The result of all this disaffiliation is an exceptionally low-trust generation. The General Social Survey recently asked Americans if most people could, in fact, even be trusted. Their answers depended entirely on when they were born: the Silent Generation (born just before World War II) had the highest levels of trust, with 41 percent agreeing that “most people can be trusted” and 51 percent instead saying “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people.” For Gen Z, only 13 percent agreed that most people could be trusted and a whopping 74 percent answering “you can’t be too careful.” This raises a big question: How do progressives plan on winning the kinds of transformative social policies they campaign on, policies that presuppose a strong degree of social trust, if the next generation of Americans have so very little of it?

None of this is a surprise to Murphy. The senator from Connecticut recently published a book on the subject, The Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. You don’t have to have read it to agree that when it comes to the “common good” we do, indeed, have a crisis on our hands. Demsas agrees too — she even praises Murphy for making a sustained political argument instead of using the book as campaign propaganda.

Yet Demsas thinks Murphy is nuts to call for a “cult of the common good” — which she likens to an actual cult. Whatever Murphy is arguing, it’s clear he doesn’t want to sign everyone up for Heaven’s Gate. The “cult” language is certainly a provocation, meant to juxtapose our neglect of the common good with the popular cults of profit and technology regularly celebrated in the business press. No doubt Demsas knows as much, but she nonetheless tries to paint Murphy as part of some lunatic fringe. Why?

Murphy, it should be said, is among the very few senators who have actually acknowledged the widespread feeling of anomie and alienation growing in our society. Recently, he garnered headlines for calling attention to the ways in which private equity had taken over youth sports, even preventing parents from filming their kids’ hockey games. Since at least the mid-century, according to political scientists like Robert D. Putnam, Americans have been sliding down a slope of ever-increasing loneliness. In just the past half century, community bonds have dissolved, romantic love has become harder to come by, church pews have emptied out, associations have atrophied, labor unions have been crushed, and whole towns have been hollowed out by deindustrialization. During that same period, the rich have gotten richer, markets have grown wider, and technological progress has taken off. To fill this void, we’ve been fed a steady diet of social media and cheap consumer goods. It doesn’t seem to be working out so well. The result is that, according to new research reviewed by the Financial Times, “on an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person.” But according to Demsas, we’re not meant to talk about that. Just go to church, she argues.

To be sure, Murphy is no socialist, let alone a radical. Yet he at least understands that Democrats — or better yet, Americans — need more than just “abundance” if they are to have any chance of fixing this country’s profound social problems. Demsas’s polemic, on the other hand, reveals a kind of harrowing fear about Murphy’s concerns. She likens his call for a renewed public commitment to the common good to a literal witch hunt. Here’s Demsas:

Now, obviously, I don’t think Murphy supports hanging women for witchcraft. Nor does punishing someone for price gouging necessarily lead to witch trials. But it’s also not an accident that a community with enough coercive power to punish someone for charging a lot for nails ends up using that coercive power in other realms of life as well. The regulation of prices, religious orthodoxy, and women’s behavior all stemmed from the same view: that “the community” could define the good, interpret dissent as moral disorder, and punish the dissenter.

The crux of her argument here is that no demos could ever satisfactorily define the common good. Live and let live — and let everyone’s individual consumer preferences be catered to, regardless of the damage done.

But here’s the thing: we are already living Demsas’s dream. The America of the 2020s is largely her world, not Murphy’s. And it’s her version of liberalism that is hegemonic, not Murphy’s. Where today do we find widespread, stultifying traditionalism? Excluding ultrareligious sects, where can you even find these overbearing “communities” she fears? In fact, most Americans complain about the opposite problem. The rise of antisocial behavior and the inability of the “community” (or whatever is left of it) to enforce even basic social norms. Today our political subjectivity is thoroughly neoliberal: atomized, asocial, and acquisitive. According to research sponsored by the Wall Street Journal and NORC, the only social value that has increased in popular appeal since 2020 is how much we see “money” as of paramount importance. America no longer has citizens, just consumers.

Still, the trouble is, according to Demsas, that while liberalism “begins with the presumption of freedom,” Murphy “begins with an Official Version of the Good Life.” This is untrue. Of course liberalism has its own version of the Good Life: it is found in Demsas’s unflinching defense of individual autonomy, echoing Isaiah Berlin’s concept of “negative liberty.” For liberalism, the highest good is the freedom of the individual to express their desires however they choose, so long as that desire doesn’t inhibit another. Importantly, as Demsas is careful to note, this entails a wide degree of economic liberalism — the freedom of markets. Yet what happens when this kind of freedom has liberated us from the very bonds that hold us together as a society? What happens when markets have dissolved so much of what we share in common that we’re left as strangers? Are liberals prepared to argue that contemporary market society is good simply because we are free to buy cheap junk on Amazon?

I suspect much of what lies behind Demsas’s surprisingly vituperative reaction to the mild-mannered senator is that Murphy has been vocal about America’s broken economic system. He is a major critic of globalization, whereas Demsas sees no problem in importing cheap Chinese cars, American jobs be damned. Murphy thinks the financial sector is bloated, shamelessly corrupt, and a drag on broad prosperity. Demsas claims it’s “dead wrong” to blame the housing crisis on Wall Street. Murphy argues against Big Tech’s overweening influence. Demsas says, if you don’t like tech’s influence over our politics and our social lives, or its corrosive effect on our collective psyche, just buy different junk. Ultimately, Murphy is a critic of atomizing individualism and “the loss of connection to, and identification with, community,” a tendency encouraged by the unfettered marketization of everything. For Demsas, well, community doesn’t matter much. As she puts it, “this idea that repeat interactions with a lot of people that you are in community with is the foundation of a good democracy, a good society, a place where people will donate their kidneys to one another, because they know each other . . .  I just don’t think that’s true.”

A lot of Demsas’s objections are also downstream from the larger divide in the Democratic Party. Demsas is a partisan of the Abundance faction, while Murphy is more of a populist. As Vincent Bevins insightfully notes, any visitor to this country can see that America has already chosen abundance. Remember all the European World Cup tourists freaking out about the size of our gas stations? The infinite supply of cheap, hot food? No one would deny that America excels at growing its economy — the trouble is that since at least the 1970s, we’ve been terrible at sharing the abundant harvest in anything like a fair distribution. The professional class has pulled further and further away from the working class in terms of income and assets, meanwhile the superrich are in another world entirely. The resulting asset-based K-shaped economy is no doubt responsible for much of the widespread social dysfunction.

Affluent liberals could almost be forgiven for not seeing how dire the situation has become. In professional social circles, all seems well for the most part; they’re still somewhat insulated from the worst of it. Affluent professionals still enjoy long stable marriages. They still have large friend groups. They’re more likely to go to church. And now, according to a new paper by Jesús Fernández Villaverde and Patrick Norrick, the rich may even be having more kids than the working class and the poor — a trend that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. When parenthood and even friendship become luxury goods, something has gone seriously wrong. Maybe then we need social policies that bring people together to help reform those bonds?

And yet all of Demsas’s fearmongering about the danger of Big Government coercion — no doubt the liberal version of the Right’s “I will not eat the bugs! I will not live in the pod!” — is leveraged against Murphy’s policy proposal: a program to send young people around the country on public service missions for half a year. This is his supposedly intolerable “cult-like” agenda. What exactly is wrong with this? If anything, the plan is far too modest. Yet for Demsas, it’s a gross overreach. Small-bore “nudges” are fine, she says, but the state should basically stay out of the business of trying to influence any prosocial behavior. Presumably only the market is qualified to shape our social behaviors.

Demsas concludes that “Politics shouldn’t create meaning, it should make room for it.” That sounds good, as far as it goes. The trouble is that politics — that is, the kind of politics Demsas favors (more markets, more choices) — has produced a degraded public sphere and an epidemic of anomie. The power of the market in America, unique among developed nations for its lack of buffering social democratic institutions, has crowded out everything else. Our economy, structured as it is, has radically reduced our opportunities for genuine social communion, and in that way it has radically reduced our opportunities for developing shared commitments. It’s made us selfish and shortsighted.

Maybe that’s no problem for liberalism, but it is for democracy. Democracy depends on our shared commitments to one another as much as it does on our ability to express dissenting beliefs. After all, a commitment to some minimum level of shared social morality — one might even call it an “Official Version of the Good Life” — certainly inspired framers like James Madison, who argued: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

And it turns out there is virtue in the people. Most Americans agree that we ought to live in a society where people can retire with dignity, where they can form and sustain a marriage, raise a couple kids in a home they own, all in a safe neighborhood. This is what most Americans understood as a normal life for generations. Today it’s a luxury product. Getting back to that norm starts with rebuilding social trust. At least Murphy is trying to figure out ways to do so.

In the end, it’s liberalism, enthralled to a cult of the individual, that cannot see the reality of widespread social alienation in this country. And Demsas’s preferred politics will do little more than help “make room” for more opportunities to check out.