Fascism will not be defeated by logic

Senator Chris Murphy on how the left can learn to speak to the emotional life of an anxious country — and win

Chris Murphy has built a reputation on his ability to make policy on the most emotionally fraught issues in America, from gun safety (where he managed to get a law passed for the first time in three decades) to the border crisis (where he got a bipartisan committee to agree on a bill, only to see it fall apart after Trump pressured the party).

He’s also someone who thinks deeply about the background conditions of American life, as with his book from some years ago on the role of violence in American life. Rare among American politicians, he has an ability to be both in the arena and up in the stands, observing the whole scene.

Lately, he’s been thinking about something that we have, too: the role of emotion in the fraught political life of America in 2024. It is an anxious, fearful, tumultuous period in the country’s history. We’ve been arguing in this newsletter than the political left needs to take emotional appeal more seriously. And Murphy has been thinking along similar lines.

We talked to him just after he’d finished work on the 2024 edition of the World Happiness Report, a process that got him to recognize how the country’s democratic crisis is rooted in deep emotional distress.

We believe Democratic leaders have failed to help Americans cope with the crisis of anxiety and unhappiness they face in a transformed world — and this failure of change management has had dire political consequences.

When we see people unsettled by it, discombobulated, a lot of them are just trying to get their heads around all that a new era is asking of them. And the authoritarians are getting to them earlier and more effectively than pro-democratic movements. And so people who start out as merely disoriented by change are radicalized into fanatics.

Murphy says that Democrats simply cannot leave emotion to the Republicans — it just plays directly into a classic authoritarian strategy. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has told us:

Autocrats are very, very good at tapping into people's innermost fears. On the one hand, they make themselves the carriers of those fears, but they also make themselves the solution. So when Trump said, The American dream is dead, he made himself the vessel of the forgotten, the people who felt downtrodden. Of course, his regard for them is fake. He just wants to use them. But he simulated care and inhabited those emotions, and then provided a solution: “I alone can fix it.” And people felt safe with him. .

Below, Senator Murphy tells us not just about his work on the border crisis, or about how the presidential campaign should be messaging, or even about how Republicans have been able to soothe people’s fears where Democrats have failed, but also about what he’s trying to do now to provide an alternative to right-wing social and political offerings — before it’s too late.

“You don’t solve a crisis of meaning and purpose by just giving people a little bit bigger tax credit,” he told us.

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I want to start with what you’ve said about happiness. Can you expand on your notion that the government you are part of is culpable for inhibiting people's happiness, or at least for not making happiness probable?

It’s important to remember that the government’s responsibility to protect your right to happiness is in our founding document. So this is a legitimate conversation — our founders thought this was an essential conversation. Government stays out of what you’re passionate about, who you connect with, where your purpose and meaning come from. But we are responsible for setting the rules of society and culture and economy that give you a chance at happiness.

The studies on what brings happiness don’t surprise anybody. What people want is connection and positive relationships and agency and power over their lives. They feel like they have less chance of connection today, and they certainly feel like they have much less agency over their economic lives. And there are public policy choices we’ve made that have robbed people of connection and power.

It’s our decision not to regulate social media; our decision to hollow out unique local places; it’s our decision to force people to work longer, eroding leisure time, that leads people to lives of isolation. It’s our decision to look the other way at monopoly power, our decision to let costs rise for families while wages are flat, that erodes people’s sense of economic agency. 

You can’t be happy if you don't have friends and connections. You can’t be happy if you don’t feel like you have control over your life. And to the extent people feel more isolated and less in control of their lives today, there are direct lines from government policies to the ways that people feel like happiness is further away.

I don’t want to let the Republicans off the hook here, but in a way it’s very obvious to me, and I think to a lot of people reading this, what the Republican culpability is in everything you just said. But what are Democrats missing in the approach they’ve been taking over the years?

I think Democrats got captured by a neoliberal vision of the future in which we would all become part of this one big common global thing. And that the technology elites would take care of the rough edges by themselves. We were wrong. It’s really important to have a truly domestic industrial economy. It’s important to have places that feel different than other places. And technology needs to be regulated. The elites don’t have our best interests in mind.

More broadly, we are all guided by what we measure. And when we measure public policy success, we generally look at unemployment rates and GDP and inflation and crime. None of those have anything to do with connection. Very few of them have anything to really do with granular-level economic power. And so I just think it’s time that we start accepting that the ways that we measure the success of our public policy are pretty disconnected from the ways that people actually measure their own happiness and success.

What’s the application of what you're saying to what a campaign could look like? What would you like the president to invite people to do to connect with each other in service of saving democracy, beyond just saving democracy by voting for him?