Chris Murphy asserts that the right to pursue happiness merits political discourse. He is a U.S. Senator for Connecticut and a leading voice on mental health, gun control and foreign policy.
Transcript
Senator Chris Murphy:
Right there in the founding document, right? In the Declaration of Independence: it is a God-given right to be able to pursue not a job, not a career, not a certain amount of money---but happiness. Right? And that's an intentional word, and it charges us with stepping back and thinking about whether we are delivering to people the right to pursue happiness.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. A month ago, I would've argued two truisms about American politics. One, that politicians do not willingly leave power. And two, the Democrats do not quickly fall into lockstep on anything. Having been proven wrong on both of these things, I get the chance to sit down with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut who helps explain exactly what's happening. He weighs in on Vice President Harris's choice of running mate, unpacks some of the fundamental problems in American politics, and discusses the role happiness should play in our government. It's a pleasure to bring you his insights. I hope you enjoy.
Senator Murphy, thank you for joining us.
Senator Chris Murphy:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's a real pleasure for us. It's particularly a pleasure because we are living through one of the most turbulent election cycles I've ever experienced, and we're going to talk about that. But I want to start someplace a little bit different, which is: you graduated from Williams, you quickly went and got your J.D., and then shortly after that you ran for public office. And you could have done anything in your life at this point. You're sort of a rising star, and I'm curious about the decision to step into politics at that age. I'm wondering if you can put yourself back in time and articulate what caused you to step into the arena.
Senator Chris Murphy:
Well, first of all, great to be with you. Thanks for having me. That is a long time ago. That's 25 years back, when I first decided to run for office. Yeah, I mean, listen, for me, it was a pretty simple story. I grew up in a household where me and my brother and sister were taught to not take our relative economic security for granted. My mother grew up in public housing in New Britain, Connecticut. She didn't have all of the sense of security that we did, and she told us that we needed to live our life in some way, shape, or form that tried to give more kids and families a shot at what we had. I also was kind of an organizer from birth. I was the kid who organized the neighborhood touch football games. When there was a dress code imposed at our high school, I was the kid who everybody looked to go protest at the teacher's meeting, and I loved organizing people.
So at some point when I was a teenager, I discovered that there was this whole world called politics where you got to organize people to make the country or to make your community a better place. It was what I liked, it was what my mother and father told me I was supposed to live my life doing, and I got hooked. I was lucky to be around a bunch of local political figures in my hometown of Weathersfield, Connecticut when I was a teenager that were really wonderful, compassionate, thoughtful, honest people that kind of defied the caricature that a lot of us have been taught about political leadership. And so it wasn't that hard for me when I graduated college to raise my hand and say, I'd like to be a part of this. I'd like to run for office. I'd like to be in the room making decisions. And so I didn't wait. I have never ever looked back because I still do believe this is a honorable profession. It's got a handful of idiots and yahoos and narcissists, but most of the people on the left and the right who are doing this are doing it because they just want to make their community better.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Did it live up to your expectations, the expectations that you had as a 25-year-old?
Senator Chris Murphy:
Absolutely. There are lots of days where you feel like Sisyphus just pushing the rock up and it comes back down. So you have to learn patience in this business. But the first year that I was a 25-year-old state legislator, I passed a little law. I was opposed to a gas-fired power plant that was being located on some wetlands in my town, and I thought that they were ramming it through way too quickly. And so my first bill that I proposed was just a bill to extend by a month the amount of time that local communities had to raise protest over power plants that were being cited in their neighborhood. And in my first year in the state legislature, I passed that bill. I mean, did it change the world? No, but it responded to a real need and concern that we had in my community. It made people feel like they could actually change things for the better. And I think from that moment on, I was hooked because I was able to get something done. It mattered. I've been able to get bigger things done later in my career, but this business is not all dead ends.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So we got a limited time with you, and I want to just quickly touch on the big announcement. Kamala Harris announced Governor Tim Walz as her VP. He's already made an impact on the election cycle by coming up with the term "weird," which has certainly entered the zeitgeist as it relates to Republicans. Does this pick matter? If it does, how does it change the election?
Senator Chris Murphy:
So I was elected with Tim Walz to Congress in the same year, 2006, so I know him well. We are friends. I don't want him to take this personally when I say I don't know how much it matters.
I think Tim is a great choice. He is exactly what you see on TV in person. He is down to earth, funny, normal, compassionate. You meet him and you're like, "oh yeah, you're a football coach slash teacher slash veteran." He's wonderful. At the same time, I think Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are such big personalities. I think the contrast is so incredible between the two of them that there are probably very few people in this country who were going to vote for Donald Trump but are going to vote for Kamala Harris because of her vice presidential choice, or were going to vote for Kamala Harris, but don't vote for her because of her vice presidential choice. I just don't think that's how a lot of voter choices are going to work. So great choice, not sure how much it'll actually matter when it comes down to voter's choices.
Ted Roosevelt V:
But there's something, what you're describing about Governor Tim Walz about, it sounds like he's an extremely authentic person. He is what you get. I'm curious if you think there's a yearning for that in this country right now?
Senator Chris Murphy:
Yeah, no, no, yeah, he is who he is. He's also deeply kind and positive, right? I mean, what you saw out of the gate from JD Vance was judgment, right? I mean, the minute that he becomes the candidate for vice president, he is judging people based on their lifestyle choices, sort of saying that you are worse or better based upon the choices you've made in your life. And that's not Tim Walz. Tim Walz thinks everybody's great, right? He thinks there's room for everybody in this country and treats everybody respectfully without judgment. So I think yes, people want authenticity, but I also think they want folks who aren't showing up at the door of this campaign placing judgment on people, which is not something that Tim Walz does.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You talked recently on a podcast that you were on about meaning and purpose in this country. You had a quote that really resonated with me that was, "there is a crisis of meaning and purpose in this country that has direct lines to policy." I'm wondering if you can pull on that thread a bit more. What do you mean by that?
Senator Chris Murphy:
Yeah, I mean, it's a huge conversation, but I think it is one that needs to be part of the political conversation. I think a lot of things have changed very quickly in this country and all across the world, which has robbed from people or taken from people, traditional sources of meaning and purpose. And I'll give you two examples. In the last 30 years, we've gone from about 70% of people being affiliated on a weekly basis with church to 50%. That's a really big, sharp, quick drop. Second, over the last 50 years, you have seen the rise of feminism in this, the entry of women into the workforce. You now have just as many households where the woman makes more than the man, as the man makes more than the woman. That has fundamentally changed identity structures. A lot fewer people derive their identity and meaning and purpose through religious affiliation.
A lot fewer men derive their primary meaning and identity through their role as the primary breadwinner for their family. Now, I don't judge those transitions, right? There's a lot of reasons why people have walked away from religion. Of course, I welcome feminism and the rise of women in the workforce. I just think it comes with a reality that a lot of folks don't---have to change the primary way that they define themselves. And I think that is not coincidental to the rise in political identity as our primary identity source. Now, political identity by its very nature is an oppositional identity, right? You define yourself as one thing and you stand in opposition to another thing. That can mean that that identity structure becomes more negative, involves more hostile feelings. I think that we have to have a conversation about that and whether we're comfortable with it, what we can do to try to give people more access to more positive identities. And I think that that is inherently at times a political conversation.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Do you think that the rise in political identities has led to a decline in the American identity, that people no longer know what it is to be an American?
Senator Chris Murphy:
Well, again, I think because a political identity is inherently an oppositional identity, right? I'm identifying myself with half of the country that is competing every single day with the other half of the country. Now, I'm not saying that there isn't religious competition, right, in this country. I'm not saying that there isn't competition between women and men, but it's different when the operationalization of politics is through competition that it by nature divides you, right? When your identity is a Democrat or a Republican, it is not a cohesive patriotic identity. It is an identity that separates you from half of the country. So I think politics is really important, but my primary identity is not as a Democrat. It's as a member of my neighborhood. It's as a father, it's as a family member. And those can and often are healthier identities than a political identity as your primary identity.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think that's really interesting. And it's not just that you're a member of the neighborhood, it's you're also a member of the country. And we've seen a revisiting of the mythology of America recently, a revisiting of the founding story of America. And I'm wondering if that's led to a decline in our shared understanding of our value system, of ourselves even, and whether that's opened up more room for these other identities to flourish.
Senator Chris Murphy:
Agreed, and listen, I share with you the belief that American mythology, the sort of founding origin story of the country, has been incredibly important to bind us together. And I do think people are struggling with what to do about some of the rethinking, as you state, appropriate rethinking that has happened about that origin story. There's also a need to sort of rethink whether it is necessary, that even through political identity as primary, it needs to be so divisive. I've made the argument that there are lots of things today that actually do unite the traditional right and left. Now that may not be abortion or guns or climate, but I think that there are a bunch of things that people are feeling that actually bind right and the left. The polling that I've seen for instance, suggests that people on the right and the left feel the same way about economic consolidation, about the erasure of market competition, about these big companies becoming so powerful.
People on the right and the left feel the same way about the degradation of the health of our local communities. Local places are less healthy, they're less unique than before, as we all become part of one big flattened culture, one big national economy. People on the right and left both don't like that. Technology is frustrating people on the right and the left. That's why you see these really unlikely coalitions between Republicans and Democrats on regulating social media. So I think sometimes we have come to believe that there's nothing that unites people who consider themselves on one side or the other of the political divide. And I actually would argue that there's a lot more that unites us that we just aren't discovering.
Ted Roosevelt V:
How do you get people to focus on that? Because it doesn't seem to be a compelling message in the realm of politics, that there's more that unites us than divides us. Obviously that was a message that Obama used quite heavily, but it seems to, particularly in the era of Trump, have faded into the background and become a less effective political message. Have you found ways to bring it back into the conversation?
Senator Chris Murphy:
I think one of the ways to do that is to be really purposeful in building conversations. I think our social media conversations, which is where a lot of or maybe most of our political dialogue happens today, just deepens the trenches and the silos. And so I've tried to take myself out of those trenches. So I've built a conversation with the Republican governor of Utah, so Governor Spencer Cox and I do not agree on the presidential choice. We don't agree on abortion. We don't probably agree on guns, but we do think that there's an epidemic of loneliness in this country. We do think that those companies I talked about have gotten way too big. We think social media needs to be regulated. And so Governor Cox and I are traveling the country building conversations where we can find agreement on those things. And so I think that's a scary thing to do these days because I certainly get shouted down from some corners of the left when I am associating myself with somebody who doesn't think the same things I do on certain cultural and social issues. But why not pick up the things where we agree on and not let our differences divide us on everything? So I think intentionality of forum and dialogue and conversation is missing, but really important.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Given your seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, do you see the fraying of the social fabric in the United States as having an impact internationally?
Senator Chris Murphy:
That's a good question. I think what is happening in this country is not unfamiliar to what's happening in places throughout Europe. I mean, as the social fabric frays, so does support for democracy itself, right? When you don't see your government being able to kind of step up and deliver for you what you need most. And study after study tells us that what really brings happiness is not career or money, but relationships, connection to others. And when your government is not creating a set of rules that allows you to build positive, lasting relationships, then you start wondering whether the kind of government you have is actually worth it any longer. And that conversation is an easier one to have about democracy because democracy is by definition really inefficient. So you have to be willing to live with the inefficiency of democracy because you believe that it ultimately is going to deliver meaning and purpose and connection in a way that another form of government can't. So I do think that America's power abroad is derivative of the health of our democracy, and I think our democracy is kind of unhealthy today in large part because people are not feeling connected. They're not feeling that meaning and purpose in the way that they might have 50 years ago.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I was struck in your answer here, just talking about the government as an agency to help bring more happiness, which is not something that you hear from politicians or I have not heard from politicians very often. It's typically GDP growth, other things that are not correlated to our own happiness necessarily. Do you think that's sort of a focus that we could see more of? I mean, why don't we hear more about the, "hey, what we're doing is actually here to help make you live a happier life"?
Senator Chris Murphy:
Robert Kennedy has this wonderful speech that Obama sometimes parrots, in which he talks about all the things that are measured in GDP. The locks on our doors are part of our measure of GDP. We measure all sorts of negative inputs, and we count that as positive because the economy grew as we put more locks on our doors, as we processed more garbage, as we polluted more, as we built more weapons of war. Right there in the founding document, right? In the Declaration of Independence is a mandate to government leaders to care about the pursuit of happiness. It is a God-given right to be able to pursue not a job, not a career, not a certain amount of money, but happiness. And that's an intentional word from our founders. It's a big word, a bold word, and it charges us with stepping back and thinking about whether we are delivering to people the right to pursue happiness.
And again, what happiness data tells you---this is pretty wonky, but---what happiness data tells you is that the most important thing, when people at the end of their life report whether they were happy or not, is the quality of their relationships. And it is harder to build relationships today in part because of government policies that have torn apart local communities, that have allowed kids and adults to be sucked into technology, that has forced us to work not 40 hours, but 60, 70 hours a week, taking from us the leisure time in which we use to build relationships. So yeah, I think we got to have a conversation about happiness, and I think if we did, we would shift some of our conversation away from just building employment and GDP to building connection and the infrastructure necessary for positive relationships.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to say I absolutely love that, and it's just not a framing that I've heard very often in the political realm, and I think it's really important. And so I hope you keep talking about that as you go about. And one of the conversations or some of the conversations that you have happen when you walk across Connecticut and you spend four or five days doing it. Theodore Roosevelt was a big walker. He may have invented the sort of walking meeting as a concept. He would take dignitaries from the White House and just sort of do a point to point. So he saw the value in walking and talking. I'm wondering what you... it's inefficient. It's laborious. It's time consuming for you. Why the walking across the state every year?
Senator Chris Murphy:
It's a good question, and it gets harder every year. I started doing this when I was 40 before I had a titanium screw in my knee. So I now am two orthopedic surgeries and 10 years later. But I still do it because my job is to represent everybody, not just the people I meet online through my social media feeds, not just the people that call my office, and I meet everybody when I walk across the state. Most people I meet do not watch CNN or Fox News. Most people don't pay much attention to politics, but they all have ideas about what they want for their communities. And so this is kind of my way to make sure I'm connected to everybody, not just the folks that reach out to the office. Second, it's a grounding exercise because what I learned during that walk is that almost nobody is talking to me about the things that are dominating the political headlines.
It's actually the same things year after year. It's mainly my budget. Am I making enough to pay my expenses? Is my neighborhood safe? How good are my kids' schools? Those are basically the same conversations year after year. So sometimes there's a tendency in this job to chase the headlines, to think that what Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity are talking about are the things that are important to people--- that doesn't tend to be the case. So I just think it's part of my job to listen to everybody, and it helps focus me. That's why I do it. And I actually clear my head a little bit on the walk because the walk is not constant conversations. There are long stretches on lonely roads where I literally have headphones in, I'm listening to music, and I just get to think, which you don't get to do a lot of in this job. And that's part of actually what I like about the walk is the long stretches where I'm just with my own thoughts, and that's kind of a gift in and of itself.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love it. So I'm going to close with this last question, and it's really a broad question, so take it wherever you want. But the title of the podcast is "Good Citizen," and we ask everybody what it means to be a good citizen.
Senator Chris Murphy:
Yeah, I have two kids at home and we sometimes get into this sort of big conversation as well. Listen-- to me, this world is about connection. This world is about creating a set of relationships that enrich your life and occasionally allow you to provide a helping hand to people that through no fault of their own have just hit a hard time. Sometimes that helping hand is material, right? Helping deliver a meal to somebody who's had a tragedy. Sometimes it's just being there to listen to somebody. And so I think being a good citizen is about reaching out and proactively involving yourself in your world and in your community, and being available to people who don't maybe need you as a sort of full-time shoulder to lean on, but need a couple people in their life who, when something strikes them in which they need that shoulder, that you're there for them.
I think we used to do that better than we do today. I think today it's a little bit easier for us to kind of curl up into our own little worlds, to do our shopping online, to get our news from our smartphones. It's a little bit harder to walk out your door and stop into your neighbor's house to just check in and see how they're doing. And I think being a good citizen involves just having those connections, having those hands that you're holding, and then being in a position to step up when people really need you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Absolutely, and it's clear that in this conversation, the underlying threat has really been that issue of connection, the sort of divisiveness of politics, the declining of institutions that used to connect us. It might be that simple: all this divisiveness, all this noise, all this fury might be solved simply by a focus on connections.
Senator Chris Murphy:
And then not letting one difference or even two differences stand in the way of you finding that connection. I mean, that's what I worry about today is that often because more and more people have their primary identity through politics, that they don't even attempt to reach out and create that connection with somebody who is different from them. I spend part of my summer living next to somebody that spends his life working in the gun industry. We couldn't be more different in our political views. He's a big supporter of Donald Trump. I'm not. I spend my life trying to tighten gun laws. He spends his life in the industry, but we find ways to connect, and that might be anathema to a lot of folks who sort of look at the work that I do, but I think that's part of being a good citizen, is finding ways to connect with people, even when one or two facts that might create a difference and a division between you and that other person still exist.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, Senator Murphy, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us today. It's been very inspirational, and I think we may have solved it here on this podcast.
Senator Chris Murphy:
I doubt it, but I enjoyed it anyway.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. I do very much appreciate you taking the time.
Senator Chris Murphy:
Thanks, Ted.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you so much, Senator Murphy, for this illuminating discussion and for making time for us, especially during these busy and turbulent times. I appreciate your perspective on building relationships and reducing divisiveness. I'm also deeply impressed by your evident passion for public service. Listeners, if you want to hear more interviews like this, please make sure you've subscribed to this podcast and consider leaving us a review. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.
