Democrats are stumbling — badly. While the Trump administration redefines the limits of executive overreach, the Democratic Party remains at odds over how to — even whether to — respond. But Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has a plan for beating Republicans in 2026, and it involves taking a cue from President Trump. He shares it with Ross Douthat on this episode of “Interesting Times.”
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Ross Douthat: Senator Murphy, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Chris Murphy: They are interesting times. Thanks for having me.
Douthat: That’s right. Well, we paid you extra to confirm that for us.
Murphy: [Chuckles.]
Douthat: Senator, you’re joining me from the bowels of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Murphy: I am in what they call my “hideaway” office, so I’m in the basement of the Capitol right now. You may hear some bells going off here during our conversation as the votes for the day get called.
Douthat: All right, terrific. That will give us some real urgency behind this conversation.
I want to jump right in and talk about your party and the state of the Democrats, because we just marked 100 days of the second Trump administration. The media was full of takes on those hundred days, how Trump was doing, how the White House is governing.
I want to ask you about the Democrats’ first 100 days. What do you think of your party’s performance since Donald Trump was inaugurated?
Murphy: I don’t know that anyone was ready for Trump in his second term. I think there was an assumption, both in the public and within the Democratic Party, that Trump 2 would look very much like Trump 1, that it’d be a lot of rhetoric and bluster, but it wouldn’t be matched with actual action.
Things have gone very different from how the public imagined — and from how the party imagined. Trump from Day 1 began to wage a very coordinated, thoughtful assault on the rule of law in order to enable the transfer of our government from democracy into some form of quasi-democracy, to put his billionaire friends in charge. I just don’t know that the Democratic Party was ready. I think, even to this day, a lot of folks in the party still think this is politics as normal, still think that we’re really not at risk of losing our democracy, that we’re going to have an election in 2026, and that if we just continue to push his approval ratings down bit by bit, that everything will turn out OK.
I think that the broad public has been very dissatisfied with the Democrats’ reaction, and that’s in part why you see approval ratings for the party in the toilet. Slowly, I think the party is beginning to understand that democracy itself is at risk and that there’s really no benefit in playing ball.
So our response is getting better, it’s getting more precise, but there is still an open discussion inside the Democratic Party as to how urgent this moment is. I’m not sure which side is going to win. I think if my side — the side that believes it is five-alarm urgent — doesn’t win, we might not actually have an election that Democrats can compete in 2026.
Douthat: As an outsider to Democratic Party debates, it doesn’t seem to me like the party went easy on the argument that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in 2024. This was obviously a centerpiece of Joe Biden’s arguments in the midterms and before he ultimately dropped out of the race. And while there were various different Harris-Walz messages over the course of the campaign, democracy ended up being a big part of the closing argument.
One, what makes you say that Democrats weren’t ready for a thing that your standard bearers were campaigning on? And two, just as a political matter, Democrats did lose with a version of that message just four to six months ago — however long it was. Time has changed a bit.
On both fronts, why didn’t that message land? And why would it be the right message for Democrats right now?
Murphy: I don’t actually know the answer to the first question. If Democrats ran telling the public that Donald Trump was going to be a threat immediately to democracy, why did Democrats not stand up a more effective, more urgent response immediately? I think losing to Trump for the second time, when Trump had openly advertised to the public that he was going to try to degrade our democracy, I think it was a body blow to Democrats. And I think there was just in those early days a real lack of energy.
I didn’t understand why, when he pardoned all of the Jan. 6 protesters, there wasn’t a more immediate response. A day later there was a proposal to speed through the Senate the nomination of the director of the C.I.A., and Democrats were all ready to fall in line, not understanding that this was an opportunity to make an argument over why Trump was actually terrible for national security, and why he didn’t care about the security of this country when he was authorizing his followers to engage in mass violence against our democracy.
To the extent that the country voted for him, having listened to him say that he was going to be a dictator on Day 1, I think that explanation is pretty easy: They just didn’t believe him. They believed him when he said he was going to be serious about lowering prices. They didn’t believe him when he said he was going to be a dictator. They remembered that he said similar things in the first term but didn’t really act on them.
I think the reason that his disapproval ratings are going up so fast is that a lot of his own voters are now coming to the realization that he didn’t mean it when he said that he was going to tackle prices, and the thing he was serious about was dismantling our democracy. And that’s not exactly how they read his rhetoric during the campaign.
Douthat: What is it that you think Democrats should be doing, then? What is the strategy, given that obviously Democrats don’t have a majority in the House or in the Senate? You already mentioned the idea, it sounds like, of slowing down Trump’s nominations to various cabinet agencies. You’ve obviously had figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing a politics of rallying, basically, around the country. What more is there that an engaged Democratic Party focused on the threat to democracy in Washington, D.C., would be doing right now?
Murphy: Yeah, it’s a long list. As I said at the outset, I think we’re checking off more boxes as the weeks go by. The first is: You need to meet his flooding of the zone, as they say, with your own flooding of the zone. We’ve got to be producing as much content as he is, and we need to be expressing outrage every single day. There’s this popular meme that you should reserve your outrage, and that if you show too much of it, you’ll tire people out. That’s not how he operates. Every single day he is doing something exceptional. He is pushing buttons. Democrats have to every single day respond with a sense of urgency and emergency and just produce the same amount of content he is.
Second, we have to be willing to engage in more risk-tolerant tactics. He’s engaged in all sorts of risk-tolerant tactics, but we’re still afraid of doing things that might boomerang and hurt us. That’s why we didn’t boycott the State of the Union speech en masse, as I think we should have done. That’s why at least 10 or 12 Democrats refused to vote against their continuing resolution, because shutting down the government might have gone badly for Democrats. But if you’re not taking exceptional tactical steps in the opposition right now, then you’re not providing any inspiration for people out there in the public to engage in the risk-taking that will be necessary to save the Republic when we need hundreds of thousands of people to mobilize on the streets.
If I just give one suggestion on the policy front, one of the reasons the pro-democracy message did not work in 2024 — and I agree, it was the tent pole of the Harris campaign — is because Democrats aren’t seen as credible. Let me say this a different way: Democrats can’t really argue for this version of democracy because people think this version of democracy is rigged in favor of the billionaires and the special interests, and they’re not really interested in protecting this version of democracy. For Democrats to credibly argue against Trump’s destruction of democracy, we have to make it credible that if we win power, we will unrig the democracy. That means Democrats have to talk a lot more about campaign finance reform, getting a constitutional amendment to get all private money out of politics, things like the STOCK Act, or closing the revolving door of lobbyists and staff and members of Congress.
We’ve got to have a real focus on the way in which we would fix democracy if you give us power. In the last 10 years, I would argue that that set of issues was never Top 10, certainly not Top 5 for Democrats. It’s got to be Top 2 now, because that’s the only way that you’ll convince people that are starting to get pretty tired and pretty worried about Trump’s assault on democratic norms.
Douthat: Are any of those issues actually Top 1, Top 2 or Top 3 for voters? Because it seems to me that if you look at Trump’s relative unpopularity at the moment, it’s heavily driven by pocketbook concerns, by anxieties over tariffs and trade wars and their effect on people’s incomes. To the extent that a lot of the cuts that Elon Musk and DOGE have done — or tried to do — have been unpopular, it’s because they’ve been touching on places like Social Security that obviously are crucial to Americans’ sense of their own economic security.
Whereas talking about insider trading by members of Congress, talking about campaign finance reform — those aren’t bread-and-butter economic issues. They may be part of a plausible narrative about what’s gone wrong in our democracy, but if you’re trying to speak to voters who — like, if I look at the polls right now, Donald Trump has become substantially more unpopular since he took office. Democrats have not become substantially more popular. So it seems like there has to be some other missing element to a democratic narrative beyond just attacking insider trading and self-dealing and corruption.
Murphy: Right, which is why I say it has to be a Top 2 issue. The first issue is how Democrats would unrig the economy.
Douthat: Right.
Murphy: But the only way you’ll ——
Douthat: So talk about that. How do you unrig the economy from the point of view of the Democratic Party?
Murphy: Let me make the connection first ——
Douthat: Sure.
Murphy: Which is that one of the only ways you unrig the economy is to unrig the way the government works, in which the special interests and the billionaires get everything they want out of government. The reason that the economy is rigged is because the government is rigged. It’s because the way in which campaigns are financed means that the billionaires and the corporations get a seat at the table and you don’t. If you are interested in changing the structure of the economy so that small businesses get a chance to compete or wages actually rise or workers don’t get abused in their workplace, then you have to fundamentally unrig the way that government works. The two are intimately connected.
I would argue, Ross, that there are plenty of examples of elections that actually have turned on the issue of corruption, because it’s a base-line issue. People don’t care about corruption until they’re looking in the face of a corrupt elected official, and then, regardless of your positioning on economics or immigration or choice or guns, they will vote you out.
On this question of how you unrig the economy — I’ll just start with this, and I’m sure we’ll have a longer discussion about it — Democratic economic policy during the Biden administration, I would argue, was very heavily reliant on subsidy. The child care tax credit, the increased Obamacare subsidies, the forgiveness of student loans, essentially a whole bunch of efforts to write families a check in order to paper over the unfairness of the economy: I don’t think that’s actually what voters want. Those are good economic policies, but they feel kind of dirty, kind of lousy to have to be compensated for the fact that work doesn’t pay, that my inputs don’t match my outputs.
Which is why that has to be the structure of our efforts to unrig the economy: making work pay. That means a much higher minimum wage. That means much more empowered labor unions. That means the deconstruction of corporate power, so that if you do start up a small bookstore in your community, you don’t get squashed out of existence in the first week. A suite and a set of policies that say to families: If you play by the rules, you are going to have a much better shot of getting ahead than you did under the old rules.
Douthat: Do you think that there’s some overlap here between the way that certain kinds of right-wing populists talk about the economy? Because it’s striking to me that when I hear what try to be the more sophisticated arguments for something like the tariff regime that Donald Trump has been pushing and trying to impose, they don’t sound exactly like the case you made, but they are somewhat similar. There’s an argument that the economy is structurally unfair because under the influence of big corporations, we entered into global arrangements with countries like China that have worked out well for the plutocrats, maybe pretty well for the upper class, and badly for the working class.
I think a lot of right-wing populists would also say it’s not enough to just write checks. If you’ve hollowed out the industrial heartland, people don’t want a check, they want a job, they want their industries back, and so on.
Is there a parallel — obviously you think that the substance is different — but is there a parallel there between the Chris Murphy agenda and, let’s say, the Steve Bannon agenda, particularly on this idea that the structure of the economy is unfair to the working class?
Murphy: Oh, absolutely. And more than that, I think the fundamental underlying story of American politics today is this realignment that is happening, a new consensus of American voters that is looking for a home. It is really a question of whether the Republican Party becomes more sincerely populist and tolerant of more government intervention in the market before the Democratic Party decides to be a big tent, in which we allow into the party people who might not agree with us on social and cultural issues or guns and climate but do believe in things like a higher minimum wage, more empowered labor unions and industrial policy.
The Republican Party has recently been talking a big game on populism but has not delivered. In fact, the way in which Trump is implementing the tariffs seems to be just another nod to former market-based neoliberalism, in which the companies with the biggest megaphones and the biggest bank accounts get exemptions from the tariffs, and those without political power are subject to the tariffs. The Democratic Party has a chance to use this fake populism to win over a chunk of his base, but only if we are less judgmental about the differences that may exist inside that tent on really tough issues like gay rights and abortion and guns.
And Ross, I’m partially to blame for that judgmentalism, because I think I helped, for instance, frame our litmus test on the issue of guns in a way that probably has been unhelpful to building a broader coalition for the Democratic Party.
Douthat: Yeah, let’s get into your personal responsibility for everything that’s gone wrong with the Democratic Party ——
Murphy: [Chuckles.]
Douthat: Or not your personal responsibility, but let’s call it your geographical responsibility, because you and I, we’re both from Connecticut. Where did you grow up?
Murphy: In Wethersfield, just south of Hartford ——
Douthat: Just south of Hartford, which, for those who don’t know Connecticut geography intimately, is a beautiful, Colonial-era town with all these houses from the 1700s. If you’ve read the children’s novel “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” that’s set in Wethersfield.
Murphy: That’s right, yes.
Douthat: It’s the kind of place where you can go and do drawings of gravestones from the 1680s and all these kinds of things.
Murphy: The largest collection of preserved 17th- and 18th-century houses, I think, in the country.
Douthat: If you drive through it, you will believe it.
Murphy: Yeah.
Douthat: So, I like Weathersfield. I like Connecticut. It’s a beautiful state. But it does often seem to me like the perfect embodiment of a kind of liberal or left-of-center politics that you personally seem to be saying is part of what’s wrong with the Democratic Party.
Just in my lifetime — I grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s, and at that point there was still a residual Rockefeller Republican, upper-class Republican base in the state. If you went down to the richest towns closest to New York, you found a lot of Republicans, and if you went to the more middle-class areas, you found a lot of Democrats.
Since then, the state has generally moved to the left. But the way the Democratic Party works in Connecticut is you have rich people who’ve become more Democratic, close to New York, in finance and industries connected to finance. You have university towns, like New Haven, where I live, which have a lot of academic liberals, and then you have some very poor cities — Bridgeport and Hartford, notably. What you don’t have is a big middle- to working-class Democratic constituency. The rural parts of the state are quite Trumpy, and in the towns near me — the lower-middle-class and working-class towns — at the very least they’re purple, they’re not blue.
This is the coalition. This Connecticut is, in a way, the modern democratic coalition. I guess the straightforward question is: Are you saying that the Democrats need to reject the Connecticut model of Democratic politics?
Murphy: [Chuckles.] Well ——
Douthat: Tread carefully with your re-election.
Murphy: Yeah. I think you are describing the demographic makeup of Connecticut, which is, right now, well matched with this version of the Democratic Party. What I’m arguing for is an enduring coalition that perhaps unites the 60 percent of voters in Connecticut that are voting Democratic, along with some meaningful slice of the 40 percent of Democrats in Connecticut that aren’t.
If the Democratic Party was to, let’s say, become more tolerant of views that are outside our social and cultural mainstream, would we lose voters that are currently in our coalition? I’m not sure that we would. Would we be able to pick up some slice of Trump’s base that now see him handing the government over to his billionaire friends and are willing to vote for Democrats who support industrial policy and a higher minimum wage, so long as they don’t feel like they are being judged and looked down upon for their views on transgender girls in sports? That’s my theory of the case, that you are not necessarily going to lose folks that are already in your coalition; you’ll just build a bigger, more enduring coalition, especially if the Republican Party doesn’t. You’ll learn from what’s happening right now and actually grapple with real populism versus fake populism.
Douthat: I agree that a bigger Democratic tent probably would not lose, let’s say, left-leaning voters in academic towns who have social issues litmus tests — we’ll get into, in a minute, some of the issues for Democrats around that movement — but what about the people who have moved into the Democratic coalition, who themselves represent the upper class, some version of the American oligarchy that you’re critiquing? Again, we don’t have to personalize it — we won’t say that they’re living in Greenwich or Darien or any particular town that you might have to fund-raise in — but aren’t you imagining that there are voters who would be comfortable voting for the Democrats under conditions where they aren’t seen as a party fighting plutocracy, let’s say, who might be alienated? There has to be some interest group in the current Democratic coalition who would be alienated by the shifts you have in mind.
Murphy: I think there’s some truth to that. I mean, what I argue for is that the Democratic Party should be more overtly populist and more pugilistic, more confrontational in its populism — meaning that you are more regularly naming the individuals, the organizations and the companies that are screwing voters; that we might become more overtly antagonistic to tech companies; that we might be more willing to name individual health care companies and pharmaceutical companies that are price gouging; that we would explain what the takeover of our health care system by the private equity industry is going to mean for quality and prices.
If we did that, yes, you’re right, we would probably lose some piece of our coalition. There would probably be a handful of voters in Greenwich, Conn. — I’ll name it, right? — that would be unhappy with the way in which we were calling out and naming certain companies or certain industries that were harming voters.
I think the net benefit to the party of that kind of confrontational politics of explaining who’s screwing you — which is what voters want, they want you to explain who’s screwing them — and an opening up of the tent would net far more voters into the coalition than it would lose in a group of very, very wealthy individuals who were probably with us only because of Trump’s ethical problems and social issues that they were — that made them very distasteful.
Douthat: Or some of these voters — and I know some of these voters — were with you precisely because of the issue with which you started this conversation: the dangers posed by Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. And it seems like one reason that the Democrats maybe have shied away from some forms of economic populism is that they felt like they were building a coalition around issues of protecting democracy and republican norms. That is certainly part of how you end up with figures like Liz Cheney involved in Democratic campaigns, and so on.
Do you think there’s any tension between, you’re trying to put together the populist, anti-oligarchy message and the it’s-an-emergency-for-our-democracy message? Can you make those two fit together?
Murphy: Well, the bet that Kamala Harris made in 2024 was that the democracy coalition would be bigger and stronger than the populist coalition. That’s why Liz Cheney was inside the tent, not outside the tent. That was a bad bet in 2024. They were wrong. Whether or not a different coalition based around a more confrontational populism would’ve won the election, we’ll never know.
It is true that the threat is now much more real. You can make the argument that a coalition really focused on saving democracy might be bigger today because folks now know that he is truly serious. That’s probably a prescription to win the House back; it’s not really a prescription to win any meaningful enduring majority in the Senate. In the Senate, we need to win states like Missouri and Iowa. And in those places, I just don’t think you can be competitive unless you are picking up those pieces of the Trump base that do want a more robust government role in the economy to make it fair, but who aren’t necessarily with us on those social and cultural issues.
That’s why I argue that you should risk losing a handful of people who think that the economic message is too spicy — or at least push them to make a decision as to whether they care enough about democracy to stay in the coalition, even if it maybe is even more apparent now that they might have to pay a little bit higher tax rate or their company might get broken up a little faster if it’s too big, if Democrats win.
Douthat: I want to come back to some of those questions about democratic strategy, but let’s talk now about some of the voters you think Democrats need to win. I think clearly Democrats do need to be able to win Senate races in states that right now are reddish, red tilting, and so on. Certainly that’s the case if Democrats are going to win back the Senate in 2026. One of the arguments that you’ve made — and you made it especially before the last election — is that part of what has alienated working-class, lower-middle-class American voters at the moment isn’t just class issues alone. It’s not just economic policy in and of itself. You’ve also talked about the idea of a social-cultural crisis in American life. You’ve described the crisis as a spiritual unspooling — loneliness and disconnection and uncertainty — that’s pervasive in American life. I have thoughts on that, but I want you to give me more thoughts. Tell me more about what you see as the spiritual crisis in American life right now.
Murphy: You know, the Declaration of Independence is a radical document for a number of reasons, but maybe the most radical phrase in that founding document is that the government owes a right to its citizens to pursue happiness. The underlying assumption is that the government has a responsibility not to deliver you the last mile toward a happy, meaningful life, but to set the conditions upon which individuals can pursue happiness.
It is true that this is a much less happy nation than at any time before in recorded data. We are a much more lonely nation and a much more disconnected nation. I think it’s OK for leaders to talk about that, and the fact that there are more people waking up every day who don’t feel a sense of purpose like they may have 50 or 60 years ago.
I think this is a conversation that either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party could have, but right now, in a vacuum, lies opportunity. That’s why I think, for instance, a real robust conversation about the regulation of technology is there for the taking, because I do think that folks think that technology is overwhelming their lives. People are not happy with the replacement of in-person experience with virtual experience, and they don’t really know which party cares more about protecting them from the rough edges of technology. Both parties have been corrupted, frankly, by too close an experience — politically and culturally — with the technology companies. Neither party is really willing to make a break.
But there is likely a real winning political message in talking about how we can incentivize in-person experience and in-person communion and disincentivize virtual experience, because that’s in part what is leading to folks waking up every day and feeling pretty [expletive]. There’s been a 60 percent reduction in the amount of time that we spend with friends and companions in the last 20 years. That’s extraordinary. Giving people a route back to the things that used to make them happy and explaining what role government plays in that, I think, is an important policy discussion — and probably a winning political discussion.
Douthat: What role does government play in that question specifically? I’ll get to some distinct questions about spiritual crisis in a minute, but just on the question of how people experience the internet — which, I completely agree, is responsible for at least a certain degree of unhappiness and even derangement in American life right now — it seems like Democrats have a narrative that you gestured at earlier in this conversation, where the problem with Big Tech is that it’s so big, it’s monopolies, and it’s corrupting the government in various ways. But the problem with doomscrolling on social media is not a problem of monopoly power. If you split up TikTok into 15 tiny little TikToks, that would not necessarily improve mental well-being, and if anything, they would be in fierce competition with each other to hook your children’s eyeballs more intently.
I’m curious what you think is the distinctive political response to, let’s call it a problem of technological addiction in American life. What is government actually supposed to do about that?
Murphy: Yeah, I agree with you that it’s a distinct problem. When I think about the factors that contribute to this spiritual unspooling, this unhappiness in America — I mean, I’m sure I don’t have it right and I’m sure I’m missing things — but I think about one bucket, which is a loss of economic control and agency over your life, one bucket that is loneliness and disconnection from community, one bucket that is just frustration with technology and how a handful of elites are winning and everybody else is losing, and then the last being a real frustration with market fundamentalism and a replacement of consumerism for citizenship.
The technology bucket is its own bucket, and there lies some fairly easy fixes. The first thing that government could do is just make it a lot harder for your kids to get addicted to the algorithm. And if fewer kids were addicted to the algorithm, then, when they turned 18, I think they’d at least have a fighting chance, because they would’ve spent a lot more time learning how to build friendships and create conversations and talk to strangers when they were kids. This also speaks to the lack of control that a lot of people feel today. One of the primary ways that parents feel out of control is that they have no idea what’s going on when their kids are up in their bedroom looking at their phones.
Government could play a really simple role here. We could say: No child under 13 should be on social media, and we’re going to have strict age verification; the algorithm cannot turn on until you become 18 years old; and we would hold the companies responsible for building verification systems, and if we saw widespread abuse of those systems, those companies could be held accountable. That would, first, put more kids in touch with each other and get them off their screens, and that would be good for kids. It would give parents a sense that they’re back in charge — they decide whether their child is on social media and what sites, not their kid. And it would lift the spiritual health of the country in multiple ways. That’s something that I think is good for the country and that one party could choose to run on more strongly than the other party. Right now, it’s muddled. Nobody knows whether the Democrats or the Republicans are for that.
Douthat: I think that that is a set of issues and ideas that already has a certain degree of bipartisan purchase ——
Murphy: It does.
Douthat: And you see Glenn Youngkin in Virginia signing bills about cellphones in schools and these kinds of things. I do think, though, it is an upper-middle-class to upper-class fixation or source of interest right now.
When I look at the wider landscape of American life, yes, of course there are parents who are anxious about how much time their kids are spending on phones. There’s also a lot of parents and communities where the phone is a tether. You don’t have strong institutions like churches and local associations and so on. You don’t have as many two-parent families — you have a lot of parents raising kids as single parents, raising kids in difficult situations — and especially in those environments, I think people see the benefits of the phone. It’s like, OK, I know where my kid is, I’m connected to my kid, all of these things.
I both wonder how much appetite there is for this regulation in that population — which is, by the way, again, part of the population you think Democrats need to win — but I also think it’s connected to issues that are also connected to any spiritual and cultural crisis that Democrats also are challenged to figure out exactly how to talk about. If you think there’s a spiritual crisis in America, guess what? Religion and churchgoing and church attendance have been in decline for a substantial period of time. Guess what? Two-parent families have been in decline for a substantial period of time. Now birthrates are in decline, and so on.
Those are issues, again, where, one, it’s hard to know what the policy response is, but there are also issues where Democrats are not at all perceived as the party of the two-parent family, the party of religion, and so on. There are plenty of religious Democrats, but it’s not the party’s brand.
I’m curious if there’s anything you think Democrats can do differently — or a way they can talk differently — that is responsive to the sense that family and religion are declining.
Murphy: Well, listen, I’ll think about the predicate to that question. I’m not actually sure I buy that lower-income families care less about their children’s cellphone addiction. Frankly, some of my ——
Douthat: I’m speculating, I admit it.
Murphy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of my experience actually speaks to the opposite, in that when you have to work 60 hours a week or two jobs or weekends, your kids are on their own more often than not. It’s sometimes those parents, they rely on the phone, they do — but they worry more.
To your question, though: Yes, part of what we have to admit is that people have become untethered to institutions that used to give them both companionship and meaning. If you want to know why we are in a spiritual state of disrepair in this country, you don’t have to look much further than this rapid diminution of membership in both churches and labor unions, two big institutions that in the early part of last century provided a lot of meaning and connection for people in this country.
I think it’s OK for Democrats to say we’d be better off as a country if more people affiliated with institutions, and that list includes religious institutions. Let’s have a conversation as a country about how we can help make religious institutions more healthy. As Democrats, we can support more grants and more public funding going to help keep the doors of religious institutions open. When we talk about wages, we could talk about how wages are connected to free time and leisure time and say, as a party, we value people having the time on a weekday evening or a weekend day to be part of a church community — or to be part of any other social or cultural institution where people find companionship.
I think Democrats, yes, have been very reluctant to engage in talk about church and religious life, but I think that’s wrong from a policy perspective and from a political perspective.
Douthat: But also, it’s just because a lot of Democrats are less likely to be religious. Again, there are many, many religious Democrats, but at the elite level of American politics, if you’re talking about people who run campaigns — and increasingly, to some degree, people who hold elected office — one reason Democrats are less comfortable talking about religion is it’s hard to talk about religion effectively when you’re not especially religious. I certainly think there was an element of this in Kamala Harris’s campaign, and that seems like a real hurdle and difficulty for Democrats to overcome.
I’m curious: Just in your own life, do you feel a sense of spiritual crisis or malaise or disconnection personally?
Murphy: Well, I’m thinking about your question. I mean, I don’t know that Republicans are more willing to use religion in their talk because of their own personal experience with religion. I just think they are more willing to use it as a mechanism to try to exploit fissures in our communities. Jesus talked a whole lot more about caring for the poor than he did marginalizing people who come from different countries or speak different languages, and yet Republicans tend to talk more about religion as a foundation of their policy motives.
For me, I mean, I have made tries — often unsuccessful, frankly — in the last couple of years to rejoin a religious life. I was active in a church group when I was growing up. My youth and adolescence was filled with church experiences that have defined me ——
Douthat: Which church? How were you brought up?
Murphy: Congregational.
Douthat: The most Connecticut.
Murphy: The most New England, yeah. And church was the place where I learned selflessness. I learned to care about my neighbors. That moment in church every Sunday morning when you turn to the strangers next to you and introduce yourself was an important reminder to me that even if I didn’t know somebody, I still should care about them and they were part of my community.
I do feel like I’ve lost something as I have strayed from structured religious life. And I will admit, I still have not found a church home as I have turned into my 50s, but I’ve been searching.
Douthat: Why has that been unsuccessful? I’m really curious.
Murphy: Part of it is a familiar story to a lot of other busy families out there: just time. The fact of the matter is I’ve got two kids whose Sunday mornings are often dominated by travel sports. I am a politician, so I’m on the road many weekends, and I find myself having very few open Sunday mornings.
I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of families in this country, that — either through work or other family commitments — that Sunday morning time is just not as sacred as it used to be. So the lack of free time, leisure time, outside of your work schedule and your family schedule has made it hard for a lot of folks to connect with a variety of different kinds of institutions — not just churches, but other places where you might be able to find connection and some sense of common cause with people in your community.
Douthat: Do you think that God is disappointed in you?
Murphy: [Chuckles.] I guess I don’t ask that question very often. Listen, I struggle with my own personal thoughts about God and the afterlife, but I find that even if your beliefs lean toward secularism or deism or agnosticism, you can still find a lot of value in church.
Douthat: Maybe, certainly you can, to some degree. But if we’re talking about why do voters in Missouri or Tennessee or Nebraska, or any state where you’re imagining the Democratic Party winning more elections, why do they feel a certain cultural and spiritual connection to the Republican Party? Certainly you can say: Oh, the Republican Party is failing to be Christian in all kinds of ways — I will concede that there are ways that the Republican Party is failing to be Christian — but voters identify with people and parties and institutions. I think there is an inherent and inevitable identification that someone who gets themselves to church on Sunday morning because they’re afraid that God might otherwise be disappointed in them feels for a party that speaks that language.
I just imagine — again, you’re not running for Senate, obviously, in the states that you just said Democrats need to win — but it just seems like Democratic leaders need a religious language that’s somewhat different from the language you just gave me. The language you just gave me is very Connecticut. I hear that language all the time: Oh, I would like to go to church because I get a lot from it socially. OK, but when Barack Obama ran for president, he said, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states.” Can you say that for me?
Murphy: Well, you were asking ——
Douthat: No. Could you say, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states”? Would you say that?
Murphy: Well, I mean, we do, right? And I don’t have the common religious history that Barack Obama has, so I’m not going to speak the same ——
Douthat: It’s not a very Congregational thing to say, I will concede.
Murphy: Yes, I’m not going to speak the same language as Barack Obama, nor would I try. But no, you are correct in that the Democratic Party more broadly, I do think, has to get more comfortable with a language of spiritualism, and to not allow the Republican Party to own a monopoly on the ways in which policy connects to religious tenets.
As we spoke earlier, the Bible and Jesus’ story are full of mandates for communities to care about the plight of the dispossessed and the disempowered, the poorest and the weakest among us. So why aren’t Democrats more willing to talk about the spiritual imperative of Medicaid? Why aren’t Democrats willing to call out Republicans’ demonization of gay children based on a commandment for us to love our neighbors, regardless of their language or ethnicity or sexual orientation?
I think you’re right that Democrats shy away from that language, and maybe that’s because there are fewer elite Democrats that are spending time in church. I’m not sure that’s true, but it might be true ——
Douthat: Well, well, just in ——
Murphy: And you’re right that we should talk about it.
Douthat: In your case, you would be uncomfortable standing up in front of a crowd and saying: Brothers and sisters, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — who is real, and who will judge you after you die — commands you to love your neighbor in a way that means you should support Medicaid. It sounds like you would be uncomfortable with that spiel.
Murphy: Sure, I don’t know that I’d say it the way you just said it, but I don’t think that ——
Douthat: Right, but the way I would say it is the way I think that — if Democrats were serious about making the religious arguments you want them to make, they wouldn’t just say, “In the story of Jesus, we’re taught to care for the needy.” They would frame it as a divine imperative, and you need some belief to do that. I’m just trying to get at what I think is a limit that Democrats hit in these kinds of debates.
Murphy: Yeah, I’m not sure that I agree with you. I think that there is a secular moralism and a religious moralism that connect. And I think if you are lifting up a debate outside of the weeds of policy and talking about our common obligation to each other — our moral imperative to take care of our neighbors — even if you aren’t framing that in a specific religious doctrine, you are still speaking to religious voters. I don’t necessarily believe that you have got to talk in the way that you frame it, as a mechanism to connect with people who find their interest in policy as directly connected and derivative of their experience in religion.
Douthat: I have three more challenging questions for you; I’ll leave the metaphysical behind for a minute and go back to the practical and political. First, on this question of what’s wrong with the Trump administration, you’re putting together a couple of different arguments. You are saying there’s a threat to democracy and the American Republic from Trump, and that it is connected to Trump pursuing oligarchic policies and enriching his billionaire friends — a line that’s come up a lot, not just in your rhetoric but in Democratic rhetoric writ large. On that second point, is oligarchy really the right way to describe Trumpism as we see it right now?
Just to go through some of the issues that Trump is pushing, certainly it’s clear that most American business leaders do not support Trump’s approach to tariffs. His F.T.C. — and people associated with it — have their own critique of Silicon Valley. The Republicans are not fully on board with Silicon Valley. DOGE has made all kinds of cuts to government head count and government programs, but not in a way that tracks, I think, directly with what corporate America wants. Big pharma, who you’ve mentioned — they clearly don’t like R.F.K. Corporate America likes immigration, which Trump is cutting, and so on.
Is this really an oligarchic administration? Is it doing what the rich actually want?
Murphy: Well, it’s more precise than an oligarchy in which government serves the broad interests of every powerful individual or corporation. Oligarchies generally don’t serve all rich people; they serve the rich people who pledge political allegiance to the leader. A cabal is formed of a certain set of rich people that get richer, and the people who don’t pledge allegiance to the leader tend to get less rich over time.
That’s, I think, what is going on here. If you pay homage to Trump with a donation or a purchase of cryptocurrency, you’re just in agreement to stay silent about his thievery and corruption. Then you’re going to be in on the oligarchy. But if you don’t make that specific pledge, then yeah, you might end up being on the outside.
That’s why the tariffs — you’re right — are broadly opposed by the elite economic set, because they don’t feel great about a world in which they are going to have to cut deals with the president in order to be exempt from the tariffs. But if the tariffs stay, then that’s exactly what will happen. If you cut a deal with the president — if you buy his crypto coin or if you pay him off or if you say that your employees will never join the political opposition — then you probably get an exemption and you’re probably part of the club. If you don’t do that, then you probably sit on the outside.
I think that’s generally how oligarchies work, and I think that this is, as the textbooks define it, a pretty standard attempt at building an oligarchy.
Douthat: OK, I think that’s a reasonable answer, but that is somewhat distinct from the traditional Democratic message about Republicans, that Republicans are the party of the rich, they’re the party of the country club, party of the upper class, and so on. So oligarchy is a refinement of that. You are saying the Republicans right now are a party of Trump and a gang of his friends, as distinct from being a general party that defends upper-class interests.
Murphy: Correct, but in the end, I think you will find that though the broad, elite economic interests — the big corporations and C.E.O.s — would oppose his policies at the outset, once they are the law, once they are the operating system for the economy and the government, they will all likely fold in. I’m not sure that the pharmaceutical companies — you’re right, they didn’t like R.F.K., but I do not think that they were trying to take down Trump’s pharmaceutical policy, which was, by and large, the erasure of the price regulation that was going to absolutely attack the pharmaceutical industry’s profits under the Biden administration. I think the pharmaceutical industry was probably, writ large, pretty happy with the direction Donald Trump was taking health care policy.
Douthat: Right, but there are also groups in biotechnology and research and so on that are quite unhappy with, for instance, the cuts to scientific research. Again, this may not be that different from your point, but there’s a way in which a lot of powerful groups — it seems like less that they are getting what they want from Trump, and more that they are nervous about what he might try to do to them and are trying to be on his side, right?
Murphy: Correct, but again, that is — I think — the classic story of oligarchy, that you are using the levers of power you possess as the executive in order to command loyalty from elite economic actors. In the end, it is not just a preference for rich people, it is a recognition of how you use elite economic power in order to stay in power as the leader of a nation or a civilization forever.
Douthat: OK, now, that seems like a plausible argument. Let’s turn then to something you’ve gestured at a few times in this conversation, which is cultural and social issues, and the idea that the Democratic Party has to be a bigger tent on those issues. I was gratified to hear you making that argument because I do feel like often you’ll hear Democrats talk about cultural or spiritual issues in this very broad way that never attacks the concrete problem that, yes, whatever dislocations there are in American life, one of the reasons that working-class voters and culturally conservative voters vote for Republicans is just that they agree with Republican policies on any issue from Joe Biden’s failure to secure the Southern border to whether transgender athletes should compete in sports of the opposite natal sex, and so on.
You think the Democratic Party needs to be a bigger tent on cultural issues, but what does that mean in actual policy terms? Does it go beyond just you saying: Well, of course people who are skeptical about immigration or skeptical about transgender issues are welcome in the party. Does it get beyond that to actually being open to Democrats taking conservative stances on those issues? How far does it go?
Murphy: I mean, I do think it starts with empathy and less judgment. Take the issue of transgender athletes in sports: I think that the folks who oppose biological boys participating in girls’ sports have a very understandable position and concern, and I think we don’t act like that often. We judge them as bigots from the outset, and that essentially creates no room for conversation.
My feeling on this is that we would probably be better off with each individual jurisdiction — state or school board or municipality — being able to make up their mind for themselves. That would allow for a community like West Hartford, Conn., to come to a different conclusion than another community might. It doesn’t change my position on the issue. I don’t have any fear of transgender athletes participating in sports, but ——
Douthat: No. Well, wait. You don’t have any fear of it. Do you think if you had a daughter competing against a biological male, would you find it unfair?
Murphy: I don’t have girls, right? So I necessarily can’t put myself in that position ——
Douthat: Well, have some empathy ——
Murphy: Sure.
Douthat: For those of us who do.
Murphy: Right.
Douthat: Would you find it unfair?
Murphy: I mean, I’ve talked to lots of parents of girls in Connecticut who do not think it’s unfair and who think that the benefit that those athletes get from being part of a team is important and they don’t mind or feel threatened by the competition. I think everybody can come to their own conclusion, but all I’m ——
Douthat: Right, but your conclusion is the current — is the official line of liberalism right now. It’s just, you’re saying you don’t ——
Murphy: Yes, my conclusion is that I would support those athletes being able to participate in my community, right? In my community. But I would not substitute my judgment and my community’s judgment for another community’s judgment.
On the issue of the border and immigration, for me, it’s a little different in the sense that I do think — because that’s unquestionably an issue that arrives at a need for national consensus; you can’t just let every community decide for themselves because the border is where the border is, and the process to become an American citizen is a national process — there I haven’t been shy about it, I think the Democratic Party needs to reform its position. I think we have become wildly out of step with where the broad American public is.
For good reason, in a multiethnic, multireligious, multiracial society, I think you have to have a very certain process by which somebody becomes a member of the whole — a member of the club, a member of the nation — because it is hard to hold together a melting pot. There are natural retreats to tribalism. So when the rules become pretty murky about how you become a member of this team, this club, in an official sense, I think it makes it hard to keep the tensions at bay. That’s why I would argue that you should have a much more firm, much quicker resolution of asylum that happens at the border, rather than what we have today, which is folks coming into the country and waiting 10 years before they get an adjudication.
I tried to pass that bill. I ultimately got most Democrats, but not all, to support it, and only a handful of Republicans. It was a heterodox position inside the Democratic Party at the time to say that we should essentially not allow people to leave the border before they get their asylum claim determined, but it was the right thing to do for a nation that was coming apart — in part because the rules around how you became an American were becoming really hard to understand. And I don’t think that that’s acceptable in the society that we are trying to build.
Douthat: How should the U.S. government be focusing its resources in terms of removing people who are here illegally right now?
Murphy: Let’s do it backward. You should not remove individuals who right now are playing by the current rules and in line for a determination around legal status. Right now, the Trump administration is removing people who are waiting for their asylum claims to be adjudicated. If you are here with a pending claim, you should not be removed. If you are an individual who has lived here for a long period of time, have family members, have children who are American citizens, I do not think that you should be removed. The prioritization, I think, was right during the Biden administration and the Obama administration to focus on individuals who had committed crimes and people who had violent histories.
There’s then a gray area of people who are not in line for asylum, have not committed serious crimes, and do not have American citizen children. Those people are eligible for deportation, and I think that’s just a question of how many resources you want to devote to that exercise. There’s no question that that category of individuals is legally subject to deportation, and I don’t think there should be a complaint if a government acts to remove that category of people.
Douthat: OK, last question. Going back to where we started and the arguable threat that Donald Trump poses to democratic norms and the Democratic Party’s response, my general perspective on where things stand now is that Donald Trump has made a large number of extreme claims about executive power, pushed executive power to the limits in various ways, and many if not all of these efforts have been met by pushback in the judiciary from the courts, including from Republican-appointed judges. As long as that remains the case, I personally am skeptical that most Americans are going to see Trump the way you portrayed him at the beginning, as a definite threat to democracy if he is seen as ultimately deferring to the Supreme Court. Even if he’s criticizing individual judges and he’s deferring to 6-3, 7-2 rulings from the Supreme Court, I just don’t think Democrats are going to win campaigns with that issue at the center.
I’m curious if you think that’s wrong? And then, to finish on a note of prophecy, is your expectation that the Trump administration is going to end up in some collision with the Supreme Court — you mentioned people taking to the streets earlier — or are you imagining a constitutional crisis in America as something that Democrats should be prepared for in the next two years?
Murphy: So, I don’t accept the premise.
Douthat: That’s fine.
Murphy: Or maybe I’ll say it differently. I think Democrats will have failed if we are only able to mobilize Americans around that specific threat to democracy, which is this high-stakes confrontation between the executive and the judicial branch. That may happen, but most democracies that die, or many democracies that die, die without that high-stakes confrontation. What happens over time is that the mechanisms of accountability — the lawyers, the journalists, the college campuses, the places where truth is protected — they become co-opted by the regime or they become weakened enough that the opposition really never has enough oxygen in order to operate.
I think that’s more likely to be the story of American democracy’s demise, that there actually isn’t this grand confrontation between the Supreme Court and Trump, but that by the time we arrive at either 2026 or 2028, that a big slice of the media has been bought off by Trump and the social media algorithms have been shifted to support MAGA, that the lawyers have all been co-opted, or enough of them, and college and youth protest is significantly diminished, and there’s elections, but it’s only one party that wins because the tools of the opposition have just been atrophied to a significant degree. But that is not the story that most Democrats are telling. Most Democrats are saying the constitutional crisis doesn’t arrive until the president ignores a high-stakes ruling from the Supreme Court.
So we make our own reality unless we choose to tell that other story — a slightly more complicated story — but I guess we won’t know the answer to your question, whether the public cares about that other, more methodical assault on democracy, until we tell that story. I’m not sure that Americans will care any less about that, but right now that’s not the story, broadly, that the progressive left is telling. We are hanging our hat on: Everything is probably OK until John Roberts and Donald Trump square off in a duel.
Douthat: As someone who follows the progressive left and the center left and what people are saying on social media and so on, I think there’s plenty of people ready to talk about a constitutional crisis long before you get to a direct Trump-Roberts clash. I think the question is, do most Americans buy into a narrative where the United States, in all its diversity and complexity, is likely to go the way of Erdogan’s Turkey?
And I will say I am personally skeptical of that narrative as well, but I think we’ll just have to have this conversation again in 2026, after the election, and see how things turned out.
Murphy: Well, and listen. I think it is also dependent on — we started talking about the economy, and we’ll end there as well — I think people are going to be doing more head-scratching and more introspection and more examination about his assault on democracy so long as the economy is getting worse, because again, it strikes at the heart of the self narrative that I believe many Trump voters went to the polls with: I don’t think he’s serious about this stuff, where he talks about attacking democracy, and even if I do, I’m going to look the other way because I really think he’s going to tackle prices. I think he’s going to make my economic life better.
If my economic life isn’t getting better, then I’m going to care a lot more — and maybe a little bit earlier than I might have otherwise — about what he’s doing to our democracy. Those two discussions, I think, will play out together in conjunction in the minds of a lot of voters.
Douthat: Yeah, let’s end on a note of relative agreement, because I do agree that most voters went to the polls with a narrative like the one you had in mind, and that the performance of the Trump economy will determine a lot about every other question as well. Senator Chris Murphy, thank you so much for joining me.
Murphy: Thanks. Take care.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Betanzos and Katherine Sullivan. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Cinematography by Marina King and William DeJessa. Video editing by Arpita Aneja and Steph Khoury. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times With Ross Douthat.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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