The Connecticut Democrat suddenly thinks Democrats need to listen to people outside their coalition.
The Connecticut Democrat was nowhere to be found as the Biden administration kept lurching leftward, but now he thinks Democrats need to listen to people outside their coalition.
S enator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) has some ideas about why his party lost control of the Senate and lost the presidency to Donald Trump for the second time. “Time to rebuild the left,” Murphy said in a thread on X, formerly Twitter. “We are out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA. We refuse to pick big fights. Our tent is too small.”
So far, so good. Democrats and the media are increasingly one and the same, and they are out of touch and distrusted by a majority of Americans. But why? That’s the part Murphy doesn’t understand at all.
“The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism,” Murphy says, referencing a thing that never happened. The fairytale of hegemonic neoliberalism, as Phillip Magness of the Independent Institute calls it, says that over the past four or five decades, government has shrunk and markets have been cut loose with little to no regulation. If only!
In fact, as Ruchir Sharma pointed out in his recent book What Went Wrong with Capitalism, government has steadily grown since the 1930s, and the economy has only become more insulated from downturns. Deficits, bailouts, constant stimulus from central banks, greater welfare spending, and an ever-growing list of regulations are the defining features of the past 50 years of economic policy, not some neoliberal fantasy.
The fairytale of hegemonic neoliberalism is well-funded by universities and foundations, which keep it before the eyes of policy-makers such as Murphy. It exists largely to convince proponents of big government that the slow growth that has resulted from decades of dirigisme is actually due to government not being big enough. It’s the “this food is too salty; have you tried salting it?” school of political economy.
Murphy notes that people are lonelier now than in the past. This critique has more merit, and it matches things conservatives have said for decades about the decline of civil society. But Murphy doesn’t seem to make the connection that this has happened as government has grown and replaced civil-society institutions in areas such as poverty alleviation and child-raising.
“The left skips past the way people are feeling (alone, impotent, overwhelmed) and straight to uninspiring solutions (more roads! bulk drug purchasing!) that do little to actually upset the status quo of who has power and who doesn’t.” Senator Murphy — who, just to remind you, is in the Senate, a body that has power to pass legislation on these topics — voted for “more roads!” and “bulk drug purchasing!” in the infrastructure law and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
When he cast those votes, he apparently found them to be quite inspiring. He called the infrastructure law “historic” and a “game changing investment” and the IRA “a break from decades of oil industry and drug company ownership of federal policy.” He said of the IRA, “This bill will make life better and cheaper for regular Americans, and it stands as part of an unprecedented string of legislative successes by this Congress.”
Now he wants you to believe that didn’t really happen, or that those laws were half-measures, and that Democrats have been too complacent in their mission to grow government to help the little guy. In truth, the Biden administration was unabashed in its disregard for economics and its emphasis on growing government to help the little guy. When Murphy was voting for those laws, he was happy to say so.
The problem for Murphy is not that Democrats didn’t pass left-wing populist economic policies. It’s that they did — and the voters hated them. Joe Biden rebuked Milton Friedman by name on the campaign trail, got elected, and passed some of the most anti-Friedman policies imaginable (subsidies, protectionism, enormous budget deficits, $1.7 trillion in new regulations). Then, his party was defeated in part because voters hated the inflation that resulted, something Friedman warned about incessantly during his life.
“We don’t listen enough; we tell people what’s good for them,” says Senator Murphy, who thinks more people should work in manufacturing, supports the government deciding what your health insurance covers under the Affordable Care Act, believes you don’t have enough friends, and has introduced legislation to prohibit you from buying the most commonly owned type of rifle in the United States.
Instead, what Democrats need is “real economic populism,” Murphy says, suggesting that he thinks Biden was a phony, though he never mentions Biden at all in the thread. (When Biden dropped out, Murphy said he was “a president who will be defined by world-changing service and nation-saving selflessness” and, during the Democratic National Convention, described Biden as “an extraordinary president” and “a great American figure.) If the past four years of strengthening “buy American” rules (which Murphy also supports), boosting manufacturing investment with billions in subsidies, and ascribing just about every economic problem to an ensemble cast of villains wasn’t “real economic populism,” I don’t know what is.
His closing advice to the Left includes, “Listen to poor and rural people.” Unless those rural people happen to own guns that Senator Murphy disapproves of.
Where was Senator Murphy when the Biden administration was violating the law and the Constitution to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to people with college degrees by canceling student loans, transferring the costs partly to lower-income people who didn’t go to college? Murphy said that was how “Democrats use government to do things to help regular people.”
Where was Senator Murphy when Democrats were advocating the reinstatement of the full state and local tax deduction, which primarily benefits the wealthy? Leading the charge, of course, as is natural for a senator who represents one of the wealthiest and most-taxed states.
Where has Senator Murphy been as Democrats have become captured by transgender activists who believe boys should be allowed to compete in girls’ sports? He magically becomes a staunch believer in federalism, saying in September that school districts should decide the issue for themselves and that Republicans who object are “bullying and harassing kids.”
Murphy’s analysis might be interesting if he was a commentator on politics, but he’s an actor in politics, and his actions don’t match his commentary. His attempt at introspection does not contain any sign that he regrets any of his own past votes or policy positions, or the positions and rhetoric of the administration that he loyally supported for four years. If he really believed that the Left has made Democrats less electable, the time to say so was before the election, rather than Monday-morning-quarterbacking from his Senate seat.