The Real Moral Majority: Sen. Chris Murphy has a sense of what ails America, and he wants to restore its spiritual core.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/26/real-moral-majority-murphy-review/


Credit: Land O’Lakes, Inc./Unsplash

In one of his first news conferences as president in 1981, Ronald Reagan famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Today, a different phrase terrifies me whenever it’s uttered by pundits, strategists, or politicians playacting as pundit or strategist: “Here’s what the Democrats should do.” The constant public musing over how the Democratic Party should position itself on every issue, not as a matter of first principles but calibrated for mass acceptance from the small slice of swing voters believed to determine national elections, creates an overwhelming impression that the party and its leaders stand for nothing. It diminishes any role for politics other than market research and instructs the electorate that a politician’s views are forever up for grabs. And it misreads what Americans in the 21st century appear to want in their elected officials: some sense that they are human beings who believe in something, not poll-tested weather vanes.




Sen. Chris Murphy has served in public office for the entirety of this century, elected first to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1998 at the age of 25. He has lived through this era of many leading Democrats hewing their views to what they think can win the most votes, rather than what might help the most people. And judging from his new book Crisis of the Common Good, Murphy is sick of this perpetual self-doubt and wants to let people in on his belief system.

The book doesn’t open with a legislative fight or a congressional hearing, but with Murphy watching his son play youth hockey and hearing that he cannot record the game to show to other family members, because if he does, his son’s team will be penalized. Private equity–backed Black Bear Sports Group instituted the ban because it sells access to a subscription-based video service of every game for up to $50 a month. What concerns Murphy is this loss of control, much of it driven by corporate power, the same helplessness many of his constituents feel doing battle with modern life. You can see this in the historic recent drop in consumer sentiment to levels below the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, despite relatively low unemployment and, before the Strait of Hormuz crisis, only modestly elevated inflation. The only way to reconcile this is by understanding that it’s about more than high prices or insecure jobs: Americans have a pervasive sense that they are under siege and outgunned. Even youth sports have become a profit opportunity; proud parents have become disempowered by corporate forces that dictate the terms and structure of the marketplace.

Murphy describes this not just in economic terms but as a spiritual crisis. I take him to mean a collapse of moral authority. When things we once took for granted are commodified and when simple pleasures are limited to those who can afford them, we’ve diminished something decent and proper. When presidents solicit bribes with a meme coin and when lives are occupied with gambling instead of participating, we’ve lost something inside ourselves. When friendship is intermediated through social media and when civic pride is harder to muster amid homogenized, hollowed-out Main Streets, we grow lonely and alienated. None of this sounds like a typical politician’s book, but the intellectual work of someone wrestling with why people are so stultifyingly unhappy today. This is not a book promising that economic growth will solve all ills: It directly calls out “false idols that … offered abundance but left us feeling empty.” There once was a time when our politicians reckoned with moral crises, and the moment appears ripe for a return to it.

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