

Autocrats are very, very good at tapping into people's innermost fears. On the one hand, they make themselves the carriers of those fears, but they also make themselves the solution. So when Trump said, The American dream is dead, he made himself the vessel of the forgotten, the people who felt downtrodden. Of course, his regard for them is fake. He just wants to use them. But he simulated care and inhabited those emotions, and then provided a solution: “I alone can fix it.” And people felt safe with him. .

Below, Senator Murphy tells us not just about his work on the border crisis, or about how the presidential campaign should be messaging, or even about how Republicans have been able to soothe people’s fears where Democrats have failed, but also about what he’s trying to do now to provide an alternative to right-wing social and political offerings — before it’s too late.

“You don’t solve a crisis of meaning and purpose by just giving people a little bit bigger tax credit,” he told us.

I want to start with what you’ve said about happiness. Can you expand on your notion that the government you are part of is culpable for inhibiting people's happiness, or at least for not making happiness probable?

It’s important to remember that the government’s responsibility to protect your right to happiness is in our founding document. So this is a legitimate conversation — our founders thought this was an essential conversation. Government stays out of what you’re passionate about, who you connect with, where your purpose and meaning come from. But we are responsible for setting the rules of society and culture and economy that give you a chance at happiness.

The studies on what brings happiness don’t surprise anybody. What people want is connection and positive relationships and agency and power over their lives. They feel like they have less chance of connection today, and they certainly feel like they have much less agency over their economic lives. And there are public policy choices we’ve made that have robbed people of connection and power.

It’s our decision not to regulate social media; our decision to hollow out unique local places; it’s our decision to force people to work longer, eroding leisure time, that leads people to lives of isolation. It’s our decision to look the other way at monopoly power, our decision to let costs rise for families while wages are flat, that erodes people’s sense of economic agency. 

You can’t be happy if you don't have friends and connections. You can’t be happy if you don’t feel like you have control over your life. And to the extent people feel more isolated and less in control of their lives today, there are direct lines from government policies to the ways that people feel like happiness is further away.

I don’t want to let the Republicans off the hook here, but in a way it’s very obvious to me, and I think to a lot of people reading this, what the Republican culpability is in everything you just said. But what are Democrats missing in the approach they’ve been taking over the years?

I think Democrats got captured by a neoliberal vision of the future in which we would all become part of this one big common global thing. And that the technology elites would take care of the rough edges by themselves. We were wrong. It’s really important to have a truly domestic industrial economy. It’s important to have places that feel different than other places. And technology needs to be regulated. The elites don’t have our best interests in mind.

More broadly, we are all guided by what we measure. And when we measure public policy success, we generally look at unemployment rates and GDP and inflation and crime. None of those have anything to do with connection. Very few of them have anything to really do with granular-level economic power. And so I just think it’s time that we start accepting that the ways that we measure the success of our public policy are pretty disconnected from the ways that people actually measure their own happiness and success.

What’s the application of what you're saying to what a campaign could look like? What would you like the president to invite people to do to connect with each other in service of saving democracy, beyond just saving democracy by voting for him?

I think we’ve reached a tipping point of exhaustion with an American society that has become hyper-focused on individual success and treats human beings as consumers instead of citizens. We are not a common-good society any longer. We are a kill-and-eat-what-you-can society. It’s been a gradual process, but I think we have reached a point where folks want something different.

Leaders should be talking about this sense of exhaustion that Americans have. I think we should be asking everybody in this country to think about how we rebuild connections to each other, how we rebuild a sense of the common good. And I think people will eat that up right now. It feels a little cold when all we talk about is dialing the knobs of existing public policy one direction or the other.

Yes, people want lower prescription drug prices. The polls tell you that they want the government to negotiate directly with Medicare, but that doesn’t address the spiritual crisis people are feeling today. And I think the best progressive leaders have talked in spiritual terms, have talked about meaning and purpose and connection. I think we’re not as good as we used to be about talking in those terms and asking people to do something for themselves when it comes to rebuilding bonds and reinvesting in communities.

All that being said, Joe Biden is still one of the few that can talk in terms that relate to the kitchen-table conversations that people are having about topics like how isolated and lonely their kids are today. So if there’s anybody in the upper echelons of progressive politics who can talk this game of meaning and purpose and connection, it’s Joe Biden.

Do you have the policy levers you need? If I were to tell you to go provide health insurance to 10 million more people, you could draft that in five minutes. You know exactly what levers you could pull to do that. To create 10 million more social connections, do you have policy levers in mind that could make that happen?

Yes and no. I do think we need to realize the limitations of government policy when it comes to rebuilding social connection. I think there’s been a cultural movement in this country since the 1980s away from an investment in the common good and towards a winner-take-all ethos.

I worry sometimes that I'm over-hyping the damage that’s been done in this country by social media, but then I check myself because I think it’s hard to over-hype. I think if you just turned off these algorithms for kids and gave them a shot at getting off of their screens and made it less likely that they would show up at adulthood with a built-in addiction to technology, you’d have a better shot at more connection, more leisure time. There's a crisis in leisure time today.

Do you think there’s a case that — given the terms in which you described it — just as we don't allow alcohol consumption below a certain age, or we don’t allow tobacco consumption below a certain age, should we not allow social media consumption at all below a certain age?

I think the harm of TikTok is comparable to the harm of cigarettes. You can, after registering a TikTok account, within five minutes be getting fed information on how to kill yourself. That is horrifying. So I think you start with just dramatically changing what these sites look like to kids. 

My proposal is that you do not allow for the information of kids to be used to create a recommendation algorithm. That would fundamentally change the nature of all these sites for kids, because now all they could get would be channels that would not be curated for them. That, essentially, is a ban on social media for kids, at least when it comes to the most essential function of social media, which is the algorithm.

Are the platforms just too powerful to ban outright for kids, or do you think it would be a bad idea to ban them outright for kids?

I think that it gets difficult politically and logistically to decide exactly which sites are banned and which aren’t. It’s easier to ban a certain technology than it is to ban access to certain websites or certain applications.

I want to switch to the border, given the doggedness with which you worked on the deal and the sense that maybe compromise was possible. I wonder, when you look back now, do you think it was a mistake to assume good faith from Republicans on that issue or any issue?

I’ve got the same answer as before: yes and no. Yes, I thought we could get a deal. I thought we could get a deal on Sunday afternoon before the bill was dropped, and within four hours everybody had run for the hills. So I was wrong. I thought just enough Republicans would be sincere. Some pretty serious Republicans and the Senate Republican Caucus told me that notwithstanding Trump’s opposition, they would be for the bill and whip the bill, and by Monday morning, none of them were returning our calls.

Why I caveat my answer is that there is a pretty important silver lining to all of this: we've exposed what the Republicans’ actual position is on the border. They don’t want to solve the problem, they want to keep the border a mess. They don’t give a shit about the crisis, except to use it as a political wedge. And we’ve never really had the opportunity to show that for sure. But when you negotiate a comprehensive immigration and border reform bill with one of the most conservative senators on the border and all of his colleagues vote no, it allows Democrats to, for the first time in decades, have proof of concept when it comes to Republicans’ hypocrisy on the border.

I’m always interested in what makes an issue really salient or explosive to people, and not just interesting to party elites. The country is so full of anxiety right now, and the border issue seems to be part of that. There’s just this very visceral sense of anxiety that people are feeling, and fear people are feeling. People thousands of miles away, people who are not materially touched by it. How do you think this connects to some of the larger questions around disconnection and loneliness and happiness in the country?

It won’t surprise you to know that I'm writing something on this right now because I’ve really given a lot of thought to this question, and I’m trying to work through it, because I believe there is a connection. 

Here’s what I've come up with: I think there are just a lot of people in crisis today, in spiritual crisis and economic crisis. And when you’re in crisis, you are open to messages of blame and scapegoating and division. And so when you’re told that you should be fearful, or have animus towards immigrants, it hits a little different when you’re already in crisis.

But I think there’s another element here. Americans look at the people who are coming into the country, getting to stay for 10 years, even though they don't have a valid claim of asylum. And it looks like a massive evasion of the rules. It looks like people are skipping the line, and when Americans feel like they’ve been standing in line and never reaching the front, and then they see others who appear to be skipping the line and going around the system of rules, it makes them really angry. And I understand that anger — that’s a legitimate anger.

And so for a lot of Americans, they just don’t have the patience and the tolerance for a massive evasion of the rules, especially if they feel like they’ve been playing by the rules and not getting a benefit. And I think that it was easier to look the other way when there were 500 or 1,000 people a day crossing. It’s really hard to look the other way when it’s 10,000 people a day. And, again, some of those people do have legitimate asylum claims, but most of them don’t. And it’s OK for Democrats to acknowledge that most of the people coming across the border don’t have a legal claim to stay in the United States. And I think we were mistakenly reluctant to acknowledge that for a very long time.

First of all, I’m very glad you're writing something about the role of inner life in these political fights, because I think it’s the core issue, this notion of a kind of background crisis that people are in on this deeper level — it’s one of my obsessions, it’s one of the things this newsletter has been very consumed by. And I think we’re all chasing these individual issues instead of noticing the state people are in as the basic fact of our politics right now.

But when I think about the Democratic agenda, it is very materially oriented. It’s all stuff that would probably have a significant effect on the crisis you’re talking about, but if you’re right, it seems like there would be an entirely different or additional way for the Democratic Party to show up in the conversation, to show up in people’s lives, to show up in terms of organizing. I’m going to press you to be really real here. What is your party not doing correctly now if you’re right about the emotional state of the country?

You’re speaking my language. So this is the project that I had started last year and I’m going to try to pick back up after having taken a big detour on border and immigration policy. I mean, listen, material success matters, but all the longitudinal studies on happiness tell us that it’s not what matters most. What matters most is people’s sense of connection to others and their sense of meaning and purpose in the world. And you don’t solve a crisis of meaning and purpose by just giving people a little bit bigger tax credit.

So, listen, I’m for lowering the cost for drugs, and I’m for the child tax credit, but we need to be talking about the actual crises of purpose and meaning that are happening in this country. That means talking about really hard issues like masculinity and why so many men are feeling like they are lost. That means a really hard, tough critique of globalism and being very open and vocal about our desire to rebuild healthy small cities and healthy small towns. That means talking about power and not being afraid to name the people who have screwed us, the corporations and the billionaires.

Republicans are doing a better job at diagnosing the metaphysical state of the country and tailoring policies to meet it, and I’ll give you an example.

Democrats broadly scoffed at the Republican parental rights effort. It looked so silly, giving parents the right to choose the books in the library or the principal of their school. We wrote it off as really hateful, naive bigotry. But Republicans realized parents are feeling a crisis of control right now. They feel out of control of their kids’ lives for a whole host of reasons. And so anybody that’s going to put parents in a position where they can make more decisions about their kids’ lives is going to find a lot of people willing to listen. And so that’s part of the reason why I think we need to be super bold about giving parents control over kids’ social media lives.

So I want to ban the algorithm, but I also want to have parental consent for any kid who wants to get on social media under 18, and I think we need to be really loud about that because parents are feeling a certain way, and a child tax credit is not the answer to solve the emotional crisis that they’re in. It’s part of the answer, because part of the crisis they’re in is a feeling of economic powerlessness, but they want actual tools that give them more decisions over their kids’ lives. Republicans have been offering them, and by and large Democrats have not.

I don’t want to understate the radicalness of what you’re suggesting — this would be a party that has a completely different kind of approach to how it speaks to people in this age, because of a very different diagnosis than the prevailing one?

I got into this conversation through a few different routes, but one of them was a real deep dive in some super dangerous New Right literature. And you’ve probably looked at a lot of this stuff coming out of Claremont, coming out of Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen and others that sit in between those two extremes in the new right. But the new — and largely young — right is in a conversation about consumerism and meaning and identity. They end up in super-dangerous places, which basically amount to a reversion to 1950s patriarchy. But they’re at least attempting to connect to the spiritual conversation that families are having.

So that’s in part why I started to think about this, because I saw the danger of letting Jordan Peterson be the only person that was saying something that connected with men’s sense of broken identity. 

There need to be corollaries on the left. And I’m not close to there, I’ve got a bunch of partners now that are working and thinking on it with me, but I think it’s a really important conversation, and I think it’s a bit of a red alert moment, because this spiritual crisis is a threat to democracy. And Republicans’ ability to capture the answers before we do, especially when those answers are really dangerous, is just as worrying.