{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/vanity-fair-chris-murphy-wants-to-make-america-a-little-less-lonely", "Vanity Fair: Chris Murphy Wants to Make America a Little Less Lonely", "2023-11-07", "2023", "2023-11", "Democrat", "Senate", "CT", "Christopher Murphy", "M001169", "www.murphy.senate.gov", "chrismurphy", "https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases", "scraper", "Vanity Fair: Chris Murphy Wants to Make America a Little Less Lonely\n\nBy Eric Lutz\n\nNovember 7, 2023\n\n[\u2026] \u201cThere are just real practical impacts to people feeling lonely and disconnected,\u201d Murphy told the crowd of community leaders. \u201cPolitical instability and polarization is driven by people feeling upset and angry when they can\u2019t find positive connection and they go find it in darker, more dangerous places. But I think as I get older, and I get deeper into this job, I just have come to the conclusion that it\u2019s not good enough for me just to kind of adjust the dials of public policy, and as a policymaker I have to step back and ask questions about how people are feeling.\u201d\n\nIf you know Murphy, it\u2019s probably as Capitol Hill\u2019s conscience amid this country\u2019s never-ending plague of gun violence. The guy giving impassioned Senate floor speeches calling on his colleagues to offer more than \u201cthoughts and prayers\u201d to the victims of the latest mass shooting. The guy who, after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre last year, pulled off what might count as a political miracle in this era of profound polarization: the passage of a bipartisan gun safety bill, the most significant such legislation in three decades.\n\nBut Murphy, who was turning 50 that day in Boone, has lately become as passionate about the nation\u2019s need for what he calls a \u201cspiritual renaissance\u201d as he is about his signature issue. He hasn\u2019t abandoned that long-standing fight for a new one; he\u2019s significantly expanded the scope of it. \u201cYou can\u2019t spend 10 years thinking about violence in America,\u201d he had told me a month earlier, in his hideaway office, where he had hashed out much of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, \u201cwithout trying to grapple with the underlying emotional state of a country in which people shoot first and think later.\u201d\n\nThe country appeared to him to be sickened somehow\u2014in the throes of an amorphous ailment manifesting all across our culture and politics. And while the right was offering snake-oil cures, pushed by the most dangerous political huckster in recent American history, it seemed to Murphy that the left was treating the symptoms and ignoring the disease entirely. Worse yet, the malady was threatening to metastasize: Donald Trump was running to reclaim the White House on an explicitly authoritarian platform with help from the Republican allies whose politics of division had contributed to this national disorder. It had become Murphy\u2019s mission, as he put it, to \u201cdiagnose and treat the metaphysical state of America.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s a big task, one not typically in the job description of a senator. It is also, by his own admission, politically fraught, and his efforts have already been met in some corners with resistance: In July, when he introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act\u2014a bill that would, among other things, establish an \u201cOffice of Social Connection Policy\u201d in the White House\u2014the right cast Murphy as a big-government liberal working to mandate friendship through bureaucracy. There was also some suspicion from progressives, who bristled at the outreach to conservatives he considered necessary to his project.\n\nHe is convinced there is a growing \u201crealignment\u201d across the right and left around questions of \u201cfirst principles, the good life,\u201d hints of which can be seen in the skepticism of Big Tech and neoliberalism that has been brewing on different sides of the political spectrum. He was taking something of a political trust fall\u2014and had come to Boone not only in search of solutions, but to begin building a grassroots consensus around loneliness and disillusionment. \u201cSome of what I\u2019m doing is unfamiliar,\u201d he admitted. \u201cWhat I\u2019m trying to do is a little bit outside of the traditional sandbox that we tend to play in.\u201d\n\n[\u2026] There have been decisions by governments that have caused our social fabric to disintegrate,\u201d Murphy told me later, describing more systemic issues weighing on the nation\u2019s psyche. \u201cAnd I think people on the right and the left are really unhappy with that.\u201d\n\nHe had come to this conclusion about a year earlier, not long after the biggest legislative victory of his career. The movement he had arguably been the congressional face of since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting\u2014which occurred in the Connecticut district he then represented in Congress\u2014had broken a three-decade logjam. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and several other Democratic accomplishments in the first stretch of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency, should have been a major cause for celebration. \u201cAnd yet, people weren\u2019t feeling any better,\u201d Murphy recalled. \u201cThe national mood seemed very stuck.\u201d\n\nThe symptoms of that malaise seemed especially acute to him in the lives of kids, who he had seen \u201cdisappearing into their phones\u2026being co-opted by this all-consuming consumer culture.\u201d They seem to \u201cfeel the weight of the world on their shoulders and have less sort of optimism and hope than my generation did,\u201d Murphy told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not a coincidence that I\u2019m thinking a lot more about the emotional health of the country as my kids get closer to adulthood,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019m worried about the world that they are walking into.\u201d\n\n[\u2026] \u201cHe was really a backbencher in Congress,\u201d said Gary Rose, a professor of political science at Sacred Heart University who wrote a book on the 2012 Senate race, in which Murphy defeated former WWE CEO Linda McMahon. \u201cHe was not considered a major force.\u201d\n\nSandy Hook changed that. \u201cMy life took a hard about-face,\u201d Murphy wrote in his 2020 book, The Violence Inside Us. \u201cI now had my calling\u2026my mission in life.\u201d He would spend the next decade in the Senate fighting the formidable gun lobby and helping build a movement that is starting to prove equally formidable.\n\n\u201cHe was an extraordinary quarterback,\u201d Senator Cory Booker, one of his closest friends in the Senate, told me. \u201cHe was just a Joe Montana\u2013type tactician working the ball down the field and did something a lot of people can\u2019t speak to as a senator, which is putting points on the board.\u201d Or maybe he was more like a hockey player, with a \u201creal ability to see around corners and see ahead for where the puck is going, not where it is right now,\u201d as Senator Richard Blumenthal, his fellow Nutmegger, described him. Or perhaps more of a point guard? \u201cHe\u2019s been amazing to watch,\u201d says Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, an admirer of Murphy\u2019s who told me his own gun safety activism\u2014which included an impassioned pregame speech after Uvalde\u2014has been inspired by the Connecticut senator. \u201cI think the hope is that we are going to tip the scales as a country, where we can actually get a group of like-minded government officials to make some real change.\u201d\n\nOf course, Murphy remains committed to that change. He\u2019s still in regular contact with grassroots leaders, as well as the Sandy Hook families he met in the immediate aftermath of that tragedy\u2014some of whom he counts among his closest friends. \u201cHe is just as dedicated, just as smart, just as compassionate, just as genuine as the Chris Murphy you see in the United States Senate,\u201d said Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old son, Daniel, was killed at Sandy Hook. \u201cHe just seems like one of the most genuine politicians I\u2019ve ever met,\u201d said Sari Kaufman, a Parkland survivor who was an intern in Murphy\u2019s office at the time of the Uvalde shooting and describes the senator as a personal hero. \u201cIt\u2019s like knowing that you have a teammate in the most important place you can have one.\u201d\n\nBut his political identity is evolving. The success of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act lent him a new degree of political capital, earned him credibility with some Republicans, and has made the senator a key surrogate for Biden\u2019s reelection campaign. The president worked closely with Murphy on the legislation, appearing with him at a June summit the senator hosted in Hartford commemorating the one-year anniversary of its enactment. Murphy is a \u201cnational leader,\u201d Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, who served in Congress with Murphy, told me on the sidelines of the Safer Communities Summit in June. \u201cThis guy has it all.\u201d\n\n[\u2026] For the most part, his bill to address social isolation\u2014which, as Jillian Racoosin, executive director of the Coalition to End Social Isolation and Loneliness, said was unprecedented in the United States in its scope\u2014was well-received save for some mockery from the online right. \u201cSenator Murphy\u2019s proposal is an important and needed policy step forward,\u201d Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of the popular Happiness Lab podcast, told me. \u201cWe need more leaders in government like Senator Murphy, who recognize just how common and consequential loneliness is and recognize that there is a role for government in helping support communities and building stronger connections,\u201d echoed Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose May advisory on loneliness helped form the framework for Murphy\u2019s legislation.\n\nClick here to read the full story.\n\nThis summer, Murphy introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, legislation to combat America\u2019s epidemic of loneliness and promote social connection in our communities. Earlier this year, Murphy co-wrote an op-ed in the Daily Beast with Ian Marcus Corbin, a philosopher at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, to call for a spiritual renaissance in American politics. In April, Murphy also authored an op-ed in TIME with Richard Weissbourd, a Senior Lecturer and the faculty director of the Making Caring Common Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, on how America\u2019s obsession with individual success has come at the expense of our sense of community and the collective good. Murphy first outlined the politics of loneliness in a piece for the Bulwark last year.\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-08T01:01:09Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/vanity-fair-chris-murphy-wants-to-make-america-a-little-less-lonely"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 3.8086199201643467, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}