US Senate News:
Source: United States Senator for Connecticut – Chris Murphy
WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) co-authored an op-ed in the Bulwark with Ian Marcus Corbin, a philosopher at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, arguing that former President Trump and the Republican party fixate on immigration and border security to preserve their convenient diagnosis for why so many Americans feel abandoned by their country. Murphy and Corbin expose the dishonesty of Republicans’ argument – exemplified by their tanking of a serious bipartisan border deal – and explain that in reality, our obsession with individual success and blind faith in neoliberal economics have created the angst many Americans feel. They argue that leaders should focus on rebuilding American solidarity and a culture that prioritizes the common good.
“The country would be better off if we had been able to pass the bipartisan border bill—and not only because it would have strengthened our border security,” the authors wrote. “It would also have left the Trumpian narrative in tatters. Without tens of thousands of immigrants streaming into the country, Republicans would be forced to deal with the complicated reality of why Americans feel more alone and unhappy than ever before. Because it turns out that impoverished people making a desperate play for a better life are not the true source of our angst, and so even if the border were brought under control, our spiritual crisis would have remained.”
Murphy and Corbin highlighted how the policies of neoliberalism are most responsible for the way people are feeling, highlighting a recent trip they took to Appalachia: “We heard the same point over and over: People here feel abandoned. Locals told us how good, dignified jobs had left the region, gone in search of cheaper forms of labor, and how pharmaceutical companies had added to the suffering by aggressively plowing addictive, life-wrecking opioids into the region. Many people we spoke with had been directly affected by these problems, and everyone knew of someone who had been affected. Meanwhile, important community institutions, like hospitals and mom-and-pop stores, have withered. Local business owners told us they feel constantly in danger of being squashed by monopolistic corporate behemoths. And ever present in the background was the sense that the government had failed to prevent any of it.”
The authors argued that America’s myth of self-sufficiency has eroded our commitment to the common good: “In the last forty years, our sense of obligation to each other has eroded as wealth and personal success have been lionized at the expense of temperance and the common good. Today the sense that each of us is rightly responsible to fend for ourselves in the world sits uncomfortably with an older, deeper sense that we shouldn’t have to face exploitation, deprivation, humiliation, or loneliness. Americans want to stand on their own two feet, but we need to know that there are some limits to competition and greed, and that those around us will defend us, befriend us, or pick us up when we stumble, which we all do.”
Murphy and Corbin concluded: “It falls to us to rebuild a sense of obligation to each other—a new American solidarity. We will need to build concrete policies that prevent excesses and cruelties now permitted in the name of profit. But we will also need to rebuild a culture that prioritizes the common good—the idea that we owe more to each other than just whatever the market will allow us to get away with. The threads that connect us have frayed or been cut. Our work, in this election year and beyond, is more than just shaming the demagogues; we must repair our badly damaged tapestry of common concern.”
Read the full op-ed here.
