Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay - Senator Chris Murphy and ‘Crisis of the Common Good’

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Connecticut senator Chris Murphy joins to discuss multiculturalism, the withdrawal of Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy, and his new book, ‘Crisis of the Common Good.’ (0:00) Intro (1:36) Responding to the symptom of Trump (5:07) Common good capitalism (7:21) The country’s most harmful cults (10:07) Building cultural connections (21:38) Getting personal (24:20) The male loneliness epidemic (27:14) Governing in 2026 (31:51) A ‘Star Wars’ analogy (37:59) The Divine Nine (39:30) Too much focus on the executive branch? (43:28) The Democratic plan for Black women and men Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Guest: Senator Chris Murphy Producer: Donnie Beacham Jr. Social Producers: Bernard Moore and Jon Roemer Video Supervision: Chris Thomas and Jacob Cornett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay. Special guest on the podcast, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut is joining us there on higher learning. Hey, thank you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, guys. You're in California. You have a brand new book. It's out now.

Crisis of the Common Good is the book. Let me ask you a question. We're going to get into some of the stuff in the book. But before we get into all of that, how are you writing a book? There's so much for you to do in the Senate. What's you writing a book for, man? Y'all need to be getting stuff done for us. Why are you?

Why a book? Because I think if we want to get stuff done for people, we have to understand how serious the problem is. And I do worry that, you know, Trump dominates every inch of our discussion. And we're so focused on these elections. And yes, I want to beat him. But there's a deeper rot in this country that we have to talk about. And I think everybody knows that, that, you know, we're lonelier than ever before. we feel powerless in our lives.

But nobody really has a language with which to sort of access that conversation and they don't know what to do about it. So, yeah, I think the task is a lot bigger than just stopping Trump's legislative agenda, beating him at the polls. I think we've got a spiritual mission that we have to engage in. And I wrote the book because I worry that there's almost too much focus on Trump and on the elections. You said that we've always kind of like known that some of this is here, right? Like it's been here. Like you talk about Trump is a symptom. He's not the thing.

It didn't start with him. If we've known this for years, and I'm just going to say particularly Democrats I'll talk about, then why were we not on top of it? If we knew that like Trump or anybody like a Trump could be a symptom, why are we just now responding to it and why were we not on top of it? Yeah, I think the simplest answer is money. So this book talks about six cults, like these sets of false ideas that we've come to believe are true but are not really true. And they all accrue to the benefit of a very small number of people at the sort of top of the economy and top of the political pyramid. And the reason that we have structured an economy and a culture that helps a very small number of people is because our politics are corrupt and they're corrupt on the right and the left. That's the other thing. This book has a book. is about is it's not just about Trump's corruption. We focus on his corruption because it's new and it's bananas. It does threaten the republic. But the whole politics has been captured by very powerful people, corporations that want no changes in the way that they're regulated. And that's an issue on the left and the right. So I think that's why, you know, we have not, as Democrats,

really sought to confront a lot of these cults in the past. I hear a lot of politicians saying that. A lot of people in politics say that. But when you start to drill down on the issues that seem to identify that, you always get some pushback. Like we would say, hey, I give you an example. Like you'd say there's corruption on the left and the right and big politics. And I'm like, okay, cool. Well, then let's be robust for single parent health care,

for Medicare for all, things that eliminate the corporate influence on our lives. And you can't get people, you get people to say that. I'm talking about you specifically. I'm just talking about a method of thinking here. But you can't get people to get behind a policy that would trim away some of the cancer out of our politics.

Is that indicative of being served a lip service? Or is this rot so deep that it can't be excised? Yeah, I think that the corruption of our economy is downstream of the corruption of our politics. So the reason you are not getting, you know, accountability for insurance companies or drug companies, the reason you're not getting single payer health care is because they have captured our politics. They put a ton of money into our politics on the left and the right. But I do think that there are these broader false belief systems

that cause people to maybe be less enthusiastic than we would like for these brand new systems. So the first chapter in the book is the cult of profit. And we've just come to believe on the right and the left that a good company is a company that makes a profit, period, stop. They can abuse their workers. They can hollow out the community they live in. They can create a product with very little social value, but as long as they make a profit, they're a good company. And so in our healthcare economy, you know, the good companies are the companies that are treating us terribly, that are denying us medicines just because they make a profit. And we have to confront that entire cult system, this idea that we can't judge an economy based on anything other than how much profit

they make, we could. And if we did that, I think we'd think very differently about how to structure the health care system. Would you describe yourself as a capitalist? Yeah. Okay. So if you are a capitalist and you believe in capitalism, I'm assuming. Yes. Okay. So then how are you going to divorce yourself from those two ideals? Meaning in capitalism, anything that makes a profit is a good. Yeah, so I think the conception today is that there's only two choices. A profit-obsessed market fundamentalism and socialism. I make the argument in this book that there is such thing as common good capitalism. Now, I get it.

Like, there's a lot of people who think that that's – Tough sale. That's bullshit, right? Yeah. Yeah, but why can't – but why can't you have a floor of benefits for workers, right? You show up into the workforce and you're getting paid $25 an hour guaranteed. You have a robust pension benefit. and health care benefit from the day you start.

Inside the health care system, we don't leave the private sector to do it by themselves. We give everybody the option to buy into a public product. We break up concentrated corporate power everywhere, every day. We don't let companies get so big that one guy, one board of directors, sets the rules of our culture through massive technological products that we're all addicted to. I do think that there is a way to raise the flow. for workers to make them feel more powerful, to break down concentrated corporate power so that economic power is local, right, the people who own the companies that matter to you live in

your community in a way where capitalism can work. And, you know, that's- For people, for working people, right? And I think the entire, I think the entire debate right now is not really between right and left anymore. It's between worker power and corporate power. And I don't think, that you need to go all the way to a socialist democracy in order to dramatically lift up the power that people should feel as workers in this country. I think it feels like you have to,

because if it is, we talk about how rotten it is and how deep it is, it almost feels like in order for it to work, you almost have to go to the other extreme. That's what I think sometimes it feels like that and the reaction and the emotion that you're getting from people in such a way. You identify six cults in the book. We talked about profit, technology, consumption, corruption, credentialism, and globalism.

Which one do you think has had the most damage to the American community? So it's the first in the last chapter. The first chapter is the cult of profit. Again, I just believe that you can measure the value of an economy differently than how much money you're extracting out of workers and out of communities. I think the cult of profit and kind of the cult of efficiency, which is, a twin of the cult of profit, the idea that everything should be maximized for profit's sake is probably the most serious. But everything is downstream of the cult of corruption. Because our politics have been bought, you can't make any changes in the way that the economy

is structured. You can't regulate the technology companies. It's hard to take on the cult of profit, the cult of technology, even the cult of credentialism, without taking on that normalization of corruption in our politics. And that's why I say in the book, this book is not really about political analysis or party analysis. But I say like the Democratic Party should get back to a place where it's number one issue is getting big money, billionaire, money, anonymous money out of politics. Because I don't think you can do anything else if you don't fix that problem first. When I look at the cults and I see, you know, like, and you read the book and you see, you know, how you discuss them, I can't help but think, where does racism

fit in all of this? Because that's a part of it too. And where we sit right now in our society and we see some of the policies and issues that are, you know, coming out of this administration in particular, I have to ask, where does racism fit in that? Yeah, I mean, ultimately this book is a, is a book about what brings you meaning and purpose in life. And I argue that that comes primarily from the idea that you have power in your life. And so the cult of profit steals power from you because you work harder and you don't get ahead. But the entire system of racial oppression in this country, from the classroom to the criminal justice system,

is all about robbing black people of power and agency. My first book is really about this question. I wrote a book called The Violence Inside Us, and a lot of that is how violence has been used as the primary means of oppression. But if you want to build a society in which people wake up every day and feel like their action,

result in their situation, their standard of living getting better. It's not just about the cult of profit, ultimately. It's about the systems of racial oppression and suppression that are still very real today. We're having a lot of conversations in America about building connection, like us being connected to one another. I feel like some of the crisis of connection, the crisis of the common good, us feeling connected, us feeling like we're a part of each other. What's the most important thing for you in building connection? Is it finding tribe or learning to coexist outside of tribe? Oh, I think it's learning to coexist outside of tribe.

Tell me a little bit more about that. Yes, so, you know, this country is a miracle, right, that we have been able to govern ourselves in a multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, linguistic society. And we're constantly getting better and we have peaks and valleys. but the only way this country sticks together is if you were able to build communities that cross those sets of divides. And so, you know, this book talks about, you know, for instance, how you rebuild institutions where you are more likely to come across people that are different from you. I think labor unions are sort of as close to a panacea as you get. Historically, there's been a lot of racism in labor unions, but they are a place.

where you're bringing together workers across boundaries, where they can find communion and where they can advance a common agenda. So the book is all about sort of a purposeful strategy to rebuild institutions, the places of gathering, downtowns, so that we aren't siloed by tribe. We aren't siloed by our politics. We have an opportunity to meet people that are different from us. Can I give you a fear that I want you to take with you when you'll leave? this room for someone like you who whenever I ask somebody about Chris Murphy their eyes light up they like you Chris like even now it's good we ask your questions the answers are direct and concise you've had politicians I do tend to

answer questions right yeah right and we like you so that not recommended by the political consultant class there's a there's a but coming I'm definitely buttering you up for something there's a fear for a lot of people that everything you just said is bullshit. Not that you meant to bullshit, but that none of that is real. And that this is really what it's existed in America for a long time. What is existed for America a long time

is a facade of multiculturalism that was dominated by a vicious and direct white supremacist organization, a capitalist organization that has increasingly over generations sought to harvest not just talent, but work, life and sweat from working people.

And the moment that we stepped into our actuality and started to litigate this in a loud and robust way that the country threatened to rip itself to shreds. That the moment that we said none of this is real, it's not real now, it's never been real, it's

always been kind of us getting the crumbs that were left around the beers of the fat cats. Now we're asking for more and we're seeing that there's no there. A lot of people feel that way and that is why the country is actually coming apart. What do you say to those people? Okay, so let me try a theory on for you. And maybe it won't fit. But, you know, I think in a

culture of scarcity where we are all scrapping for crumbs that demagogues and scapegoat messages work, right? And that's about the jobs that are being stolen by black people, by immigrants, the fact that gay kids and drag shows are the biggest threat to your community. All of that works when you wake up every day and you feel like your neighbors are competitors, right? This is what sociologists call the scarcity mindset. And so if your focus is on raising that floor, that's why I say $25 minimum wage, not $17, $15.15. minimum wage. If you're about bringing power back to workers' lives through the expansion of collective bargaining, does that scapegoating, right, become less attractive? Are you less likely

to want to explode things if you know that everybody's floor is being raised, white, black, or Hispanic? Is there something to university? more economically powerful human beings that acts as a prophylactic against that explosion you're talking about. There's only one thing that I can't get my mind around. Chris, and I'm going to have to try

and I do every day. But my core belief that despite everything that you just said that there are some people that just don't want a nigga having shit, right? And it doesn't matter how good they're doing. You ain't supposed to have it. There were certain regions in this country that chose starvation.

They chose poverty over being more integrated into the American economic system because they knew that if they did that, that they would have to share that wealth with black people. And it's not a problem that you can solve. But the reason why I want to put it in your brain is because a lot of the concepts that we're discussing, capitalism, protecting workers and all of that stuff, those things are going to be things to where you might have to see somebody that's black driving a nice car down your street. And how do we get past some of the things that we're not supposed to talk about to understand that everyone being capitalized on? All the people that are going to jail in my community where I come from, if those guys were out being productive, if they weren't thrown into the carceral state to work as slaves, we will be better off. And I want to make sure that the people that I actually have some faith in, remember that that messaging has to exist to.

Yeah. And if you look at some of the underlying reasons that we destroyed intentionally, the institutions where people find community, it is all a story told through a racial lens, right? Why did public pools disappear in this country? Public pools were a place where people found. Because we were getting the pool that they would drain the pool. Right, right, exactly. So that's the reason the pool, well, one of the primary reasons the pools shut down was the idea that white people just were not willing to accept sitting at that pool being in the pool of black people. And so, yeah, and I certainly acknowledge in this book that a lot of the reason that we are here today is because people didn't want to be in institutions where they had to commune with people that were different from them.

And I don't know that my theory is right that if you remove that scarcity mindset, then the demagogic messages just don't have as much appeal. And I acknowledge that that's not and cannot be the only answer. But I think there's something to it. I think it's part of the solution. It almost feels impossible at times. And you discuss the cult of technology. You talk about that.

And you talk about the loneliness data and how striking it is. And I didn't even know the statistic of how we were spending 60 minutes of day with a friend. and now it's 20 minutes a day. And so when you talk about connecting and reaching people, but then people aren't spending time with other people outside of their tribe, and they're doing it through technologies, social media, or whatever it may be, so then they find the person who's most like them, and that's who they connect to, and then it causes even more separation.

And it's like, how do we even, as social media continues to get bigger and all these different platforms with, you know, podcast and whatever it may be, it almost feels like we're continuing to separate. Podcasts. What do we do? Well, we not like that. But I'm just saying there's so much of it out there that it almost feels like we're continuing to separate from one another rather than connecting to each other outside of tribes and coming together. It almost feels impossible. What would you say to that?

And you do discuss. Yeah, I mean, there is, first of all, there's just lots of science that says, virtual connection is just fundamentally different than in-person connection, that there's something different that happens in our brains when we are sitting with people, when we're able to touch them, smell them, right? And I think that's the most important thing is that you have to prevent us from getting into a world in which we think virtual connection is a substitute for in-person connection. But yes, of course, the algorithms are going to silo you, and the algorithms are going to feed your prejudices. And so if you don't have some mechanism by which to control for the sort of

negative spirals that will happen there, then all this technology is going to do is to feed that scapegoat and culture. Because listen, we are, our biology inside tells us to stick to tribe, right? Our biology tells us to fear others. Like that's, that is cultural, that is environmental, but that is also biological. Pro-evolutionary. It's evolutionary, right? That's how you survive, right, as a species without fangs and horns, whereas you just stuck close to the people you thought were your family and you just sort of guessed that everybody else was a threat.

So the technology is feeding that biology, which is why, you know, I think you've got to take some really dramatic steps. Like, I think you have to treat that algorithm as a poison for kids. And the only way that they're ever going to get a chance as adults, to really understand the value of in-person connection is to just say they can't have it until they're a certain age. The technology companies obviously hate that idea. As a question for you, cultural or political, is this something that we teach people or would you legislate this? I mean, I think it's more political than we want to believe.

Okay. We made, every time a new big technology came around in the last, you know, 75 years, we immediately saw regulation as a means to get the good stuff and not get the bad stuff. right, nuclear technology, advanced medicines, even the telephone. This is the first technology that we've just, like, said, fuck it, we're hands off. So to me, we have always been able to kind of moderate the rough edges of new technologies through regulation. And I do want to bring it a little bit back to the conversation we were just happening. The corrosive influence of the technology has and often has a deeper impact in low-income communities. because you have parents that are working 70 hours.

They end up relying on the technology in order to keep the kids occupied. You know, in my neighborhood in the south end of Hartford, you know, the parents and grandparents are really not super interested in the kids running around outside because of the threats that exist. And so the technology becomes an even deeper crutch in those lower-income communities. So I think we have an obligation to every kid, but in particular lower income kids, where the technology ends up babysitting because, you know, just the numbers don't allow for parents to be around as much. The book has parts of a personal narrative and you dedicate it to your sons. Yeah.

In the book, why did you decide to dedicate the book to them? And what was the most uncomfortable thing that you had to put on page about your son? It's definitely not a memoir, right? I mean, as you saw, there's not much of me in there. So, yeah, obviously I think that if we don't take on these cults, even if you beat the Republicans in this midterm, it's just not going to fit the bill. And I do think that the social media and AI are existential threats. And I have no idea what job our kids are going to get if we don't figure out a way to slow the job description. But I also don't know what will be left of humanity if we outsource to the technology conversation and friendship and creativity.

I just don't know what's left for them of their soul at the end of that. It's probably the last story in the book that's been the hardest one for me. So I've been talking about loneliness for four or five years. And the obvious question that every reporter asks me is when they're doing a story on why Chris Murphy is talking about loneliness is like, what's your experience with loneliness? And I think I was in denial for a while about how lonely this life can be because very few other people kind of understand what it's like to be in the life. The last story I tell in the book is about a really lonely day for me. My wife and I just separated and I was Thanksgiving morning and my kids were with her down

in D.C. And I was doing what a lot of lonely people do. I was sitting in my house by myself that morning, just scrolling on my phone. and I was just getting lonelier and sadder, and I finally just decided to put down the phone because I knew that there was this family on Thanksgiving morning that normally handed out donuts and coffee to the homeless on the green where I live. And so I went over there,

and I just spent like, I don't know, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, helping them hand out stuff. And it was like magic. Like, sadness didn't totally lift. I was still sad that my kids weren't there. But I had a pep in my step, like walking away from having just engaged in this act of selflessness. And I definitely am not somebody that readily shares, like, my personal narrative and, you know,

my personal hurts, you know, in a political context. But I wanted to end the book with that because that was a moment where I recognized that everybody has the ability to sort of force your way into connection. It's not all up to government. So that was probably the hardest story to write because I don't normally weave a lot of that stuff into the way that I talk about politics. But it resonates. Yeah, hopefully.

We need more personal stuff. Do you think there's a specific issue with the male loneliness epidemic that you hear people talking about, like young men not being able to find connection? Yes, because what's happened in the last 50 years is radical, right? I mean, for thousands of years, men by birth had a natural way to identify themselves and define their purpose, right? I mean, you were breadwinner, you were protector, and you had a genetic position of primacy in the economy, the culture, and the politics. And while the patriarchy still lives, you do not have that automatic identity any longer.

You do not have that automatic sense of purpose. And for young men, I think it's been catastrophic to try to figure out what is that new way that I identify myself. So, you know, this book talks a lot about power, right, about an economy where you as a worker feel power. Again, that's why I love talking about unions. I think that's particularly important for men because they have had rightfully their automatic power taken from them. But it's hard to go, you know, in one generation from a way of thinking of your identity to something totally new. So if you're delivering them more economic power in their lives through higher wages or collective bargaining or the deconstruction of corporate power, I think you're feeling, you're filling an immediate gap that's a very real one for young men. There are some people that feel like the conversation is centering men in a way that's unfair to everyone else.

We have this conversation here. It seems like we're having a conversation about the male loneliness epidemic. And we're sometimes using that conversation to excuse bad behavior by young men who aren't taking proper. responsibility for their actions. I'm mad, I'm upset, I'm lonely, patriarchy, die, what do I do now? I can't make the football team. Now I got to go out and hurt somebody. What do you say to people that say that? Yeah, I hope that's not what we're doing, and I hope that you can acknowledge the crisis that a lot of men and young men are going through without excusing their bad behavior. I worry, right, that for the last 10 years, the right has had a very easy answer to the masculinity identity

crisis, which is just we're just rolling it back. We're just rolling it back. We're going back 50 years, 100 years. We're putting you back in charge. And the left's answer has kind of been, get over it. Like, get over it. Like you enjoyed this position of primacy for thousands of years, and it's gone and figure it out. That's one answer, but I don't think it's the responsible answer. I think you actually have to do some work, part of it in the public sector, to give men and young men a healthier conception of this spring denim gets a softer lighter update

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old navy's drapey denim wide like the masculinity. What does it feel like to be a senator right now in 2026? Because you write this book and it's pretty much diagnosing what broken America. And you sit in the Senate and sometimes, you know, we watch it and it feels like these, it's broken as well. And do you feel like as you sit here? It's definitely broken.

It's definitely broken. Yeah. No, it's broken. It's broken. It's broken as well. sit in it, you're a member of it, how do you feel like, as you sit here in 2026 in a broken system that you still feel like it works and it can be fixed? Well, I mean, honestly, I mean, that's the answer to why I wrote the book was that I just

was sitting in it and coming to the conclusion that we couldn't fix it without fixing the culture, right, and that we had to have a conversation about fixing the politics, getting billionaire money out of politics, all the rest, well also addressing what was broken in the culture. I guess why I keep coming back for more is that I still have seen it work. Okay. Like, it's fundamentally broken. You are right. But I've seen it work.

So, you know, after, you know, the shooting in Sandy Hook, you know, my life became about gun violence. And I helped build this movement for 10 years. And then after Yuvaldi, we had a little period of time where we were able to write a bill. We wrote a bill. We got assigned by the president. It had five major changes in gun laws, a lot of money for, neighborhood anti-violence initiatives. And since we passed that bill,

nobody really knows this, but gun violence rates have been coming way down, way down, like 15% reductions every year. They don't know it because no one's talking about it. Nobody's talking about it. By discussing the fact, and I think that there's reasons why you just, God damn it triggered me, Chris Murphy.

Bring it. I think one of the reasons why we're not discussing this is because in places that were scapegoated and made examples of these tremendous it's gun violence issues like Chicago, like Baltimore, like New Orleans, like places like that where the violence is actually sharply dropping and declining. Those places have black mayors and they have constituencies made up of people who are black and are doing the interventions that are necessary to save their communities.

And that doesn't really look good for a lot of the mainstream media and particularly this president to put his arms around Brandon Scott. to put his arms around some of these people and go, great job, this is coming down in these different blue cities. Yeah, it doesn't fit their narrative. There's a cultural reason why we're not talking about the fact that gun violence is going down and some of this stuff is working. Yeah, I think that's right. And if you really try to dig into why the rates are coming down, the changes we made in gun laws, they definitely mattered. But what really has happened is that mayors and community leaders have figured out how to do this anti-violence programming, right?

wrapping services around kids, going to the emergency room to stop the retributive cycles of violence. It really is local communities that have figured out how to do this work. Now, we're funding it for the first time from the federal government. But, yeah, I mean, obviously this country has been willing and enthusiastic about just blinding themselves to the reality of violence in black neighborhoods. in our cities, and you're probably right that our refusal to see the good news is just an extension of our refusal to see the bad news and, of course, only wake up as a nation when a group of white kids in Newtown, Connecticut got shot. And as someone who's story on gun violence is rooted in that tragedy, I also completely understand how unacceptable it is that it was that tragedy,

rather than the tragedy that was happening every single day in New Haven and Hartford and Bridgeport that decided that turned us all into crusaders on this. What's your favorite comic book? Comic book? Your favorite comic book? Your favorite story tale?

When you're in Fantasyland and Chris Murphy when you're watching, like, what's your favorite like superhero growing up or anything like that? Oh, I mean, I'm definitely like a Star Wars. kid, right? Like Star Wars? Yeah, so I was so yeah, I was born in 73, right? So Star Wars comes out right at the point where you're in the middle of that

that zeitgeist. So that's probably the biggest part of my... Okay, so Star Wars, I ask you a question. Who do you blame for the rise of Emperor Palpatine? Do you blame the Sith Emperor Palpatine's Dark Force Jedi cult that he is a part of,

right, for taking over? Or do you blame the Jedi, Yoda, Mace Window, Quigong Jin, even our beloved Obi-Wan Kenobi, for not realizing that Senator Palpatine was a Sith Lord. Which one do you blame? Well, you've got, you know, in the broader Star Wars universe, you've got exploitation, right? Of course. At scale, right? Yes.

Right, happening. And so the Jedi weren't focused on the underlying dynamics, right, that give rise to someone who comes along and says, you know, just put me in charge, right? I'll fix everything, right? It's a, all of a sudden the Republic gets fragile and hard to maintain when the Jedi aren't paying attention to the destruction of the shared prosperity that makes a republic possible. Absolutely. So with us having established. that isn't it fair that since we're living under the empire that we

blame Jedi who are asleep at the will as much as we blame the evil of Palpatine and Darth Vader that's what the book's about me I'm just making sure it's like we we all Republicans and Democrats

let us slide into a world where people are feeling shitty and lonely and powerless because we were made to believe a set of things that weren't true that really were just an excuse for a bunch of rich people to get richer. And so our culture became really fragile, which allowed for a potential empire to take root. Now I got one for you off that. You said recently...

I'm never seen a Star Wars movie, by the way. She called... So I tell now. You said recently that Biden should have dropped out early. My question is, why? didn't you say a thing? Because it's stuff like that that makes me feel like the Jedi were asleep at the wheel, that they cared more about business as usual than they did about actually defending people. Yeah, I mean, it was a mistake, right? I think a lot of us had spent, I mean, just to be

honest, like, I think a lot of us had spent time with him privately where we did see a guy. So that's true. You're telling us that's true. Yeah. That whole behind closed doors. he can do a black flip shit. You're telling us that that that's actually... I'm not saying that he was the same guy that he was when I met him 15 years earlier, but I'm saying that we didn't... We saw different things behind closed doors. I think there was also for somebody like me

who wanted to see kind of a more robust populism, wanted to see a president take on consolidated corporate power. He was starting to do that. And so I was, you know, I think a lot of us were just... loyal to the guy because we thought he had done the right things and he had helped us pass some pretty serious legislation, including gun violence bill. But I make the case in this book that one of the things that's plaguing the country is the tribal nature of our politics in which so many of us now define ourselves by our politics. We don't define ourselves by

our gender or the place we live. We define ourselves by our politics. And I think as politics becomes more of our core identity, we are less likely to look at our leaders and ask hard questions. That's what's happening on the right. You identify yourself as MAGA. And so you're just not willing to question the leader because that would cause you to question your entire identity. And I think that happened on the left as well, which is probably part of the reason that we didn't ask harder questions about whether Biden could carry the banner. So then how as voters and constituents, when you make a confession like that, and you're not the only one, how do we, you guys then reconnect with us to build trust back in the party, back in politicians? Because it does feel like that loyalty wasn't just to Biden. It felt like it was to an institution.

So how do you rebuild that? How do you reconnect? Yeah, part, I mean, part of it, I think, is just admitting you made the mistake. I do think that that's a start. But second is being, you know, committed to tearing down the institutions. And that's just, I'm not sure that our party is there. And I make this argument in the book that, you know, in the end, as much as I don't quarterback Kamala Harris's campaign, she ended the campaign with Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney, people who were very much part of establishments that let us down. instead of finishing the campaign attacking those establishments.

We don't make getting billionaire and private money out of politics are number one issue because we're kind of addicted to that money too. And so I think people look at us and they say, well, if you're not proposing things that are going to destroy the existing corrupt parts of the system, then even if you do a couple mea culpos like on Joe Biden, it just doesn't seem serious to me, which is why I think the Democratic Party just has to be bolder in the ways that we tell people if we win power, we're going to fix the ways in which our politics are aligned to listen to only the powerful and rich people. Yeah, because then what happens is people take advantage of it, and then you have

Spencer Pratt running for mayor. Tough. Yeah. I heard that slight criticism of Kamala Harris's campaign. I could, like Rachel, I'm surprised Rachel didn't get you. I can't believe you set that right in front of her face. but I don't know if you know this, Chris. Kamala Harris is in a different sorority than Rachel. She's an a-a-a-a-rachel's a Delta. So Rachel, you have to learn this. But you're still a diehard.

I mean, I'm a delta for life. But there's a little bit of like them versus us. These are the things when you run for president, what you're going to do. When you run for president, I love the, you know what I love? That's my favorite one. What's that? Of all the lies that politicians tell, my favorite one is we've had Shapiro up here, he's going. We've had you up here, you're going.

We've had Newsom. Newsom appear. Gone. Like, he's gone. Like, gone. We've had Roe up here. Going. Like, we need to have a couple of ladies up here that are going.

All you guys are going. We know that you're going. I'm telling you right now, when you do it, like just learn the Divine Nine black sororities and fraternities. Yeah, it's important. Yeah, because like that'll be a way. I'm just telling you right now. That'll be a way you come out here and you go, yeah, I'm sharp today.

I'm dressed up like a Kappa. Oh, but I'm- watch all of the goddamn. He can not say dressed up like a Kappa. But if I screw it, but there's got to be a big downside. You screw it up, right? Yeah, you're screwed up. Yeah.

This is like high risk high reward. Just learn the names. Or there's something else you could do. You can come out. you'd be like, hey, the government owes you $14 trillion. We're going to pay it back to you. And then, but that would take actually a real movement. I want to ask you a question.

So just off that, there's a thought that you are one of the bright, shining stars. You, also off AOC, you know the Warnock, Georgia might have two different guys in the situation. Are we overly focused on the executive branch right now because of Donald Trump? the power that he's taking at the executive level is making everyone think that, hey, if we get somebody in there, that is other than Donald Trump, that we can roll some of these things back.

Everyone's obsessed with who's going to run. Your name is in that we know that you're going. You're not going to tell us right now. But is this taking up too much of the oxygen at a time when we don't have a functional government? 100%. No, 100%. And it is also just a function of, you know,

how politics is covered today. Yeah. I mean, people like competitions, right? They like horse races. And, you know, generation or two ago, not everything in the media was being driven for profit. There was a belief that you had a social obligation to cover what was important. And yes, the horse race was important, but it wasn't the only thing that was important. And so, you know, in an old media landscape where profit didn't drive every decision, where clicks didn't drive every decision, there was more energy given to things like legislation, right?

Of course. And there's just no room for that today because people want to know about the horse race. That's what drives clicks. But some of that is, you know why I want to know? Because I don't want 2024 to happen. So some of that is just fear. Like we want to know those things because we want to know that we're headed in the right direction. And listen, you will not, you're not going to believe me.

But like, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do. We love that. Yeah. I don't. But I, but somebody, another person who read this book said, I actually think you're not running for president because if you were running for president, you would write a different book than this, right? You would have written a book about yourself, right? And I wrote this kind of weedy, feely book about this underlying spiritual rot that's happening in the country. And I did that because I'm just worried we're not having that conversation. And so maybe the thing that felt best to me was that a couple of the people that you listed who are definitely running. running for presidents, you know, texted me. I have the book came out and they're like, listen, you know, we got to find a way to talk about this stuff.

And I've read part of the book and I'm going to try to find a way to, you know, use some of that language. So, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do. But in the end, whoever is going to run in 2028 has to talk about politics through a spiritual lens. How does it make you feel? Right. And our best communicators on the left historically from Martin Luther King Jr.

to RFK, the original, have communicated in spiritual terms, how politics can lift you up, make you feel happier, more powerful, feel more meaning in your lives. And we've become kind of a technocratic party in which we just talk about how this policy solution is going to lead to this additional income in your life. That's not, I think, how people think every day. They live life emotionally. They live life metaphysically. And they want to. on a politics that meets them there. This episode is brought to you by Comcast Business. Hey Thought Warriors.

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per second internet. Security edge and additional qualifying service. One of your agreement, paperless billing and auto pay with bank account required. Taxes and fees extra. Last question for me. I know Rachel's got to go. Yeah. Just telling me. Last question. There is a cohort of people that we talk a lot about. I wonder all the time what the Democrats are doing for black women because black women are the Democratic. Democrats, the most loyal base, the most loyal base that they have. I specifically also am concerned about what the party is offering black men. I wonder what they're doing for black women and what they're offering black men.

I increasingly hear from people who now have statistics, they have data, they have their eyes, they have their experiences, and they are wondering for two or three generations of Democratic leadership. Not that people haven't gotten stuff. They have. They've gotten a host of legislation that actually in the 60s made them full citizens. And then after that, there's been stuff. But it doesn't seem like there's ever been a plan for addressing systemic inequality,

addressing historic harm. And just the full cultural adoption of black people as Americans. I'm a fucking American. like my people are from South Louisiana and they bled and tilled the soil so that I could be sitting here talking to you and I don't feel like my country or the Democratic Party or anybody else

gives a shit about that. I'm not from anywhere else. I am from here. Everything here I don't have to ask for anything. I shouldn't have to ask for a police officer not to address me as sir. I shouldn't have to ask to not be discriminated against Bob. All of that, that is bananas. to me that we're still having this conversation. What are you guys going to do? Like, how do we move forward? What are you offering the black women that vote for you 92% no matter what? What are you

offering the black men that want to be entrepreneurs and leaders in their society? What do you guys offer? Well, I mean, first of it, first of all, I think it is really important for us to be fiercely patriotic in a way that explains the ability of America to be multicultural, multilingual, multiracial, multireligious. And we have kind of ceded the patriotism narrative to the right. That's a choice. And we can explain the America we want to live in with a patriotism that commands us to break down those barriers. But one of the reasons I talk a lot about concentrated corporate power is that if you choose to have an economy that is dominated by a very small handful of companies, then you are never giving the ability for black entrepreneurs male or female to be able to succeed.

All those companies that dominate our economy today, they are run by white guys. Their boards are almost all white. The only way that you are going to have real black entrepreneurship again in this country is to just destroy the control that those folks have at the top. We made obviously a bunch of really good runs at civil rights reform in the wake of George Floyd. And it was hard and we didn't get it done. And we kind of stopped trying. Got spooked. We got, we kind of stopped trying. And it came from beside your cohort.

It was a couple. It was a senator from West Virginia and another one from Arizona that wouldn't vote for this stuff and did. And you guys allowed some bad actors inside of your own party to stop a lot of this stuff from moving forward. And so people notice, black women and black men notice that we stopped trying. And so and I also worry that sometimes our set of work here gets limited to the issue of voting rights, which is super important. Of course. Or criminal justice reform. Yeah, but we don't, we have not talked about criminal justice reform as much as we used to in the last few years. But it's even deeper than that. I mean, the most work that I've done in this space is around what's happening in our schools, right? I mean, that school to prison pipeline, the way that school discipline is used to target black boys in particular is an absolute abomination. And that is actually, you know, one of the primary. experiences that black women have is watching their sons be treated fundamentally differently in the school discipline process than others are. That's a real life daily experience that we

could lift up. It's frankly, in some ways, easier to tackle than the what's happening in the criminal justice system because we actually have examples of schools that when they pulled the school resource officers out of the schools, put them back onto the streets. the school discipline rates and the disparities dropped. So we have to be caught trying. We have to build a narrative about American patriotism that is fiercely inclusive. And then I think we have to explain that the changes we're talking about in the economy are all about giving the ability for everybody to have that American dream, that business that they start,

that business that thrives. But that's a particularly important narrative for Black America. So good way to end it Chris Murphy Senator from Connecticut You know You know I just Before you go I want to say something

You know I like to watch the Sunday shows I don't know why I'm like a mascus like that I like to get up and I watch All of Face the Nation I watch all of Meet the Press Sounds unnecessary I just like it

You know They put you wake up And there's Markway Mullin on there And And I just don't know how to fuck some of these people got to where they are. I don't mean to be a dick about it, but sometimes I watch stuff and I am amazed.

It makes me look down on myself. Like, could I have been more? Could I have done more? Because sometimes I watch, particularly on the Sunday shows, like they don't do long sit downs, but particularly on these shows, I'm watching this. I want you to just make sure,

don't make a fool out of yourself, Chris. Like when you go, like when you go, that is, I watch, and I am, flabbergasted sometimes. But it's a consequence of what skills you need to have today to succeed politically. So the two primary skills you need are your clickbait, right? And clickbait has nothing to do with qualifications to be a political leader. And you need to be able to raise money.

You need to be, you need to have the kind of hoodspa necessary to call up strangers one after another and ask them for money. And so you know what? If you're selecting leaders based upon whether they say things that will get clicks and whether they are good telemarketers, you're going to get some fucking weird people who rise to the cream of the crop because neither of those things have anything to do with the actual questions of merit as to who should be leading. So all of that is not unsolvable. Like you could choose to finance campaigns differently. You could choose to regulate our social media spaces in a way that those sort of dangerous

clickbait messages don't rise to prominence. There are ways to fix even those things. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you.