What Chris Murphy Learned From the New Right

The Atlantic

6 hours ago

The unincorporated town of Saxapahaw, North Carolina, is a 300-mile drive from Washington, D.C. It's about twice as far from Connecticut, the state that Chris Murphy represents in the United States Senate. So what was he doing hosting a town hall there, of all places, one evening this past April? One answer is that he was trolling Saxapahaw's congressional representative, who had recently advised Republican colleagues to stop doing town-hall events. Another is that Saxapahaw is somewhere, and these days, Murphy seems to be everywhere.
Since Donald Trump's return to the White House, Murphy has emerged as one of the most vocally freaked-out Democrats in Washington. He has become a fixture of cable news and highbrow politics podcasts, as well as a prolific poster of five-alarm-fire social-media content. (His biggest hit so far is a March video of a Senate speech titled 'Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is on Its Way to Being the Most Corrupt in U.S. History,' which has been viewed more than 5 million times on YouTube.) He recently launched a political action committee, the American Mobilization PAC, that focuses on funding grassroots opposition to Trump.
This behavior is consistent with a politician attempting to raise his profile ahead of a run for higher office, a theory that Murphy dismisses. (The dismissal is itself consistent with the theory.) It also befits a politician who genuinely believes that Trump poses an immediate threat to the survival of American democracy, a premise that Murphy very much endorses.
'You cannot be guaranteed today that there's a free and fair election in 2026,' Murphy told me before going onstage at the Haw River Ballroom, where about 1,000 local voters, mostly silver-haired, had packed the venue to hear him speak. It was the first of several conversations I would have with him about how he thinks the Democratic Party should respond to the second Trump term. Just that morning, the president had directed the Department of Justice and Department of Treasury to investigate ActBlue, the primary Democratic Party fundraising platform, for supposedly facilitating election fraud. This, Murphy told me, was 'a crystal-clear signal that their agenda is nothing less than the destruction of the opposition.' In light of those threats, he said, he felt a moral responsibility to rally public opposition. 'I think we are getting close to the point where we are going to have to see hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets, not tens of thousands of people.'
To help spur that mass movement, Murphy, who until recently was best known for his gun-control advocacy, is making a Bernie Sanders–style argument about money and power. Onstage, he told the crowd that Trump's antidemocratic actions were designed to neutralize resistance to a pro-billionaire economic agenda. 'If you are engaged in something as unpopular as the most massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class,' he declared, 'the only way you can get away with that is by destroying the means of accountability.'
This raises another question: Why is a standard-issue Northeast progressive who parts his hair so neatly and has worked in politics his entire life suddenly talking like a would-be class warrior? Over the past three years, Murphy has been on an intellectual journey, influenced as much by the Trumpist right as by the Sanders left. He has come to think that the Democratic Party can regain working-class support only by calling out the powerful corporate villains who he believes are to blame for the country's problems.
Now, even as he is seeking to muster opposition to Trump, he's trying to persuade fellow Democrats to follow him down the populist path. This might not be easy. After President Joe Biden's experiment with new economic ideas ended in an electoral rout, the party's free-market wing has been feeling vindicated and ready for some infighting. Meanwhile, Murphy, whom National Review recently called the 'Most Boring Politician in America,' is not an obvious vessel for a rousing appeal to the working class.
Murphy knows that the party brand—out of touch, too focused on social issues, too judgmental—is desperately in need of a reboot. If he is the walking embodiment of Generic Democrat, perhaps that makes him the guy for the job.
Democratic Party politics sometimes feel like a struggle between an old guard and an upstart youth movement. Murphy somehow belongs to both camps. He has held elected office since the Clinton administration, but at 51, he's still the fifth-youngest Democrat in the Senate.
He was just 25 when he won his first election, to the Connecticut state legislature, and 33 when he successfully ran to represent Connecticut's Fifth Congressional District. That district includes Newtown, where, on December 14, 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered six adults and 20 children. Murphy, whose two sons were 1 and 4 at the time, was with some of the Sandy Hook parents when they learned their kids had been killed.
By that point, he was already on his way to the Senate. He had been elected five weeks earlier, defeating Linda McMahon, the future education secretary. Murphy, who was 39 when he took office, would focus for the next decade on passing gun-control legislation.
As the junior senator from Connecticut, Murphy rarely drew national attention. One exception came after the 2022 schoolhouse massacre in Uvalde, Texas. 'What are we doing? What are we doing?' Murphy demanded of his colleagues in an emotional speech on the Senate floor. 'Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate—why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority—if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?'
Murphy went on to partner with Senate colleagues on bipartisan gun-control legislation that passed the following month with 15 Republican votes. The law was modest, but it was the first significant federal gun legislation since 1994.
Even as Murphy was building toward his first concrete achievement on a signature issue, he was undergoing a kind of reinvention from gun-control advocate to economic populist. In October 2022, he published an essay in this magazine in which he argued that decades of free-market economic policy, embraced by both parties, had led to a host of ills: the hollowing-out of communities, a rise in loneliness, a sense of lost control and meaning. The Trump movement, he wrote, fed off these frustrations. It was the first of several articles he would publish on the theme.
Murphy's interest in these ideas seemed to come out of nowhere. Other politicians and commentators had been making similar arguments for years, but Murphy was never part of that crew. How had the gun-control guy suddenly become the economic-populism guy?
I recently put that question to him during an interview in his Senate office. Murphy still looks young for a senator, but he has aged out of the boy-wonder era. His face, once doughy, has grown narrow and lined. He recently began sporting a scruffy beard, perhaps in a bid for a more working-dude aesthetic (a suggestion he denied with a laugh). 'I watched the economy get better according to all of the metrics we think measure economic health,' he told me. 'And then I listened to the people I represent, and people all across the country, tell me how shitty the economy was. And that seemed to be a real problem in general, but for Democrats specifically, because at the time, we were running on a growing economy and low unemployment, and we thought we were going to get credit for that if we just kept telling people that the economy was good.'
I found this answer unsatisfying. Every Democrat discovered, at some point, that voters were unhappy with the Biden economy. Most did not make the turn that Murphy did. A few weeks later, in a follow-up interview, I asked the question more pointedly.
'Probably the most important thing that happened to me was a decision in the summer of 2022 to go down a deep new-right rabbit hole,' he told me. Murphy started with Why Liberalism Failed, by the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen. In the book, Deneen argues that liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism and free markets, has sown the seeds of its own demise by undermining traditional social structures and neglecting deeper sources of human flourishing.
'I dog-eared and highlighted the crap out of that book,' Murphy said. 'While I don't go to all the places Deneen goes, it opened my eyes as to how the market fundamentalism that had creeped into the Democratic Party had really corrupted the country's soul.'
'But then I went a step further,' Murphy continued, 'and started spending time listening to the Red Scare, and reading Curtis Yarvin, and going through the stuff that the Claremont Institute was producing.' He came to feel that the new right—skeptical of free-market libertarianism and eager to use state power to impose its values on American institutions, including Big Business—was asking the right questions, even if its answers were alarming. 'What I was hearing and what I was reading was a conservative movement that was actually spending real time trying to understand the spiritual crisis that the country was in,' Murphy said. 'Listen: Blake Masters is a creepy weirdo, but a lot of the stuff he was getting into in 2022—about the emptiness of American life when all that matters is how much you buy and how good a consumer you are—really, it spoke to me.'
Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism
Where Deneen critiqued liberalism as such, Murphy, like others on the left, saw the culprit as neo liberalism, the philosophy that favors private-sector solutions and defines good policy largely in terms of total economic growth. Neoliberal Democrats, according to their critics, had placed too much faith in free markets, relied too heavily on welfare programs to compensate the economy's have-nots, and overlooked the political perils of concentrated wealth. The Biden administration thus sought to break from neoliberal ideas in key ways: reviving tough antitrust enforcement and consumer protection, strongly supporting labor unions, and directing huge sums of public money into domestic manufacturing. In his Atlantic essay, Murphy argued that this agenda provided Democrats a way to defeat Trump by selling 'a new, winning message of actionable economic nationalism.'
This is not quite what happened.
Opinions differ on why the 2024 presidential election went so wrong for Democrats. One school of thought holds that Biden had been a fool to reject neoliberalism in the first place. 'Policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions,' Jason Furman, an influential centrist Democratic economist, wrote in a postelection essay titled 'The Post-Neoliberal Delusion.'
The other possibility is that the theory was sound, but the implementation wasn't. Perhaps voters would have rewarded the Biden administration if they hadn't been so upset about inflation—a post-pandemic phenomenon that triggered anti-incumbent backlash in democracies around the world and that the administration was slow to recognize as an emergency. Or perhaps what sank Democrats was the fact that, thanks to the slowly turning gears of government, most of Biden's concrete achievements—new infrastructure, reduced drug prices, and so on—had not materialized by the end of his term. (We can set aside the obvious problem of having a president so ravaged by age that he had to abandon his reelection campaign. Opinions don't really differ about that.)
Murphy believes that the decisive factor was communication: The administration failed to sell its own record. 'Nobody knew what Lina Khan was doing,' he told me, referring to the Biden-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission whose aggressive agenda drew the enmity of much of corporate America (and for whom I briefly worked before joining The Atlantic). 'Nobody understood that the president actually was in the process of breaking up concentrated corporate power.'
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As the nominee, Kamala Harris seemed unwilling to lean into a populist economic message. Two moments crystallized the lost opportunity for Murphy: One was when rumors swirled that Harris intended, as president, to reward her Silicon Valley supporters by firing Khan—rumors that Harris did not dispel. Another was when Harris proposed a ban on supermarket price gouging as a way to address voter anger over food costs. That plan was mocked by many economists and pundits, including liberal ones, who insisted that capping the prices businesses can charge for essential goods would lead to Soviet-style shortages. The campaign subsequently downplayed the proposal.
Ali Mortell, the director of research at Blue Rose Research, a leading Democratic-strategy firm, told me that a campaign ad in which Harris promised to 'crack down on landlords who are charging too much' and 'lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers' was in the top 1 percent of effectiveness among the many thousands of ads her firm has tested. But for whatever reason, the ad 'was not necessarily what received the most airtime,' Mortell said. An analysis published by Jacobin found that Harris mentioned economically populist themes and policies less and less as the campaign went along. When asked during her first and only 2024 presidential debate whether Americans were better off financially than they had been four years earlier, Harris offered a stultifyingly dry sales pitch for what she called her 'opportunity economy,' which seemed to consist exclusively of tax cuts.
In Murphy's diagnosis, Democratic politicians must adopt a more confrontational style in which 'you tell people who's screwing them'—which is to say, giant corporations that wield their power to raise prices, nickel-and-dime consumers, and corrupt the government (and, in the case of tech companies, to addict our children to harmful social-media feeds). For Harris, that would have meant addressing grocery inflation by talking about collusion among monopolistic food companies. Instead, the administration 'chose to just take it on the chin, over and over again, on inflation,' Murphy said. I asked why he thought that was. He was silent for a moment before saying, in an almost pained whisper, 'I don't know.'
If pugilistic economic populism is such effective politics, shouldn't Bernie Sanders be president right now? Maybe his problem was the S-word. Maybe a type of populism that aimed at fixing capitalism, rather than replacing it with socialism, would perform better—except that's what Elizabeth Warren tried in 2020. For her troubles, she got to split a New York Times endorsement with Amy Klobuchar and finished behind Sanders in the primary.
But a lot of other things were going on back then. Social-justice issues dominated Democratic politics. Warren and Sanders were among the 2020 primary candidates who declared their support for unpopular left-wing positions such as decriminalizing border crossings, banning fracking, and abolishing private health insurance. To this day, the public overwhelmingly perceives the Democratic Party as caring more about progressive social causes than economic ones.
Murphy puts forward a version of an argument that has been advanced by the likes of Steve Bannon and J. D. Vance: that millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities are to the left of the GOP on economics and to the right of Democrats on social issues, and whichever party can occupy that sweet spot will reap major benefits. 'The race is really a matter of whether Republicans become more genuinely economically populist before Democrats open up their tent and accept in folks who aren't with us on every single issue, from abortion to climate to guns,' he said. This approach cuts against both the economic self-interest and the cultural preferences of much of the Democratic donor base. But it seems to have worked for some swing-district Democrats, including Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Representative Pat Ryan of New York, social moderates who emphasized anti-corporate themes and ran far ahead of Harris in their congressional districts last year.
The political writer Matthew Yglesias has accused Murphy of ' dog whistle moderation ' for implying that Democrats are too 'woke' without actually saying anything anti-woke. It's true that Murphy does not offer any particular culture-war takes that defy progressive orthodoxy, perhaps because his record as a blue-state liberal makes this improbable. His critique is more about tone and emphasis.
'It's not just about that specific message of attacking corporate power,' he said. 'It is also about having the discipline to spend 80 percent of your time on that message.' This is hard for Democratic politicians, who are much more comfortable talking about social issues. 'Climate, guns, choice, gay rights, voting rights: Every single one of those issues is existential for an important community. But I think right now, if you aren't driving the vast majority of your narrative around the way in which the economy is going to become corrupted to enrich the elites, then you aren't going to be able to capture this potential realignment of the American electorate that's up for grabs.'
'And listen—I own part of that responsibility,' he added. 'I spent a lot of time trying to convince my party to spend more and more time talking about guns.'
In my conversations with him, I got the sense that Murphy was better at making the case for populism than at actually doing populism. Perhaps because he came to it relatively recently, he seems at times to still be trying on the ideas. Unlike Sanders or Warren, he doesn't slip naturally into detailed, outraged explanations of how the economy has gone wrong. Even in his essays, he tends to hover at the level of abstract ideas.
And Murphy's economic argument, given its overlap with the intellectual movement surrounding Trump, exists in some tension with his effort to whip up opposition to the real-life Trump agenda. Murphy recognizes this dynamic. 'I struggle with the question of how much time to be explaining that tariffs aren't always bad,' he said. 'That seems like wasted energy right now, because the way he's doing them is definitely bad.' To the wing of the party that thinks Bidenomics was a catastrophic blunder, agonizing over whether Trump has a point on the downsides of free trade is political insanity. Yglesias, for example, argues that Murphy's embrace of 'pseudoeconomics' is the exact wrong way to broaden the Democratic tent. Better to celebrate cheap goods as the key to prosperity and return to the more corporate-friendly, growth-oriented approach of the Clinton and Obama eras.
Murphy is trying to prevent his colleagues from giving in to that temptation. But he faces skepticism from a party that is still uncomfortable with class-conscious politics. 'There has always been a resistance to what very rich people call the demonization of wealth,' he said. 'Part of the pushback is the idea that it's a mistake to talk about the dangers of concentrated wealth, because it feels like that's an attack on wealth, and people want to be wealthy. I think that's a legitimate criticism, but I think we have to explain that the current structure of power in this country is a barrier to people becoming wealthy. I'd like to have fewer billionaires and a lot more millionaires.'