In an interview for this column in January, Senator Chris Murphy more or less foresaw the Democratic defeat in the 2024 election. The Connecticut Democrat warned the party had alienated working Americans by dismissing their concerns, prioritising identity over class and refusing to engage in dialogue. Donald Trump’s crushing victory on 5 November has seen Murphy emerge as one of the leading figures working to rejig the left.
“The way we measure the health of the economy is disconnected from the way in which people experience the economy,” Murphy told me back then. For too many Americans, material conditions were still “shitty”, and meanwhile the populist right was “having an energising conversation about how frustrated [Americans were] feeling with the pace of modern life”.
Many left-wing pundits and analysts promptly condemned him. The Biden economy was doing fine, they said: median wages and full-time work were up; perception of misery was just that. As for Murphy’s arguments about how neoliberal capitalism had eroded people’s sense of stability, well, “most of the evidence cuts against” it, averred a think-tanker from the neoliberal left (he offered a chart on the supposed correlation between “market integration” and social solidarity to counter the senator’s philosophical claims).
Murphy kicked up a bigger furore in 2023 with his commentary on “Rich Men North of Richmond”, a country ballad cum political anthem that briefly topped the charts. The lyrics railed against low wages and corrupt insiders (“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day/Overtime hours for bullshit pay”). For Murphy, the song’s explosive popularity highlighted discontent that the Democrats had to address, lest they continue to haemorrhage support among Americans without college degrees.
Rather than engage with his substantive point, many on the left accused him of going Maga. They were outraged he would find anything worthwhile in a song including a verse complaining about “the obese milkin’ welfare”. In short: progressives enacted precisely the tsk-tsking moralism and obsessive language-policing Murphy had set out to criticise.
As Democrats confront their electoral disaster, he is employing a much greater stridency. “That was a cataclysm,” he said in an X thread laying out his reaction to Trump’s win. “We are out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fuelling Maga. We refuse to pick big fights. Our tent is too small.”
Murphy blamed the Democrats for shunning Bernie Sanders-style economic populism “because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base”. He also assailed the left’s judgementalism: “We don’t listen enough; we tell people what’s good for them.” He argued economic populism should supply the “tentpole of the party” – a tent with room enough for those “who aren’t 100 per cent on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns or climate”. Perhaps Murphy’s strongest contention was the left’s association with diminished expectations: migration, globalisation, climate. In the progressive telling, these and other crises demand Americans relinquish control, or in some cases their sense of abundance. “Progress” has come to mean surcharges on driving cars; banning plastic straws; uncontrolled migrant flows; urban crime and disorder.
The right, a despondent former Biden administration official told me, has come to stand for what can be done: we can control the border, we can reverse neoliberal globalisation. By contrast, as Murphy wrote, “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.”
Murphy is right, but there are two serious obstacles to his renewed left. The first is institutional. Everyone in Democratic circles is talking about the distorting influence of “the groups” or “the shadow party” – the complex of donor-backed NGOs, media outlets and “community organisations” that set the Democratic agenda, staff Democratic offices, and constrain what elected officials can or can’t say. It was in response to a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, that Kamala Harris pledged to publicly fund transgender surgeries for imprisoned illegal immigrants. It was a self-parodic stance that supplied grist for Republican attacks.
This distorting influence is thorny, having to do with the decline of mass-membership organisations like labour unions, political parties and volunteer groups. Overcoming it won’t be easy. Even after the election exposed progressives’ chasm with voters, Seth Moulton, a Democratic lawmaker from Massachusetts, got in trouble with his own staff for his concerns over trans girls in school sports.
The second problem is political: how far are left populists like Murphy willing to go in submitting to popular sentiment on issues like immigration and gender? In his post-election thread, he didn’t signal openness to actually altering Democratic positions on these issues. All he would grant is a less hectoring tone and a willingness to engage with Americans who might disagree. Insufficient perhaps, but it’s a start.
America desperately needs a viable, popular left party. Let’s hope more Democrats join Murphy in reckoning with things as they are, rather than as they might wish them to be.
[See also: The new Trumpian bargain]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone