Today, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) is publishing his newest book Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. He sits down with April to share why he wrote Crisis of the Common Good, explaining that our obsession with Trump distracts us from fixing what is already broken in our system. Senator Murphy also discusses a potential 2028 presidential candidacy and widespread corruption within the administration before giving us a special sneak preview from his book.
Senator Chris Murphy is the junior United States Senator for Connecticut. He serves on the Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Stay connected with the Senator on his personal Substack here and find his new book here.
This transcript has been slightly modified for formatting purposes
April Ryan
It is an honor and a pleasure to sit here with U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. He’s got a new book out, guys. Crisis of the Common Good, The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. Congratulations on this book.
Senator Chris Murphy
Thank you.
April Ryan
It is… it is an interesting read. You really… it… you drew me in. You made me connect. lot of dots. You’re a lawyer, so you have to prove your case, and you definitely proved the case here. But I’m gonna go to page 113. That really, that really got me. Everyone talks about being happy, the pursuit of happiness. And you write in here, Thomas Jefferson, who’s one of our founding fathers, at age 33, he wrote… what did he write? The Declaration of Independence. And within it, he put life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And… At issue, you said the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is one of the most revolutionary ever put to paper. It states that humans have a set of natural rights, and that the function of government is to use powers to secure those rights. Now. this book kind of also chronicles the destruction of this country, the democracy with Donald Trump, and I’m thinking about how In his first term, in the ramp-up to that first term, winning the election, how he tried to make or make people believe he was gonna make them happy. It kind of… you know what I’m saying?
Senator Chris Murphy
Yep.
April Ryan
This book connects so many dots. Could you explain, all of that that I just gave to you? Because it was interesting in how you put this together.
Senator Chris Murphy: Well, awesome to be with you, April, and I’m glad the book spoke to you. Yeah, so that’s a really pivotal point of the book, where, you know, I say, listen, that idea is revolutionary, the idea that government exists to help make you happy. And so it requires government to really think about what drives happiness. And the book is structured around six cults, that have captured America’s attention. And what is a cult? A cult is a set of false beliefs That… that benefits the cult leader, or a handful of cult leaders. And there has been a set of false beliefs about what makes us happy in this country, and those beliefs help a very small number of people at the very top of our political and economic food chain. One of them is the, you know, I talk about the cult of consumption, the idea that if you just buy more stuff, if you have the latest iPhone, if you follow and the right influencers, that you’ll be happy. But what we know about happiness, and we’ve done lots of studies on happiness, and it’s pretty clear that happiness doesn’t come from a high income, or a career, or buying things. Happiness comes From relationships, friendships, family, and shared purpose, that you are engaged in projects with your neighbors that make your community better. And historically, the people that have had strong relationships who have been engaged in their community are the happiest. And so this book is really about how we have lost a sense of the common good, existing for others, not just for ourself. And that Trump. took advantage of a country that had become spiritually unhealthy, that had become unhappy because we had lost this connection to the common good, because we had come to believe that if I just take care of me, myself, and I, I’ll be okay. And if we don’t have this broader conversation about the unspooling of America, about how we became such a a me nation instead of a we nation, then beating Donald Trump or his party in an election isn’t going to be good enough, because somebody else will just come along who will say, yeah, the real problem is immigrants or Muslims or gay kids, and will be distracted because we are angry, and we’re empty, and we want something to blame. We have to fill that emptiness inside us first, and that is not an exercise of winning an election. That’s an exercise in rebuilding our economy and our culture.
April Ryan
exploiting our emptiness, and that’s what you talk about in the book. And, basically, he tailored… Donald Trump tailored his message To Americans who lost a sense of rootedness. So talk to me about that. There are several pieces of that. It’s education, it goes into education, it goes into isolation, technology isolation, it goes into so many things. Talk to me about that, sir.
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, this sense of rootlessness is, you know, actually a concept that a lot of, you know, smart people, theologians, and political philosophers have talked about for a long time. you need, as a human being, roots. You need to belong somewhere in order to feel fulfilled. MAGA is a place that gives you roots, right? It’s a… it’s a… it’s a…
April Ryan
Some people, let’s, let’s, let’s, yeah, let’s clarify and specify some people.
Senator Chris Murphy
No, no, no, I’m just saying for some people.
April Ryan
Right, right.
Senator Chris Murphy
people, right? It gives you a sense of belonging. Unfortunately, a belonging to something hateful and racist and demagogic, but it gives you a sense of belonging. Where are the healthy places, though, where you find roots? Okay, companionship. Friendship, family. Well, we’ve built a set of technologies that is ripping people away from companionship, is isolating our young people in their rooms. Our institutions are being destroyed. Churches, social halls, unions, places where you found roots They’re less healthy. The fact that you gotta work 70 hours a week means you can’t even find the leisure time to belong to those places. What about, place? Place used to be a place where you’d find roots. well, places aren’t healthy any longer, and they’re certainly not unique. We buy all of our stuff from Amazon and Walmart. Our economy is faceless, and we’ve lost that… we’ve lost that connection to a place that feels different and unique. from other places. So, we just have to think about the way that we can rebuild a culture and economy where people can find those roots again, and that involves Breaking up the big corporations so that small businesses in your downtown are healthy again, regulating the technology, purposefully helping those institutions that have become weaker become healthier, making 40 hours enough to live so that you have free time to put down those roots. You know, that rootlessness that people feel is a choice that we’ve made, a choice that, in part, is derived from government decisions, and we could just choose differently.
April Ryan
you talk about first-term Trump, and now, also. I guess second-term Trump, who has kind of shaken or abandoned the low… his lower income, I guess, what do you call it, the forgotten male, those who he said he was a champion for the first term. He’s now, basically corrupt and raiding everything for himself and his family and his rich friends, and that’s what you talk about, yes.
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, and he’s gonna pay an electoral consequence for that. He is exposed more so than ever before as a total charlatan, so that will come with an electoral consequence. But I do think we have to, like, ask ourselves. you know, why hasn’t there been a stronger mass public reaction to his corruption? I’m not saying that people don’t know it’s wrong, but yeah, I think there’s been a disappointment that more people on both the right and the left haven’t said, this is, like, totally out of bounds. And I think that that’s, again, back to our culture. We have created a culture where the winners take all, where modesty or restraint is a weakness. So in the economy. the winners in the economy, the titans, the CEOs, you know, they just steal from you. They take everything, and they leave scraps for everybody else. And so people, I think, and this is my theory in the book, is that people then extrapolate that to the… to our politics, and they say, well, Donald Trump won, he’s a political winner, and if our economic winners can just take everything, why can’t our political winners take everything? So that kind of normalizes the… the corruption, and so I argue that you have to change the way the economy works so that greed is not lionized, but shamed for greed’s sake. And I think that that would make us less accepting of that greed and corruption in our politics as well.
April Ryan
But I also like, on page 261, you hold your own party to account. You say voters chose Trump because they wanted a revolution. But my party doesn’t seem to completely… doesn’t seem yet completely ready to seize this moment. This is tragic, unacceptable, and worth having a fight over. What does that fight look like? Is it a street fight? Is it just that highbrow, thus thou art wherefore thereas, and holding hearings? What does it look like?
Senator Chris Murphy
No, I mean, it’s a street fight that plays out in our primaries. So I… listen, I think this world is a world defined you know, in part, by worker power against corporate power. And I want people who see the world that way. I do think our party has too often been captured by the very elites that, are corrupting our culture and our society. I mean, why haven’t Democrats championed the regulation of social media and II. It’s in part because, you know, we are less beholden to those technology elites than Republicans are, but we’re beholden to them. And, yeah, I do, in this book, talk about my disappointment in 2024. I’m not like a… I’m not like somebody who thinks that Kamala Harris ran a bad campaign, and yeah, I think she was in a really bad position, but I think…
April Ryan
107 days, that was, that was pretty bad.
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah, I do, but I do think she made a choice to not take on corporate power in a more, you know, confrontational way, and I think that our party offers kind of weak solutions to the unfairness of the economy, kind of doesn’t name and shame the people who are screwing ordinary Americans, and I think we need to do more of that. I do think it plays out in these primaries. I mean, I’ve endorsed… I didn’t used to endorse candidates in Democratic Senate primaries, but I have, in a handful of states where I see a candidate that looks kind of like a corporate Democrat running against, you know, somebody who’s actually gonna… Upend the existing paradigm.
April Ryan
You are a lawyer by trade before you became a U.S. Senator. Are you surprised, legally. as to what’s happened… I mean… We have seen things before. We’ve seen questions about a president’s integrity, things that they’ve done, but this is… We’ve got a wannabe king. who is above the law. There used to be a time when they said, there’s no one above the law. Donald Trump and his family, and some of his friends, are now above reproach and above the law. What do you say as putting on your lawyer hat?
Senator Chris Murphy
I mean, let me just caveat this. I was a really bad lawyer, so…
April Ryan
You might not want to say that!
Senator Chris Murphy
I will, you know, I practiced for a grand total of 4 years, and I was a part-time state legislator, so I, you know, I never really got to, like, learn the law in the way that you should, so I was… I was not a terribly successful lawyer. But, but yeah, I mean, so, okay, so why is the law not working right now? I mean, there’s a bunch of reasons for that. Some of it is just basic corruption that You know, he has broken norms and put people in charge of law enforcement that are loyal to him, not to the law. But I just also think there’s a lot of Americans who are like. not that enamored by the law, because they’re like, who has the law been working… who has the law been working for, right? The law has been locking up Black people at scale. the law has been protecting corporations from their wrongdoing. The law locked up nobody after the collapse of the financial system in 2008, and so people are just like. you know, you want to hold our democracy and our legal system, like, up on a pedestal? You know? It doesn’t work for me. So again, that’s back to the theory of this book, which is that, like, you can’t just beat Donald Trump. You actually have to reform the law and reform the democracy so that it works for everybody. So that people are going to be willing to defend it.
April Ryan
The average American has to work hard to pay their taxes. Donald Trump now does not have… he nor his family is audited. He was supposed to owe $100 million. He doesn’t have to worry about that. Donald Trump is also giving reparations, if you will, to the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and those who did the insurrection on January 6th, but yet Black folks, we talk about reparations for slavery, oh no, oh no, there’s a problem. There is something fundamentally wrong in this nation, right now, and the laws have had loopholes that this man is able to get around. what is the Democratic Party gonna do once the expectation of a tidal wave happens in the primaries, what will happen? Is everything on the table to hold these people accountable, hold hearings? Again, what?
Senator Chris Murphy
Well, you know, of course. I mean, in the short run, of course we’re going to have to, you know, do deep investigations into, how this administration has become the most corrupt in the history of the country. I kind of wish state attorneys general would do more. to hold, you know, this administration accountable. When we hold all of the levers of power, including the Department of Justice, people are going to go to jail. People should hold their receipts, keep their records, because You are not going to be above the law when you are out of power. But, again, this is where I think, like, if we are only focused on his corruption, we’re missing the story, because people, like, think that both parties are corrupt, and the difference is just that you’re seeing the corruption with Donald Trump. He’s like, you know, he doesn’t try to hide it. And they’re kind of… I mean, they’re not right about that. Obviously, this corruption is just bonkers, brand new, never seen anything like it. But the system itself is still corrupt, right? The system itself is built so that powerful people have power and have an influence in government, and regular people don’t. And again, the book talks about that breeding a sense of powerlessness in people, that when the democracy is rigged, it is just hard for them to feel good about their life, because they don’t have power in our democracy. So I do worry a little bit, as Democrats, that if we get power. We’re only going to focus on Trump’s corruption, because we also are just going to have to step back and say, hey, the whole system has been rigged for a long time, and we have to spend some time fixing that, too.
April Ryan
And in this book, you call out companies. I’m not gonna say it on this… this program right now, but you call out companies, and I’m like, woo! It was interesting. But, at the end of the day, who are the Democratic heroes that are gonna save, the presidential election? Do you think you’ll be one of them jumping into the fray? Running for…
Senator Chris Murphy
Oh, I don’t know. I mean, this is kind of an odd book to write if you were, you know, gonna run for president, because it’s not about me, right? I mean, this book is really about that… that spiritual crisis in the country. I think this’ll sound a little bit like a line, but it really isn’t. I just think you’d be an idiot to be spending this moment, like, prepping your presidential run when we don’t know whether there’s gonna actually be a free and fair election in 2028, so… I just am putting, like, all my resources into trying to… Save the democracy, and… you know, figuring out whether, you know, I have a role to play beyond just being a good senator in the future.
April Ryan
Before we leave, I want you to read an excerpt from your book. I really like this book. You connected a lot of dots for me. I have my tabs, and I’ve got a lot of, I did a lot of little, I did a lot of highlighting in the book. I read your book! So, yes, Senator Murphy, can you read an excerpt from your book so people can understand some of the things that are in your book?
Senator Chris Murphy
Well, I’m gonna read your book coming out in October, so…
April Ryan
Yes, thank you, sir!
Senator Chris Murphy
So this is kind of like a paragraph that distills the basic argument, and here it is. It’s, Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause of America’s spiritual unraveling. This is page 7. Make no mistake, he is no ordinary symptom. He could prove fatal to our 250-year experiment in multicultural democracy. But our nation would make a grave error if we believe we could repair what is broken within us simply by defeating Trump or his successor at the ballot box. No. A deeper rot festers in the American soul. Callousness towards our neighbors. A me-first selfishness. A relentless focus on getting mine, even if it leaves others behind. Today, we worship false cults. Profit at any cost, consumerism instead of citizenship, a blind faith in technology, a winner-take-all politics. that leaves us feeling empty and devoid of purpose. So, that’s kind of the idea of the book, that, yeah, we want to beat Trump this November, but if we don’t rebuild a sense of common good, of common purpose in this country, we’re just going to be stunk with, you know, Trump Jr. on the back end of this.
April Ryan
I’m… I’m in agreement with you, and when you said false prophets, also that golden calf, yes.
Senator Chris Murphy
Yeah.
April Ryan
Guys… Crisis of the Common Good, The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. Senator, thank you so much for your time. This is a good read, and you helped me put a lot of the… connect a lot of the dots, and it was common sense. Some… some things, really, you didn’t think of, but the way you put it. It’s like… for those who remember, it makes you say, hmm… and it does, it makes you think. Thank you so much for this offering, and thank you for your service, sir.
Senator Chris Murphy
Well, I’m a big fan, April, so it’s really an honor to be with you.
April Ryan
Thank you, sir.
