Is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy The One? He's Not Bernie... But At Least He Isn't Gavin Newsom

ProgressivePunch isn’t the flawless measurement of congressional progressivism… but it’s closer to perfect than any other measurement I’ve found. Right now, there are 7 senators with 100% voting scores for the 119th Congress— Elizabeth Warren (MA), Mazie Hirono (HI), Ed Markey (MA), Jeff Merkley (OR), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Patty Murray (WA) and Chris Murphy (CT). When it comes to lifetime scores, only two, Patty Murray and Chris Murphy, seem to have changed direction. All the other senators with 100% scores this year, have very high scores for their careers. Murray and Murphy don’t— and they’re the only two with overall “B” grades instead of “A” grades. Of the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus, Murphy’s overall record makes him the 34th best. The 13 senators with worse records than Murphy mostly really suck bad— like the 5 with “F” and “D” scores, Elissa Slotkin (MI), Ruben Gallego (AZ), Mark Warner (VA), Angus King (I-ME) and Michael Bennet (CO).

I got to know Murphy a bit when, as a state legislator, he first ran for the House in 2006 and flipped a red seat blue (with help from Blue America). He came across as a fighting progressive. Then he joined the centrist, corporate-aligned New Dems and I lost interest in him. He came across as a garden variety Democratic careerist, not terrible, not great… just there, sometimes good, sometimes less good, always better than a Republican. Then the threat of Trumpism seems to have woken him up. He’s been one of the strongest and most consistent voices against fascism in Congress. And his positions seem to meet have moved in a more progressive direction over all.

He’s running for president; he may be the best alternative. He’s sure better than Kamala, Gavin Newsom, Mayo Pete… I guess his primary strategy is to move left; makes sense. I’d like to ask him. I haven’t been able to so far.

In a New Yorker interview, We Are Sleepwalking Into Autocracy, that was published this week, David Remnick had a different set of questions for Murphy than I would have, although he noted in his introduction that “in recent months, Murphy has tirelessly argued… that unless the Democratic Party broadens its coalition with a primarily populist economic message and takes risks to oppose the destruction of democratic institutions, it will fail to mobilize popular support, continue to lose elections, and squander (as in Hungary, Turkey, and beyond) democracy itself.”

The two agree that the Trump regime “is intent on creating an American-style authoritarian situation” and Murphy added that the congressional Republicans don’t gave much of a problem with that. “They are,” he said, “living in a self-created delusion. Most of them will tell you that it’s not as bad as you think. Yes, Donald Trump is acting in a way that previous Presidents have not, but we will still have a free and fair election; what he’s doing is not enough to topple essential democratic norms. They are, of course, also deeply scared of him. They have worked very hard to become United States senators. You’ve sacrificed a lot to get to this point, and you don’t want to stop being a United States senator once you’ve gotten here. And for Republicans, the only thing that keeps you a United States senator is staying on Donald Trump’s good side... And then the majority of Republicans in Congress are fully on board with the idea that the rules should be rigged so that Democrats never rule again. There is just an exhaustion with democracy among a lot of Republicans... I do think that over the last four years, those surrounding Donald Trump put together a pretty thoughtful plan to destroy democracy and the rule of law, and you are seeing it being implemented.” 

“Just in the last week,” continued Murphy, “the assault has been trained on academia, institutions of higher education, and the legal community, the biggest law firms in this country. In democracy after democracy, those two institutions— higher education and the legal profession— are, in many ways, the foundation that undergirds the rule of law. Those are the places where people think about the rule of law, protect it, warn when it is being undermined. The legal profession is the place where people contest efforts to try to destroy the rule of law. And so it is not coincidental that Trump is trying to force both higher education and the legal profession to capitulate to him, and to commit, often through very explicit bilateral agreements— for the most important institutions— to essentially quelling protest. And, of course, what the Administration is doing by taking on these very high-profile institutions is sending a warning to other law firms and to other colleges: if you take us on— if you file lawsuits against the Administration, if you support Democrats, if you allow for campus-wide protests against our priorities— you’ll be next. And so what will happen here—  what inevitably happens in every democracy in which this tactic is tried— is that the Administration won’t have to go after every institution or every firm, because most of them will just decide in advance to stay out of the way. When students are filing a petition for a massive protest against a Trump Administration policy, they may just find it much harder to be able to exercise free speech on campus. This is how democracy dies. Everybody just gets scared. You make a few examples, and everyone else just decides to comply.”

“I think we’re a pretty broken brand right now,” Murphy offered, ‘and some of the people on the left don’t want to go through that hard rewrite of what the Democratic Party stands for. Remnick asked him “What’s at the core of the brokenness, if we can be specific?” And Murphy responded that the Democrats “have become the status-quo party, and so we have reverted to defending democracy instead of explaining how we are going to break it down and reform it. We have not been a pugilistically populist party, where we name the people who have power and we build very easy-to-understand solutions about how to transfer power to people who don’t have it. And then we’re a pretty judgmental party, filled with a dozen litmus tests. We don’t let you in unless you agree with us on everything, kind of— from gender rights to reproductive rights to gun control to climate. We’ve got to be a party that invites people in as long as they agree with us on the basic economic message, and build our party with a little bit more acceptance of people who have diverging views on social and cultural issues.”

Murphy said the key for the Democratic Party is “making the decision that economics is the tentpole. And populist economics. That means that you are going to have a party that, frankly, sounds a little bit more like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. You are talking about billionaires and corporate power. You are proposing really easy-to-understand ideas on how to shift that power— whether it be a cap on rent increases, or a massive increase in the minimum wage, or the regulation of every single drug price, not just the ten highest-priced drugs. And then it is just making that decision to go out and ask people to come into the coalition who might not be with us on issues that I care about, like guns, and to nominate candidates that signal that the Party is a big tent— people who are populist economically, but may not line up with us on all the social and cultural stuff.”

Newsom heads right; Murphy heads left

Further along, he noted that “Trump is giving us this opportunity— because this is the most corrupt White House in the history of the country— to run on an anti-corruption message. But we will only win if we actually run an anti-corruption platform. And so, for me, the two things that matter most are populist economics and government reform. If Democrats run on cleaning up Washington with real, actual plans— to, for instance, get private money completely out of politics; to pass the Stock Act, to make sure that not a single person inside government can use insider information to trade to benefit them financially— and we run on populist economics, I think that’s a winner, and it’s a way for people to stand up and support democracy, but only a reformed version of democracy... Trump has been so public about his corruption that it ends up being normalized. If it were so corrupt, why would you do it in public? It must not be corrupt if you’re doing it in public. We’re used to corruption being done in secret. We’re used to there being a sort of shamefulness about it. And so it is interesting that his boasting of his corruption ends in people believing that he might not be corrupt. I’m just shocked that the Trump meme coin isn’t, like, the only thing that we’re talking about. It’s probably the most massive corruption scandal in the history of the country. You literally have an—I guess—legal, open channel for private donations to the President and his family in exchange for favors. And we just think that it’s part of Trump’s right to do business in the White House. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s deeply immoral. And the fact that we didn’t talk about that every hour of every day, once he released that coin, was kind of a signal to the country that we weren’t going to take the corruption seriously.”

Remnick never asked about a general strike but Murphy did assert that “[W]e need to be engaged in risk-tolerant behavior right now. Because ultimately, the only way to save the democracy is for there to be a national public mobilization— of not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people— when the five-alarm fire happens. If the public doesn’t see us taking risks— tactical risks, daily risks— then they are not going to take what will be a risk on their part, standing up to a repressive regime where it’s clear that the government is willing to make you pay a personal price if you exercise your voice.”

This is in line with what you said to Jon Stewart recently. You said, “I don’t think you can ask the people of this country to do these exceptional things that are going to be necessary to save our democracy if we are not willing to take risks”— meaning yourselves. What kind of risks should you and your colleagues be taking right now going forward?

In the Senate, the minority has power— you cannot proceed to any legislation without the consent of the minority. Now, we have regularly been providing the votes to the Republican majority to move forward legislation that they care about, including the continuing resolution. We could choose not to do that. We could say to Republicans: Unless you work with us on some targeted measures to prevent the destruction of our democracy, we are not going to continue to pretend like it’s business as usual. We could make that decision as a party. Now, that would mean that occasionally Democrats would need to vote no on legislation that, on the merits, they may support. But, if you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 story, then you have to act like it, and you need to show that you’re willing to take a political risk, like voting against an otherwise popular bill in order to increase and create leverage to try to save the democracy.

You mentioned the possibility of public involvement, public demonstrations, people out on the street. What would bring them there?

Well, there aren’t daily political rallies happening in the country. But anytime you set one up now, you’re seeing not thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people attending. You saw what happened with Bernie and A.O.C. over the weekend.

…So how do you go about winning back voters who don’t agree with you on some of what you say are orthodoxies, without ceding ground on things that you believe in?

I think about a really transparent ask of people, which is to say: we want you to work with us because you believe the minimum wage should be ten dollars higher. You believe that corporate power has become so consolidated as to become an evil. And we’re willing to hear you out, we’re willing to listen to you about your concerns, about how far our party has moved on guns or climate or cultural and social issues. To just have a little bit less judgment when it comes to the non-economic issues. I think that that builds a bigger coalition… If we don’t build coalitions that allow us to win elections. Listen, one of my colleagues, [Georgia Senator] Jon Ossoff, gave a great speech over the weekend. He talked, in the meat of his speech, about the trans community, as I do, and said, “Listen, don’t let the right blame your problems on trans kids or on immigrants. Your problems are created by a fundamental corruption inside government. Your problems are created by a government that prioritizes the billionaires and rigs the rules against you.” That is a message that can win. So I don’t think you run away from your defense of those communities. You talk about those communities in the context of a message that is anchored in fighting concentrated economic power, and fighting the billionaire class that is taking over our government.