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Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. This month, Emily Bazelon talks with Senator Chris Murphy about his new book Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. Their conversation explores the spiritual crisis Murphy sees at the heart of America, why he believes Trump is a symptom rather than the disease, and what solutions he proposes for rebuilding community and reconnecting Americans to a sense of shared purpose.
This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Emily Bazelon: You talk about breaking up corporate power as a way of unrigging the economy, making people feel a sense of ownership. Tell us a little bit about how you see that happening.
Senator Chris Murphy:The way to talk about breaking up concentrated corporate power is to talk about it in terms of how it makes people feel. Today you are told that you are just a citizen of the world, that we all buy stuff from the same national retailers that are part of a big antiseptic, flattened culture. Our downtowns have been emptied out. Our local institutions from churches to unions to service clubs aren’t as healthy as they used to be. The people who are powerful in our economy don’t live in our communities anymore. They live nowhere. They live in Davos and Manhattan and Aspen all at the same time.
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I grew up in Weathersfield, Connecticut, just north of here, and I was so proud to be from a place that felt connected, a place that felt unique. I tell the story in the book of going to the grocery store with my grandma every weekend and it was owned by a local family. We stopped at the deli counter and my grandmother had a five or ten minute conversation with the deli guy and that made her feel really connected to the community. And the deli guy every Saturday morning would hand me a free slice of American cheese and I was like the luckiest kid in the world. But that connected me to the deli guy and I just walked out of there feeling like I belong to a place. This is my meaning. This is my identity.
That reality doesn’t exist for people anymore. It felt powerful when the people who owned that supermarket, who owned your local hospital, who owned the company you worked for, lived in your community. There was accountability. It was harder for them to screw you because they were going to see you at church or at the grocery store. Both left and right are sick of being told that you are now just a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of this place. And there’s real hope that if you frame it in those terms. The political solutions there, including breaking up those big companies that run out of business the small companies and supermarkets and bookstores that used to make us feel connected, that that politics is not hopeless.