Gabfest Reads | Why America Is Spiritually Broken and How to Fix It

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One purchased equals one donated over 200 million donations in counting. Head over to bombath.com slash political and use code political for 20% off your first purchase. That's BOMBAS.com slash political code political at checkout. Hello and welcome to GabFest Reads for the month of June 2026. I'm Emily Bazlon, one of the hosts of the Slate Political GabFest. This month, our episode is about the new book, Crisis of the Common Good, the fight for meaning and connection in a broken America. The author of the book is Senator Chris Murphy, who is the Democratic senator from Connecticut,

which means he's one of my two senators. And the Connecticut bookstore RJ Julia asked me to interview Senator Murphy recently at the Omni Hotel in New Haven. And we thought GapFest listeners would enjoy this conversation, which is very much about Chris Murphy's new book. not such a typical book for a politician to write. And here's my conversation with him.

Thank you all so much for being here. Sandra Murphy is such a pleasure to get to ask you some questions about this extremely thoughtful, terrific book. I'm going to start asking you why you wrote this book. Hard to write a book as a senator. Yeah, it's a good question to start. Somebody said in an interview that I was doing on one of these podcasts this last week about the book, that this was a really odd book for a politician

to write because it isn't about the what, right? It's not really a book that describes in detail the current political moment. It's not about who. It's not a book about me. It's not a memoir. It's a book about why. It's a book that I thought was important for somebody, me to write to try to explain why we have arrived at this moment where we have this reckless, racist, divisive president, even when people knew exactly who he was when he ran for a second time. It's definitely a product of my own experiences, as I've watched a country kind of spiritually unspool over the last several decades, a country that just feels. feels like it's coming apart a little bit.

Folks have less connection to the community. Data tells you there's a lot less friendship today. People feel like they have less meaning and purpose in their lives. And it certainly is a product of my own experiences. First, my experience as a father. I've got two teenagers, and I'm watching this generation just spiral into lives of isolation. I'm watching them worry about what will be their purpose in the world as machines start to fill all the functions that humans did. I was there on January 6th. I was there when a

bloodied Capitol police officer rushed into the chamber and told us we all had to run for our lives, essentially. And it made me, of course, wonder about why there were thousands of people who were so desperate in their circumstances that they were willing to engage in an act of violence, perhaps murder, because of that desperation. I thought there must be a whole lot of lonely people in that mob, and why did we get to this point? And then, of course, as all of you know, I've spent the last 10 years of my life inside the gun violence epidemic here in Connecticut and across the country, and a lot of time spent with those families, but a lot of time thinking about the people who pulled the trigger, people who had also become unmoored from a spiritual center who had lost meaning in their lives,

and it ended up in lethal violence. And so I wrote the book because I, as I say in the book, and this might sound controversial, I believe that Trump is not necessarily the primary cause of our spiritual unspool. he is the primary symptom of that unspooling and that I worry that we will come to believe that just by winning an election beating his party or him, that we will solve all of our problems. And what this book does is, I think, give you a language for something that you have been feeling for a long time, that Trump is a symptom of a country that just cares less about each other. that it lives in a culture that is bathed in a me-first individualism, that communitarianism, neighborliness matters less. Our culture is colder. Our economy is more extractive than ever before, and it leaves people feeling really unhappy. And when people

don't have purpose and they're unhappy and they're lonely, that's when demagogues have an opportunity to come in and play the politics of scapegoating. So the book is really derived from my own experience, my belief that we would be oversimplifying the moment if we just focused on the president. And it's my attempt to try to, I guess, raise the volume on the work that we have to do, not just in our politics, but in our culture and in our economy. In the end, as we'll talk about it, it's a hopeful book because it's got this dire word in the title, crisis. But the book says that actually there's a real opportunity for a coming together in this country if we really think about the reasons the country is more unhappy today than it has been in

the past. Right. If you use crisis in your title, then you have to come up with a solution at the end of the book and we will get there. I wanted to ask you about how the walk across the state that you take influence the writing of this book. That's something. something that gives you, I'm sure, a more personal sense of people's perspectives in Connecticut, a sense of the size and shape of the state. And some of their stories are in the book and seem important to the points you wanted to illuminate. Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, my favorite, you know, week of the year in terms of my career, I walk the length of the state, as most of you know, for a week a year. When I started out doing this 10 years ago, I walked east-west, which is about,

you know, 110 miles. And then during the pandemic, I had two titanium screws put in my knee. And now I go north-south, which is, you know, depending on the route, it's still 70 miles. But I am learning to take care of myself in my older age. But yes, it is and has been this moment where I encounter this, you know, this real metaphysical crisis in the country. Probably the longest story I tell in the book from the walk is about this guy, I met Izzy a couple years ago on the walk in Willamannock, Connecticut. He was coming out of a liquor store. It was a ritual that he engaged in every single day, walking to this liquor store on Main Street in Willamannock, buying a six-pack, and then walking back home. And Izzy, you know, was kind enough to...

walk with me for 15, 20 minutes and tell me his life story. And Izzy's life story won't be unfamiliar to you. He had a hard early life. His wife died relatively young. He was living in New York. He came back to Connecticut where he had family. And he went to work for a iconic American company named Walmart. And he was proud of the work that he did at Walmart. He liked helping people every day find what they needed. And he did that work for almost 20 years, working. full-time and overtime giving himself to that company. But he never made more than just a tiny bit over minimum wage when unions tried to organize at Walmart. Walmart destroyed those unions. When Izzy retired, he had nothing, nothing saved. Even though he had played by the rules, he had done everything

that society had asked him to do. And what he found in retirement is that as he described to me, he didn't feel like he was even living a human life. He was not able to make ends meet any week. He couldn't afford a place of his own, so he was living with two strangers in a tiny little apartment, sharing a room. He had few friends because he had worked so many hours, had not been able to join institutions in his community

during his working life. And he just didn't understand why this company that he had cared so much about didn't care about him at all. Why the economy and the culture was structured in a way to just take from him and give nothing back. He felt like there was no net when he fell after he stopped working. And he was just exhausted and angry about it all. How did we construct a country that cared so little about him in which people were doing so well at the top of the economy, and people like him who deserve to be doing better weren't.

And that exhaustion that you felt in Izzy's voice, I mean, literally I described the tears welling up in his eyes when he described his living situation, you know, just made me realize that it shouldn't be such a surprise that we have higher rates of political instability, higher rates of self-harm, that we have chosen to do this to people, and that it is just a choice, and that we could make a different choice. One of the interesting critiques in your book is about youth sports, and that isn't necessarily the first topic that might spring to mind for national politics, but I think you use it to describe this whole larger phenomenon about the kind of commercialization of America. So I wanted to ask you about that.

What is your critique of youth sports right now? Yeah, so I opened the book with this story about my younger son, and the opening line of the book says, my youngest son, Ryder, is not likely to play in the NHL. And people have asked me, like, whether it was a wise choice to open my book by trashing my son. But he's not going to play in the NHL, and he doesn't want to. You know, he likes hockey, but, you know, he wants to be a normal kid.

But he plays in a league where the season has 60 games, spread out all over the East Coast. And I came to realize that that wasn't the only peculiar thing happening in this league. One day I was walking into the rink for a game, and I saw a parent videotaping the game from like a dark corner of the arena. And I asked him, well, why don't you just find a better position? And he said, well, actually, if they find out that I'm live streaming the game, our team will get docked points in the standings.

And I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, don't you know, this league is owned by a private equity-backed for-profit company, and they have installed cameras in all the rinks, and they sell a streaming service to the parents and the grandparents. And so we can't record the games. And that's why we're playing a 60-game season, because they make money off of running these kids through the ringer. They make money off of buying youth sports and then selling it back to the parents. this ritual, I mean, that every parent has gone through, videotaping your kids' games so that the grandparents can see it because they can't make the drive being taken from us. Why? Because

everything in this country that is not nailed down is becoming a commodity, is becoming sold back to us. And it speaks to two problems I talk about in this book, this book, as we'll talk about, is organized around six cults that I think are plaguing the country. One of them is the cult of profit. The idea that the only thing that matters in this country is profit. That a good company can be one that abuses its workers, that empties out its community, that provides a product with no social value, but it makes a profit. And that's the only thing that makes a good company. Why? Why have we structured an economy like that? It leaves people feeling soulless. It leaves people feeling empty. But we have also chosen to make everything a commodity. We have we've we've chosen to believe that

there is nothing that should be run just for the benefit of our families and our kids and our communities. And that also makes us feel used, right? That we are just utilitarian so that other people can make billions of dollars. And that leads to emptiness as well. So you know, it's a personal story, but it rings true to a lot of people because that sacred ritual, recording your kid's game for the kids' grandparents, is now being monetized. And I think it speaks to something that's gone fundamentally wrong in the country. So one of the other cults in the book is the cult of corruption. And obviously we're seeing lots of examples of that right now. You take a step back, just acknowledge that. You take a step back by talking about the role that money is playing in politics. I mean, obviously you have to raise

money to do your job, to keep doing it. It is, as I understand it, increasingly something that elected officials spend an enormous amount of time on. There is so much money sloshing into American politics. Some of this is very much at the feet of the Supreme Court. But there are things that Congress could try to do about this. How do you think about this problem and how to solve it? Again, this book is a book of why. And this is maybe the question that is plaguing most people today. Why has this country decided to far too often look the other way at Trump's bananas nuclear-grade corruption? How did we get this way? Probably everybody in this audience remembers our governor in the 1990s and 2000s, John Roland. John Roland was at a 70% approval

rating. And then two months later, he was at 24% on his way to impeachment and out of office. And what happened in between? Well, essentially, he had a state contractor, build him a free hot tub. That level of corruption sounds wonderfully quaint. Right? I would be... Just a hot tub? I would be, like, really happy. if that's what we were dealing with today. But we're not. We're dealing with a guy who is stealing $1.8 billion in your money

to pay off police beaters who used violence in his name. And yes, this is, I think, finally capturing the country's attention. But the book is trying to ask the question, why, right? Why do we look the other way? And what do we have to do at the bottom of our culture and our economy to change that. Before we get into the solutions, just I'll give you part of my theory, and you'll tell me if you think I'm right or not. But I think there's a connection to how our economy is structured and our tolerance for corruption. I think we have structured an economy

in which we say it's okay for the winners in the economy to just take everything, everything that's available to them. There is no modesty left in our economy. There is no temperance left. Elon Musk is about to be a trillionaire. And everybody else is left with the scraps, the scraps, fighting over the scraps. And like the companies with the CEOs that make 900,000 times the average worker, those are good companies. And I think that infects our politics. I think that we look the other way at what Trump does too often because we apply the same

rule. If you win in our politics, you should just be able to take everything because we've normalized that in our economy. So I definitely have a lot of ideas on how to fix our broken politics. But again, getting back to this question of why is this all happening? I think it's happening because when you normalize corruption and greed and avarice in the economy, it does make it a little bit easier for people to look the other way in our politics. It means that the job is pretty big.

You've got to fix the problem on both the political side and the economic side. But I think we'd be fooling ourselves that we didn't admit that the problem is connected. And what about trying to solve it? Is there legislation Congress should be considering? What about just disclosing all the dark money that's coming in? How do you get your hands around this? Well, again, let's root it back to what this book is about, how are we feeling? How are we feeling?

And one of the key feelings in this country is powerlessness. You don't feel like you have power. Izzy didn't feel like he had power. He did everything was asked of him. But he had no power to be the lead of dignified. retirement. But our politics makes people feel powerless as well, because how does my vote matter if the billionaires and the corporations control our politics? We all want social media to be restrained, to be controlled, our kids to be protected. Why hasn't Congress done that? It's money.

It's money. And it's money that is corrupting both sides, the left and the right. So my prescription here is that Democrats need to be not just focused on Trump's corruption. I mean, It is ugly and it is unique, but the whole system is corrupt. And we haven't done anything to protect people because both sides are impacted by money. Here's my prescription. I just think we have to be bolder in what we want to do. Yes, disclosure is good. Connecticut's public financing system, if we adopted it nationally, would be good.

But the dark money is the biggest problem. The corporate and billionaire money that you don't even know is in our politics is the is the real corrupting part. And so it is time for us as a party. It is time for us as a nation to talk about a constitutional amendment to ban corporate, billionaire, and dark money from our politics.

One of the other subjects that you discuss with a lot of good analysis is the role of technology. in increasing loneliness, in messing with how kids socialize. I think there's also a connection, and you were alluding to it, between money and politics and Silicon Valley. These tech companies, we're seeing this with AI in a way that may just be completely off the charts and overwhelm all the dynamics that we're talking about in a way that we haven't even really, like, anticipated or thought about. How are you thinking about those questions?

In some ways, they are political questions. There is a real lack of regulation. And on the other hand, they are like deeply cultural and personal questions about how we all use our phones and our other devices. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, agreed. So the book, as I mentioned, is structured around these six cults. And what is a cult? A cult is a system of false beliefs that accrue to the benefit of a small handful of elites.

And so I make the argument that there are really six cults. profit, consumption, one of them is technology, that involve a set of things that we believe, but that are not true, that serve a very small number of people. Inside the cult of technology is another cult, the cult of efficiency. The idea that we are better off if everything happens faster, if everything happens without friction. And I make the case in this book, and I gave a commencement speech at Wesleyan last weekend on this topic, that in fact, inefficiency and friction and drift is actually what makes life life. And part of the reason that we are feeling worse today than ever before is because of what the technology is doing to maximize everything. I'm worried about the

job loss that comes with AI, but I'm just as worried about the spiritual atrophy when everything that it means to be a human is now outsourced to machines. Friendship, creativity, composition, critical thinking. What happens to us? What happens to our soul when the machines do all of that to us? Friendship is really inefficient, right? It is. I love my friends, but they let me down. They don't show up every time I need them. But it's the most wonderful thing in life. Family is deeply inefficient, right? But it's just as if not more wonderful. Well, Sam Altman, I tell the story in the book,

Sam Altman came into my office. He's the CEO of OpenAI, ChatGPT. He came into my office about a year ago, and he knew I was a skeptic of AI, which makes this argument that he made even more implausible. He said, Chris, I have a product that you're going to really like. AI best friends. I'm going to design a best friend machine.

never lets you down. Never lets you down. It never lets you down. Is there the minute that you need him or her that says exactly what you want in that moment? It'll learn you faster. It'll learn you better than your best friend knows you. And I mean, that's just dystopian, right? But we don't have to choose to accept that.

So I've introduced legislation, bipartisan legislation, and we'll get to this. But a lot of these solutions are not as political. fraught as you think. I have bipartisan legislation with a bunch of really conservative senators that says, for instance, we are going to prohibit children under 18 from accessing AI friendship bots.

And so I want to tailor solutions to protect jobs, but I think it's just as important that you tailor solutions to AI and social media that protect our spiritual health. And the money is a huge piece of this because we're not doing it mainly because of the influence of money. But underneath that money, you see just as many people on the right that are interested in the regulation of this technology as people on the left. And that gives me a lot of hope. Yes, it does seem to be an issue in which the standard polarization has not yet set in. And that's true about a number of the things you talk about in this book. Could it be the case also for a constitutional amendment about corporate billionaires? And what would that amendment say? Could it just say money does not equal

speech as a way of undercutting the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United and other cases that really have made the First Amendment a kind of obstacle to campaign finance reform? Yeah, I mean, I'm in your area of expertise right now. Sorry, I couldn't resist. So at the risk of sounding uneducated. Yes, it's going to, essentially you have to give Congress the power to regulate money in politics. And right now we cannot do that because the Supreme Court wrongly has said that money is equated with speech like this. And that is a wrong interpretation of the Constitution. The founding fathers would have never imagined that the wealthiest people in the country should be able to capture our politics through contributions. So yes, the essence,

I don't imagine a constitutional amendment which would legislate, right, but a constitutional amendment which would give the power to Congress and to state legislators to be able to control for that corrupting influence in our politics. Good answer. So we are heading into campaign season for the 2026 midterms. Democrats are feeling pretty good about their numbers on the generic ballot, what it looks like when you just ask people, would you rather vote for a Democrat or Republican?

President Trump is, you know, arguably committing political malpractice in terms of the gap between what he promised in terms of lowering prices and his actual policies, the tariffs and the Iran War. And now seems very preoccupied by the slush fund you brought up earlier and the ballroom.

And so in a lot of ways, things look promising for Democrats. On the other hand, there is more gerrymandering than there's ever been in the House of Representatives in a way that is going to reduce the number of competitive districts. And Democrats are still at a disadvantage in a lot of states, red states, mostly, but perhaps some purple states as well, in a way that makes it really hard. for Democrats to recapture the Senate. In the conclusion of your book, you have a really sharp, clear-eyed analysis of these dynamics, and you ask a question, why does the Democratic Party not take the necessary steps to bring together traditional progressives and disaffected conservatives

to create a new coalition? And then you start answering, and I thought it was a great answer. So tell us a little bit about how you see these dynamics playing out and what you think Democrats need to do to win in 26 and then beyond? Yeah, I mean, this book is not really a book about political analysis. It's a book that, again, is trying to give everybody a language to understand that spiritual crisis at the center of the country. I sort of feel like that's what people are needing right now, is to understand that foundational problem.

But yes, I can't help in the end, but to give a little bit of advice to my party. and I do think that there is a realignment there for the taking. I tell this story in the book about a song that went viral several years ago. It's called Richmond North of Richmond. It went to number one on the charts. And it's a song about the soullessness of work, about a guy who's working minimum wage, she says for shit pay, nobody north of Richmond,

the corporate titans, the politicians, care about me. But in that song, there's also a bunch of conservative tropes. He also blames overweight welfare recipients for the problems he's facing. He's singing it from the woods of rural North Carolina. He's got an accent and a long beard. And everybody kind of coded him as a Trump supporter and didn't necessarily hear his critique of the economy,

just heard the conservative tropes. But I heard that song, and I was like, wait a second, Why aren't Democrats talking to the hundreds of millions of people who are listening to that song? Why don't we tell them that if they think that work is soulless, it's actually the Democrats that have the solutions? And when I said that on Twitter, I like posted this suggestion, and I got just like slammed online because folks were like, he's a racist, his supporters are racist, they're hopeless. Like, you're just not going to get anywhere with those kind of people. And I just think that that's a huge mistake. I think our party should be in the business of conversion.

I don't think that we should cut off talking to people who don't agree with us on everything. And so part of my prescription is for our party to become a bigger tent. And to say that the tent poles are unrigging the economy to make you feel more powerful. in the economy. Everything has to be around your emotional health and unrigging the democracy to make you feel more powerful in the democracy. But then, like, let's let people in. And yeah, maybe people don't line up with us inside that tent on guns or climate or choice, but at least if you're in the tent, I have an opportunity to try to convince you. And then I also make the argument that our ideas are just too small. They're just too small. And that we...

and that if you really want to speak to people emotionally, their problems are enormous, and so you can't offer technocratic solutions. And you have to offer solutions, again, I'm coming back to it, that speak to people spiritually. So one of the solutions I have in this book is one that you don't hear a lot about, but I think really speaks to folks who feel like this economy only asks them, and this culture only asks them to buy things. You just need to be a good consumer and you're a good American. And people actually want to be called to service, to citizenship.

the economy, making people feel a sense of ownership. Tell us a little bit about how you see that happening. The Biden administration had a pretty aggressive antitrust set of policies, really went in and tried to give some very big companies like Amazon and Google and meta a hard time. Legally speaking, that was tricky just because of the way antitrust law has developed in the Supreme Court. What are the openings here for breaking up corporate power? I mean, again, the way to talk about breaking up corporate, concentrated corporate power, which I argue in this book is a key part of unrigging the economy,

is to talk about concentrated corporate power in terms of how it makes people feel. So chapter two in this book is the culture. cult of everywhere. And what I talk about in that chapter is the idea that today you are told that you are just a citizen of the world, that we all buy stuff from the same national retailers that were part of a big antiseptic, flattened culture, that our downtowns have been emptied out, that our local institutions from churches to unions to service clubs aren't as healthy as they used to be the people who are powerful in our economy don't live in our communities any longer. They live nowhere. They live in Davos and Manhattan and Aspen all at the same time.

And what I talk about in this book is how important it is to have a place that you belong to, how local identity is such a healthy identity. I grew up in Weathersfield, Connecticut, just north of here. And I was so proud to be from a place that felt connected, a place that felt unique. I tell the story in the book of going to the grocery store with my grandma every weekend. And it was owned by a local family. And we stopped at the deli counter. And my grandmother, you know, I had a five, ten minute conversation with the deli guy. And that made her feel really connected to the community.

And the deli guy every Saturday morning would hand me a free slice of American cheese. And I was like the luckiest kid in the world that I got a free slice of cheese, but that connected me to the deli guy. And I just walked out of there feeling like I belong to a place, right? This is my meaning. This is my identity. And that reality doesn't exist for people. It felt powerful when the people who owned that supermarket, who owned your local hospital, who owned the company you worked for, lived in your community. There was accountability.

It was harder for them to screw you because they were going to see you at church or at the grocery. grocery store. And so I talk about rebuilding healthy local places with smaller economies, not just as a way to lower prices and raise wages, but as a way to make us feel more connected and more powerful again. And once again, there's just as much pride in local places in red-leaning small towns as there is in blue-leaning city neighborhoods, both left and right, are kind of sick of being told that you are now just a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of this place. And there's real hope that if you frame it in those terms, the political solutions there, including breaking up those big companies that run out of business, the small companies and supermarkets and bookstores that used to make us feel connected,

that that politics is not hopeless. So how do we start? I mean, I think so many people, I know this is true for me, are very drawn to that. vision, right? I mean, you talk about Willamantic in particular as a place that you drive through, you worry about the town center, feeling like it's boarded up. We've all had these experiences driving through towns. Sometimes I worry about that even here in New Haven. How do we get here from there? There's a kind of nostalgic quality to remembering what small towns looked like when they had local businesses. And I don't, it feels like such an appeal

vision, but hard to imagine how we get there. And are you imagining something that seems like the past, or are you imagining a kind of future version of it? Yeah, it's a great question, right? And it's a good pushback because there is definitely nostalgia in this book. But nostalgia is dangerous because it can get a little gauzy. And one of the things that I'm nostalgic for in this book that I talk about in the opening chapter are these service clubs that we remember. There was a time 50 years ago where, you know, a very large percentage of adults belong to Kwanis or Civitan or lions, right, that they define their life in part by service. But those clubs mostly only took white men. And those clubs were also intended to just kind of cement the white patriarchal

power structure. And so there are parts you want to rescue from the past, but then there are parts you want to leave behind. I guess what this book says over and over again is that the way things are today may feel natural and inevitable, but none of it is natural and inevitable. It is just a choice to decide not to have local commerce. You could have a healthy economy and choose to just break up the concentration of power. And the good news is that there's precedent for America, choosing differently. I spent a little time in this book talking about the transition from the Gilded Age, an age where it felt a lot similar to today, to the progressive era, where Americans chose to just say, I don't want the Rockefellers and the Morgan's and the Carnegie's controlling

everything. I don't want to be just my labor to be simply extracted. And citizens and government together made a bunch of choices. That's the rise of law. labor unions. That's the rise of surface clubs. That's the breakup of the trusts. And so we have precedent where it looked hopeless. It looked inevitable. It looked like the permanent state of affairs. And then all of a sudden it wasn't because we chose together to do something. The money is the biggest piece here. I think that's why I keep coming back to it. I don't think you can make a lot of these changes if you don't get rid of the billionaire and corporate capture of the politics, which is why I recommend in the book that that kind of has to be the number one agenda item.

for Democrats. But all of it is a choice. History tells us that we have power to change how we feel in this moment. So imagine that we're a step down this road. There's some beginning to be hope for breaking up corporate power. Your message is getting through. Maybe it's a couple years from now. Maybe, you know, you're trying to, or someone like you is trying to make this a national message for the Democratic Party. What, how do the Democratic Party? How do the Democratic Democrats make this big tent happen that might require some moving of the party itself, right? It's one thing to say, you can come on in, but we still think all the things that we think that you disagree with.

Like, we'll tolerate you. You can be here, but we're not going to say you're right about any of the things that are divisive here, right? And we could name lots of different issues now that have become kind of litmus tests and ways that people self-identify, gun control. or reproductive rights, or transgender rights, or, you know, you name it, lots of different aspects of these questions.

Do the Democrats need not just to change their messaging and their sense of being welcome by not yelling on social media when someone suggests reaching out, but also actually shifting in a way where people feel not just like heard, but actually like met where they are in their views? Yeah, I don't make the recommendation in this book

that Democrats should move or moderate their commitment to saving lives through changing our gun laws or full equality based upon sexual orientation or gender identity? I don't make that argument, right? I do think that you can solve a lot of this problem by simply signaling that we are not going to make a personal moral judgment on you as a human being because you don't agree with us on everything. Now, there is a limit to that. I'm not, you know, advocating for Nick Fuentes and, like, the Groper movement to be in the tense, right? So I acknowledge that there is a line here, but not everybody that voted for Donald Trump is morally repugnant, and we sometimes make folks feel that way. And that happens in the way that I get treated when I make a suggestion to reach out

and to talk to members of his coalition. That happens by the Democratic Party not normally nominating candidates that don't have different views than the mainstream on a handful of these issues. That happens because we don't go and talk to his voters very often. So last year I went around the country and did a bunch of town halls. I went to rural North Carolina. I went to sort of deep red suburban Missouri, but that's the exception, not the rule. So I'm not arguing that we just, you know, stop advocating for what we believe in and as a political, as a matter of political expediency, sort of move our positioning into the center or to the right. I'm just arguing to open ourselves up to the fact that people can be converted and convinced if we get into a real legitimate relationship with them.

And do you see evidence of that in place? like rural North Carolina? I mean, those places are still deeply red. President Trump's approval ratings are lower than they've been, but within the Republican Party, he's still in like the mid-80s in terms of approval. Yeah, I mean, listen, I am like, you know, a preternaturally optimistic human being, so I admit that, like, of course, I see a path here, because I always see a path. I mean, that's in this business. How you get up in the morning is that you see a path. But, But yes, I do. So, I mean, look at, you know, look at what's happened with referendums on the ballots in very deep red states to raise the minimum wage or to pass family and medical leave or even to stop voucher laws from allowing the private sector to come in and pillage our public schools.

There's actually a lot of signals out there that there are a lot of Republican voters that believe the economy is fundamentally unfavorable. and extractive and want solutions. There was in between Trump one and Trump two a kind of interesting movement in the conservative movement to build more support for labor unions and responsible protectionism and a more muscular government to try to regulate some of the rough edges of technology. Now Trump like stamped out that movement when he became president, but it's there. It find Republican sponsors for some of the legislation I'm talking about. That bill to take on the technology companies and ban kids from AI friendship bots. That's a bill that Senator Richard Blumenthal and I sponsor on the Democratic side, but our Republican partners are folks

who we do not find a lot of common cause with Katie Britt and Josh Hawley. So there is, I do see some signals that there is a potential. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We talk about mental health more openly now, but asking for help can still feel hard. Better Helps, 2026 state of stigma reports surveyed 2,000 Americans and found something interesting. 85% of Americans believe getting support is wise, but 74% say society discourages people from doing that. maybe you're busy, maybe you're worried what others would think, or maybe you're telling yourself, you can handle it alone. But therapy can be a space to slow down, talk through

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That's better help.com slash gabfest. This episode is sponsored by Ground News. I've been fascinated by the reflecting pool story in recent days. Just fascinated. I'm a Washingtonian. And this fight over the reflecting pool and President Trump's renovation of it and it or attempted renovation has just struck a chord with people in Washington and around the country. And there's been a huge amount of news coverage of it.

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or send it as a gift. Groundnews.com slash gab, use my link so they know the Gabfest sent you. This episode is sponsored by Quince. I'm 100% in Quince right now. 100%. I'm wearing a quince polo. It's a great forest green color that I adore. I'm wearing quince pants, some khaki pants, super comfortable. And I noticed that my belt, I was talking to my girlfriend about why I love this belt that I have. And she's like, where did you get it? And I was like, oh, it's a Quince belt too. It's a mesh belt that I love so much. Quince makes summer amazing because they've got all the summer pieces you want. They have 100% European linen shirts and pants.

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I have one from Valerie, who volunteered for your campaign in 2012. Thank you, Valerie. That's pretty great. Valerie asks, once the Democrats are back in control of Congress, outside of your current agenda, what would your main priorities be to repair the damage from the Trump and administration? Well, I mean, I'm sort of coming back to this theme over and over again. I think people understand that our economy is rigged because our politics are rigged. And I don't think they believe that we're really sincere about the economic fixes we're talking about unless we are unrigging

the democracy. So, well, I admit we're not going to get a constitutional amendment done right off the bat, I would make a series of other initiatives like first week business. So I would pass something called the Disclose Act, which requires every contribution, including those corporate contributions, are disclosed. So that's the end of dark money. I would pass the Stock Act, which bans every member of Congress from trading stock. I would, I would show people, And listen, and I would hold Donald Trump accountable. I mean, I don't, every member of the Trump administration should save their emails and their receipts because there is likely, you know, criminal conduct happening in this administration.

But I think it's important to show that we're not just focused on his corruption, that we understand the whole system is corrupt, and that right out of the bat, Democrats are showing that we are serious about cleaning up the whole mess, not just Trump's mess. So that's how I'd start. I'm sorry, I'm going to hijack the audience questions to ask a follow-up. What about do we need a limit or a ban on partisan gerrymandering? Do we need some legislation that addresses rule of law issues, like the separation of the Justice Department's criminal investigation function from the White House? Are there things like that? They're wonky. They're hard to make sing. And yet it does seem like a lot of our weak spots in our constitutional order have been really tested and wanting. Yeah, this is such an interesting dance that we're doing right now because I absolutely believe that when you think about those democracy forms that we would engage in in the first week, that one of them would be banning partisan gerrymandering in this country. That is an essential reform. But then, you know, critics will say, but wait a second, you guys are doing it right now. engaged in partisan gerrymandering as we speak. And that is the exceptional nature of this unique

moment in that I believe, and I have argued for a year and a half, that if the other party that is trying to convert the country from a democracy to a totalitarian state is breaking all the norms, then you are doing them a favor by observing the norms in their violation by the ruling party. So I think that right now we have to be doing what they're doing to change districts to save the democracy. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it a priority when we get power to change the rules to stop them from engaging in that. So yeah, that's on the list as well, even though up until that moment we are going to have to use some of the same tactics that they use. Here is a question from a millennial. What advice would you give a millennial who grew up on the ideas of equality and accountability,

someone who graduated from high school in 2008, college in 2012, and is feeling nothing but hopelessness when they think about the future? Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot about this because, well, I have some ability to remember that world where we were a little bit more communitarian than we are today. where neighborliness mattered more than it does today, where the economy wasn't as cold. If you were a millennial, you only know this world. And I guess my message would sort of be, again, a riff on what I have said,

that none of this is inevitable because many of us remember a time when many more people knew their neighbors, when the technology didn't cycle us into lives of isolation. we know what else is possible. And while it can feel uniquely exhausting and deflating to be a young person at this moment, all we know about the history of this country is that great social change movements, the ones that move history, are almost exclusively led by young people.

It is young people who have torn down walls that seem impenetrable. Why? because it's young people who speak to a purity that adults can't as easily access. They shame those in power. And so I think this is a unique moment for young people to stand up and demand that things be different, to get involved politically, to remember the times in which political action on behalf of young people mattered. I worry today that young people's political action is more a branding exercise than it is an effort in true old-fashioned political organization.

Political organization still works when young people lead. And then to also just lead by example. There's this fascinating movement right now where young people are coming back to church at interesting rates. Young people are giving up those smartphones and putting these so-called dumb phones in their pockets that don't keep them connected to the Internet at all times.

There's no shame in political organization. Young people can have a big role in making an economy that's more fair that cares more about you than about profit as an example. But you can also exhibit modeling behavior in your life that may be infectious as well. This person wants to know if your team is hiring, and these are good questions, so I'm just passing that along. Here is a very practical question. We're always hiring. What is the plan if Trump pulls midterm election stunts?

Well, I mean, so as most folks know here, I mean, I was, you know, I was an alarmist right out of the gate, right? As soon as he was in power, in part because I had studied what was happening deep in the conservative movement in between those four years, I saw that they were getting ready to try to destroy the democracy. And so right from the beginning, I said, guys, like, there is a plan here to try to make 2024 the last election. And a lot of my friends said, you know, Chris, you're like, you're scaring. people aren't going to get involved if they think that there's not going to be an election. And my theory, which I think has turned out to be true, is exactly the opposite. If you level with people and tell them how serious this is, they're going to be more likely to come out. And that has proven to be true with record numbers of people in this country showing up in protest over the last year and a half.

And so I think that we have been effective because of popular. mobilization in throwing some pretty significant sand in the gears, I was alarmist. I think I would have said a year ago that there is maybe a less than 50-50 shot that we were going to have a free and fair election in 2026. I am much more optimistic today because I've watched his attempts to try to steal the election hit dead end after dead end. Redistricting, we fought back and we've kind of drawn to a, we've kind of run this thing to a draw. the Supreme Court, in part because they were watching us turn out in record numbers, said, no, you cannot utilize the military to try to take control of the polls.

That was definitely part of his plan. The SAVE Act, they thought they could bully that through the Senate and the House, in part because of a lot of good behind-the-scenes work. We have stopped this bill, which was going to create a national voter file from becoming law.

So I'm not staying that we stop, be vigilant, being vigilant. I think he's going to come up with a whole bunch of other ways to try to steal the election. But we have proved much more nimble than a lot of people thought at stopping his attempts to rig the election. I think there's a very good chance the election is going to come off. And it will be a referendum on his attempts to destroy the democracy, on his corruption. And it will be, you know, an enormous success story of popular mobilization. So we'll stay at it. But I think we've been a lot better than a lot of folks would have thought in shutting down those attempts to destroy the rule of law and the democracy.

I think that's a great... That is a great setup for a last question. Beyond protest, and I'll add beyond voting here in Connecticut, what do we do as citizens to save our democracy? Yeah, it's kind of a great... You're going to applaud that question. It's a great question. And I think a lot about this because I have a role, but so to you.

And obviously, you've self-selected. You're here because you are already participating and you want to know what more you can do. So what are we celebrating this year? We're celebrating 250 years of this revolutionary document, this document that says right at the beginning that Congress, government has a responsibility, not to increase GDP or lower unemployment or get your kids good test scores, but Congress has and government has a responsibility to help you be happy, right? The right to pursue happiness. That is a remarkable phrase at the center of the Declaration of Independence.

And our founding fathers conceived something radical and revolutionary for this country. And I just think it's worth, you ask what you can do. One of the things you can do is feel so privileged and lucky to be living in this country even at this fraught moment. Because no society, no civilization in the history of the country has done what we have done at the same time. Two things. One, build a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multilingual society, right? That's revolutionary in and of itself, living amongst people that are different from you. And two, self-govern.

right? No king, no monarch, we decide for ourselves. Those two things have never been done before for 250 years. Both of them are unnatural. It's hard to live with people who are different from you. We're very used to having one person in charge. And so I wake up every day with the same anxiety and anger that you do. But I wake up with joy because I feel like I'm the luckiest guy in the world to be living in this country, but also to be in this country at a time. when it is under siege, that I'm going to get to be part of this effort to save it, and that I'm going to tell my kids and my grandkids about it. And this book is, yes, scary because it says it's not just about winning an election. It's about rebuilding our culture. It's about thinking about that question of happiness, thinking about what makes people happy and building a culture and economy that delivers on that happiness. And you have to do both.

You have to build a politics of the common good. and you've got to win elections, but we're celebrating 250 years of a radical idea. And so we should, I think, accept and be joyous in needing to step up and both fix this country politically and culturally. I've been lucky because as broken as the democracy is, I've seen it work. It is still worth saving. And what this book says is that, yes, you have a lot to do. There's a lot of things you can do in your individual life to build a culture of the common good. But government has a responsibility too. We set the rules that have made people feel lonely and unhappy and in able to access meaning.

We have the power to change those rules. And I've been part of legislative fights where it felt hopeless, where money seemed to have bought off our politics. And then we decided to change it. For 30 years, the gun. industry ran Washington. It had all the power. And then after that awful thing happened in Sandy Hook, starting here in Connecticut, we decided that we weren't going to let them. We weren't going to let them control our politics. And for 10 years, we, for 10 years we built. And then in 2022, after Yuvaldi, I got the chance to sit in a room. And over 30 days, right and pass the first

major anti-gun violence legislation in 30 years in this country. And since then, everywhere across this country, including in Connecticut, gun violence rates are coming down, mass shootings are coming down, school shootings are coming down. I walk around my neighborhood in the south end of Hartford, and there are people alive in my neighborhood who wouldn't be alive if democracy hadn't worked for that moment. It is worth saving, but to save it, you have to both invest in the culture as well in our elections. I'll finish with this story, and it's a personal one. But it is part of why I wrote this book.

So at the end of this book, I tell this story. Thanksgiving of last year, I think it was, I was home in my house in Hartford by myself. And I was home by myself because my wife and I had just separated. And my kids were in D.C. with their mom. And I was here, and I was going to join family. here in Connecticut later that day, but I was home that morning by myself

and feeling bad, like feeling lonely. And I was doing what you do when you're lonely. I was sitting with my phone and I was scrolling on it, and I was feeling lonelier and lonelier. And I remember that on Thanksgiving morning, there was normally this family that set up a card table at the little town green near my house, and they would hand out like coffee and donuts

and small meals to the homeless on the green. And so I put my phone down, and I walked a block up to the green, and I got some dung and donuts gift cards to help give out at the table, and I just sat there for not that long, like 30 minutes, 60 minutes, and I just sat with that family, and I just engaged in selflessness, right? I engaged in a basic exercise in the common good, right? It wasn't about me.

It was about other people. And I walked away, going back home to get ready to join my family here in Connecticut, it and I just felt like that, not all of it, right, not all of that pain and sadness lift, but I felt a lot of it lift. And it was this reminder, right, of how good it feels to give to others how happiness really is not driven by our income or our job, but our ability to live for other people, our ability to be in relationship. And we have just allowed for our government to set up a system of rules that makes it harder than ever before for people to access that feeling of happiness

that comes from investment in the common good. In fact, we're told that it's unnatural, that it should be disincentivized, that all you should do is just buy stuff, just be a good consumer, that your company shouldn't care about the common good. It should just care about profit. All of that is a choice.

And that day, that Thanksgiving morning, I just, you know, had this epiphany of how good selflessness feels and how the job here is not just to win elections, but to build a set of rules and a culture that allows more people to feel that little small feeling that I felt that morning. You can engage in small acts thrown a block party this summer for your neighborhood, shopping at the local store instead of the chain store, going down and helping your neighbors engage in a little act. self-in-ness, but you can also challenge your political leaders to design a country that allows for that muscle, that muscle of the common good to be more easily exercised. That's why I wrote this book in the end. Senator Murphy, thank you so much for your service. Thank you so much for coming.

Thanks so much to Senator Murphy for joining us, his new book is Crisis of the Common Good, the fight for meaning and connection in a broken America. That's it for this month's edition of GabFest Reeds. Our producer is Nina Porzuki. Ben Richmond is Senior Director of Operations of Podcasts. Mia LoBelle is the executive director of podcasts at Slate. And Hillary Fry is the editor-in-chief at Slate. We'll be back next month with another edition of GabFest reads.

Until then, all three of us, David and John and me, will be back in your feed on Thursday with a new episode of Slate Political GabFest. Hi, this is Brooke DeVard from Naked Beauty. I am always looking for ways to elevate our daily rituals, and the Kohler Smart Toilet is proof that design changes everything. It's this stunning, sculptural piece that feels a quiet luxury for your bathroom. It totally transforms your daily ritual into something elevated, with customizable cleansing and touchscreen controls.

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