Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has made it a personal crusade to move these challenges to the forefront of politics, told me he sees “a lot of room between right and left to work hard” on these questions.
This has now taken the form of an alliance with Republican Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah to convene “a national conversation” under the rubric “restoring the common good.” A small group of prominent intellectuals and activists ranging from progressive to conservative held its first meeting in Utah on Friday.
It is worth briefly interrupting the news about a certain trial in New York and ludicrous claims that presidents don’t have to obey the law to celebrate this effort to do politics differently.
Their initiative matters as a signal that parts of both the left and right are reconfiguring politics around communitarian themes. By focusing on deep personal dissatisfactions, they are also offering an explanation for the disconnect between the good news of a nation where “the unemployment rate is low, crime is going down, GDP is growing,” as Murphy put it, and the unhappiness so many Americans express.
Murphy and Cox initially came together because of their mutual desire to respond to the damage that cellphones and social media are doing to children and teens. In the process, Murphy told me, they realized they shared a “common worry that this country feels like it’s falling apart at the seams emotionally and spiritually.”
If that sounds grand or even theological, the specific forms of suffering that alarm Murphy and Cox are tangible and heartbreaking — from “deaths of despair” caused by suicide and drug overdoses to the collapse of communities that lost their economic purpose. “We had more opioid prescriptions than people in some of these counties,” Cox said in an interview, referring to rural parts of his state.
Murphy is emphatic in distinguishing their effort from the usual bipartisan confab. “This is not intended to be some milquetoast, moderate, let’s-all-get-along conversation,” he says. “This is about trying to push right and left into a … conversation about why so many Americans are feeling bad and some of the really big things we may have to do together to fix that.”
What could turn this conversation into a larger challenge to the status quo are the links Murphy and Cox draw between the social breakdown often highlighted on the right and the economic injustices that engage the left.
Ian Marcus Corbin, a philosopher at Harvard Medical School and architect of the initiative, says the emphasis on the material roots of personal struggles distinguishes this era’s communitarians from their forebears. “You pull out the economic foundation of a community,” he told me, “and family formation goes haywire, and all sorts of social pathologies — drug abuse, loneliness, alienation and anti-social behavior — emerge.”
Murphy speaks of how “concentrated power is driving Americans crazy,” the need to “grow bipartisan coalitions around breaking up monopolies and big companies that have way too much power in our economic lives,” and the imperative to recognize that there are “some sacred places where efficiency and profit shouldn’t govern.”
Cox has pioneered a call on Americans to “disagree better” — meaning to argue substantively without holding each other in contempt — and he expects to have some disagreements with Murphy about “the proper role of government” in the economy. But, Cox added, “I think he and I will find agreements that when there are major economic changes to a community, that does lead to some of these deaths of despair, this hopelessness that we’re seeing.” Repairing the social damage will require public action to “help build more resilient neighborhoods and economies.”
Murphy and Cox also have different (but not diametrically opposed) perspectives on the fiercely contested presidential campaign in the backdrop of their dialogue. Murphy is a staunch supporter of President Biden, whom he credits with pushing “transformational policies.” Cox is critical of both Biden and former president Donald Trump. “We should be nominating different people,” Cox said earlier this year.
Yet both insist the nation needs to pay attention to the discontent Trump has exposed. “I guess we can thank him for that, and nothing else,” Murphy said. Cox said that to move forward, the country must figure out why so many voters used Trump as an opportunity “to throw a brick through the window.”
Democracies can founder when they fail to address festering social wounds. These bipartisan partners are standing up for the democratic project by insisting that we can’t ignore them any longer.
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