When Vice-President Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump, it was clear that her economic message failed to break through with most voters. Still reeling from the effects of inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, Americans did not believe a Democratic president would deliver the change they sought. Five days later, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, posted a postmortem of sorts to X. “Time to rebuild the left,” read one post in part. “We are out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose fueling MAGA. We refuse to pick big fights. Our tent is too small.” The left, he added, “has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism,” and should become “less judgmental,” he concluded.

Elected to the House in 2006, then to the Senate in 2012, the liberal Murphy was an early supporter of the Affordable Care Act and stronger gun laws following the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting in Newtown. Over the past several years, he’s also fashioned another identity as a critic of the neoliberal consensus. In a 2022 piece for The Atlantic, he wrote that Democrats must “do the work that would make us the natural favorite for Americans who want government to act in their interests — not merely as the facilitator of some dreamy neoliberal ideal.”

I spoke with Murphy this week about neoliberalism in crisis, the failures of Democratic rhetoric, and how he thinks the party should expand its big tent. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Over the last several years, you’ve often warned that the postwar neoliberal order is breaking down, and I was curious to know how you define neoliberalism and how you’ve reached that conclusion.
Neoliberalism is a belief that markets and in particular global markets will work for the benefit of the common good with light adjustments here or there by the government. I think neoliberalism is also about the belief in the individual as the hero of every story as opposed to the community or the collective. And so as a result, both Democrats and Republicans have been very reluctant over the past 40 years to do anything to disrupt existing markets, in particular international markets, and have sort of let society and culture and our economy slide away from a focus on the common good, instead believing that we should just align incentives so that each individual is able to have a shot at material wealth. So that to me is kind of the definition that I use in my head.

Many would argue that neoliberalism has become a core tenet of Democratic Party politics and remains so today. Do you think that’s true? And if so, why did you decide to become so critical of it?
I think there’s a fight inside the Democratic Party today about whether or not neoliberalism has permanently failed. There are still plenty of market believers and market fundamentalists inside the Democratic Party, but I would argue Joe Biden made a pretty material break from neoliberal orthodoxy. His unabashed public support for labor unions, his revitalization of industrial policy, albeit targeted industrial policy, and his work to rebuild American antitrust power was all a recognition that we needed to move beyond our neoliberal failures. And one of my frustrations is that President Biden and Vice-President Harris didn’t lead their economic messaging by talking about their break with neoliberalism, their belief in the need to break up corporate power, their belief in the need to........

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