Chris Murphy’s Crisis of the Common Good examines how the erosion of shared civic life affects and endangers us all.
Last May, the Class of 2026 gathered on Foss for the final time listening to Wesleyan’s commencement speaker. Drenched, hungover, and awaiting their diplomas, many may not remember the equally drenched man who stood speaking before them, impassioned and stole askew. That man was Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. His message: Wesleyan’s defining virtue is its inefficiency.
When post-grads say college was “the best four years of their life,” it is usually not because of the coursework or the dining-hall food, but rather the classroom and the dining-hall atmosphere. What is cherished is the effortless abundance of community—a sea of people to ask for advice, play midnight kickball with, or have conversations at the food truck that last until class is only hours away. These are all profoundly inefficient ways to go about life, yet this community is what people spend years trying to recreate. It’s why so many graduates gravitate toward places like Brooklyn or L.A., tossing aside efficiency in favor of rebuilding these community enclaves. During the World Cup, millions of people were making this exchange globally, leaving work early or watching matches with their colleagues. In the end, the World Cup estimated a $17 billion worldwide loss in productivity. It was utterly inefficient, and yet it was healing. Games were screened on the sides of buildings, bars were full, and buses were bustling. Neighbors and strangers felt a sense of camaraderie.
This cultivation of community is essential in an era of unprecedented loneliness, partisanship, and apathy. The importance of rebuilding a shared civic life, in the face of such deterioration, is at the heart of Chris Murphy’s new book, The Crisis of the Common Good. He argues that together the cults of profit, ‘everywhere’ (globalism), technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption have shaped a cultural mindset that values efficiency, profit maximization, and me-first individualism above all else, eroding the institutions and relationships that once sustained civic life. People are hanging out less, community establishments are disappearing, humans are feeling increasingly devalued, alone, and subsequently compassionless towards their fellow citizens. This is Murphy’s crisis of the common good.
Murphy opens the book in the stands of his son’s youth hockey game, where he encounters a father sheepishly recording his own son. He learns that the community league is owned by a private equity firm that has created a subscription service for parents and grandparents not in attendance to watch their children play. In an attempt to maximize profit, the equity firm had banned parents from filming their own kids. One of the quintessential foundations of community life–youth sports–had become outsourced, commercialized, and squeezed dry. “Everything in America not nailed down has become a commodity—even middle school hockey.” Murphy uses this scene to demonstrate “the cult of profit,” the first of six cults he believes has usurped and discarded the shared spaces and values American communities once held dear.
Each chapter is dedicated to its own cult, with the seventh and final being a summarizing framework for the common good’s revival. With each cult Murphy provides statistical case-studies that display how the institutions meant to selflessly serve our communities have turned against them. For instance, in the 1960s, the largest healthcare provider, Blue Cross, earned no profit and reinvested its surplus into making healthcare increasingly affordable. But, today, the largest healthcare provider, UnitedHealth, reported their single-year profit as $22 billion. The statistics also explore the more tangible aspects of community decline. In 2003, the average American adult spent 60 minutes a day with friends; by 2019, that number had dropped to 35. Even more so, among ages 15-24, the number fell over threefold, from 140 minutes to 42. Friendship is disappearing, and taking with it people’s sense of common good.
Murphy combines his statistical research with the personal stories of various citizens. While his numbers portray a nation on the brink of a communitarian crisis, he hammers it home with the personal faces of those Americans who have been cast aside and wronged by such a system. From unmoored MAGA songwriters to left-wing Walmart employees, Murphy asks us to look deeply into the disillusionment inside Americans; to understand them and how they got there instead of quickly moving over those we don’t think about often. The book teaches about a crisis of empathy, but it also employs one to practice it in real time. As a result, Murphy steers away from an alarmism familiar to our feeds.
Furthermore, throughout his writing, Murphy cautiously tiptoes the partisan line, skirting personal and political sniping. While he is a staunch Democrat, and champions Democratic beliefs and policies in the Senate, the rhetoric of his book is universal. In fact, he argues that the fight for common good is one of few battles which transcend party lines, and one that can only be solved through a unifying coalition. He refreshingly focuses very little on President Trump, marking him as a symptom of the crisis rather than the cause; a crisis which predates Trump and will outlast him. Murphy asserts that winning an election is not enough. Rather, the country needs a “concerted effort to build a more communitarian society,” and no November, however satisfying, delivers that on its own.
For a congressman, the solutions he proposes are far from just political. There is plenty of policy; he concisely summarizes 30 policies in the index he believes would aid in the fight for the common good. But Murphy’s language continuously gravitates towards the spiritual, expressing that “a deeper rot festers in the American soul,” and healing will only come if a reimagining occurs on both the governmental and individual level. Murphy sees the rot not as merely economic or political, rather as “a callousness toward our neighbors, a me-first selfishness.” This failure is older and more basic than any policy. It is a perversion of American ideals that champions bootstraps individualism but forgets the communitarian history upon which America was founded. As such, its solution is not entirely tangible as much as it is spiritual. The revival of the common good produces a legibility with which one can orient themselves. An individual can construct their own identity in relation to their common citizens. In coaching a team, or keeping a shop open, or sitting in a pew, we contribute to something that is not entirely ours, and which will remain long after we’ve stopped being able to optimize or squeeze the efficiency out of it.
While Murphy never directly cites Alasdair MacIntyre or Aristotle, their influence is overt. All three arrive at the importance of a thriving shared life. MacIntyre believed modern moral vocabulary had lost the concept of a telos, an end that a self or a community was oriented toward. As a result people and groups became spiritually unanchored, aiming towards nothing but their own perpetuation. Murphy pinpoints where this telos has gone–it has been replaced by profit-maximization. But, he argues, “the most enduring sense of fulfillment comes not from what we buy but from what we give—our time, our labor, our care—to something larger than ourselves.” In casting aside our ends in favor of profit and efficiency, we not only feel worse but the means themselves start to disappear. If people no longer feel driven to be part of something larger than themselves, those somethings cease to exist.
This loss results in increased loneliness and disillusionment. When people no longer feel a sense of belonging to a collective project, they go searching for who and whatever can offer that sense, whether that offer comes from a soup kitchen or the Manosphere. Hannah Arendt warns that this is the crisis which leads to totalitarianism. Chris Murphy is continuing that warning, citing Arendt and urging us to offer up communitarianism instead.
In light of all this, the people are searching. You don’t have to go far to see confirmation that the appetite for belonging is alive and well. In the past couple months, New York City has been thriving in a way it hadn’t in a very long time. As the Times put it, “When the Knicks are good, signs go up in the windows of the good bodegas and the bad bodegas and the cannabis shops and the eight-figure luxury apartments.” Like the World Cup, the Knicks championship run brought strangers and neighbors together. People felt like they belonged to something bigger than themselves, and that felt good. It’s the feeling of being a regular at your local diner, or making a new friend at a party. It’s the small reminder that, in some low-stakes but real way, we belong to each other.
It is no coincidence that two of today’s most media-dominating politicians are New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Texas State Representative James Talarico. Both have built their widespread support around the notion that politics should restore our sense of obligation to one another. Mamdani’s policies have been inherently communitarian. Through programs such as permanent funding for libraries, open Summer Streets, and Universal childcare, he has garnered his support by investing directly in rebuilding spaces that cultivate connection. During his campaign, he was known for walking across neighborhoods, meeting the people where they were. In a city known for its rough edges and attitudes, he built a coalition on the faith that participation could feel worthwhile again. James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian running for Senate in Texas, has built a following by framing politics as a moral responsibility. Borrowing the language of scripture, he asserts that citizenship is, at its heart, a relational obligation. Much of their success is due to their ability to revive faith within their constituencies and promise a revival of civic life.
Faith is one of the facets at the forefront of reviving the common good. Polling has shown that there is a direct correlation between people’s religiosity and their trust in the ability of government. Faith practices inherently ask Americans to imagine themselves as members of something larger than the individual before they imagine themselves as lone consumers or ideological combatants. Faith evokes a sense that you owe something to the person standing beside you. The same polling has found that faith practiced in communal settings results in measurably higher trust in government and–more importantly–in strangers generally. That is because, in practicing communally, one engages each week with people they did not choose but who nonetheless belong under the umbrella of their greater community.
These people constitute the “middle ring” that Murphy discusses throughout his book–the acquaintances lost when we do not engage with our neighborhoods and our networks. They are the figures explored in The Crisis of the Common Good, but who we often overlook. Murphy explains that our communities are deteriorating because our trust in one another is deteriorating. In 1984, nearly half of Americans said most people could be trusted; by 2024 that number was down to a third. Murphy traces that decline in trust directly to Americans’ retreat from shared civic life–our withdrawal from the middle-ring. It is why people are more distrustful, more hateful, more alone. It is why we need a spiritual revamp; and this is a book that beautifully and passionately introduces one.
Throughout the book, Murphy acknowledges the limits of a congressman’s lofty argumentation by continuously drifting away from promising policy toward more tangible personal instruction. He asserts that “the common good is not just a set of policies waiting to be enacted. It is a way of living.” So, shop at the local hardware store, learn your neighbors’ names, join a run-club, go to office hours. It will be time-consuming, maybe even inefficient, but it will be worth it. It is the same wager an entire planet made this summer by letting 17 billion dollars in productivity walk out the door for 90 minutes in front of a shared screen. It is the inefficiency that college is all about, and what makes a place like Wesleyan so special. Murphy presents us with a crisis—and, if we are willing to be a bit intentionally inefficient—a way back to each other and to the common good.
