The unincorporated town of Saxapahaw, North Carolina, is a 300-mile drive from Washington, D.C. It’s about twice as far from Connecticut, the state that Chris Murphy represents in the United States Senate. So what was he doing hosting a town hall there, of all places, one evening this past April? One answer is that he was trolling Saxapahaw’s congressional representative, who had recently advised Republican colleagues to stop doing town-hall events. Another is that Saxapahaw is somewhere, and these days, Murphy seems to be everywhere.
北卡罗来纳州的非法人镇萨克萨帕胡（Saxapahaw）距离华盛顿特区（Washington D.C.那么，在去年四月的一个晚上，他在那里在所有地方举办一个市政厅做什么？一个答案是，他正在拖萨克萨帕霍的国会代表，他最近建议共和党同事停止参加城镇大道活动。另一个是Saxapahaw在某个地方，如今，墨菲似乎无处不在。
Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Murphy has emerged as one of the most vocally freaked-out Democrats in Washington. He has become a fixture of cable news and highbrow politics podcasts, as well as a prolific poster of five-alarm-fire social-media content. (His biggest hit so far is a March video of a Senate speech titled “Murphy: Six Weeks In, This White House Is on Its Way to Being the Most Corrupt in U.S. History,” which has been viewed more than 5 million times on YouTube.) He recently launched a political action committee, the American Mobilization PAC, that focuses on funding grassroots opposition to Trump.
自唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）返回白宫以来，墨菲（Murphy）成为华盛顿最令人震惊的民主党人之一。他已成为有线电视新闻和高音政治播客的固定，以及五种警报 - 火灾社交媒体内容的多产海报。（迄今为止，他最大的热门歌曲是一段参议院演讲，标题为“墨菲：六个星期，这座白宫正在成为美国历史上最腐败的人”，在YouTube上被观看了超过500万次。）他最近成立了一个政治行动委员会，美国动员PAC，专注于基本的基层反对王牌。
This behavior is consistent with a politician attempting to raise his profile ahead of a run for higher office, a theory that Murphy dismisses. (The dismissal is itself consistent with the theory.) It also befits a politician who genuinely believes that Trump poses an immediate threat to the survival of American democracy, a premise that Murphy very much endorses.
这种行为与一位试图提高他在高级办公室之前提高自己的形象的政治家一致，墨菲认为这一理论是一致的。（解雇本身与该理论一致。）这也适合一位政治家，他真正地认为特朗普对美国民主的生存构成了直接的威胁，这一前提是墨菲非常认可的前提。
“You cannot be guaranteed today that there’s a free and fair election in 2026,” Murphy told me before going onstage at the Haw River Ballroom, where about 1,000 local voters, mostly silver-haired, had packed the venue to hear him speak. It was the first of several conversations I would have with him about how he thinks the Democratic Party should respond to the second Trump term. Just that morning, the president had directed the Department of Justice and Department of Treasury to investigate ActBlue, the primary Democratic Party fundraising platform, for supposedly facilitating election fraud. This, Murphy told me, was “a crystal-clear signal that their agenda is nothing less than the destruction of the opposition.” In light of those threats, he said, he felt a moral responsibility to rally public opposition. “I think we are getting close to the point where we are going to have to see hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets, not tens of thousands of people.”
墨菲告诉我：“今天不能保证您在2026年举行免费，公平的选举。”在舞台上舞台上，大约有1,000名当地选民（大部分是银发）打包了场地，听到他说话。这是我与他进行的几次对话中的第一次，即他认为民主党应该如何应对第二个特朗普的任期。就在那天早上，总统指示司法部和财政部调查主要民主党筹款平台Actblue，以促进选举欺诈。墨菲告诉我，这是“清晰的信号，表明他们的议程无非是对反对派的破坏。”他说，鉴于这些威胁，他对集会公众反对的道德责任感到责任。“我认为我们接近我们将不得不在街上看到成千上万的人，而不是成千上万的人。”
To help spur that mass movement, Murphy, who until recently was best known for his gun-control advocacy, is making a Bernie Sanders–style argument about money and power. Onstage, he told the crowd that Trump’s antidemocratic actions were designed to neutralize resistance to a pro-billionaire economic agenda. “If you are engaged in something as unpopular as the most massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class,” he declared, “the only way you can get away with that is by destroying the means of accountability.”
为了帮助刺激大规模运动，直到最近以枪支对照倡导而闻名的墨菲（Murphy）提出了伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders），即关于金钱和权力的论点。在舞台上，他告诉人群，特朗普的反民主行动旨在中和抵抗数十亿美元的经济议程。他宣称：“如果您从穷人和中产阶级中最大的财富转移，那就是最大的财富转移，那么您可以摆脱这种情况的唯一方法是破坏问责制的手段。”
This raises another question: Why is a standard-issue Northeast progressive who parts his hair so neatly and has worked in politics his entire life suddenly talking like a would-be class warrior? Over the past three years, Murphy has been on an intellectual journey, influenced as much by the Trumpist right as by the Sanders left. He has come to think that the Democratic Party can regain working-class support only by calling out the powerful corporate villains who he believes are to blame for the country’s problems.
这就提出了另一个问题：为什么一个标准发行的东北进步者如此整洁地分散了他的头发，并且一生都像一个可能的阶级战士那样在政治上工作？在过去的三年中，墨菲（Murphy）一直在智力之旅中，受到特朗普主义者的影响与桑德斯（Sanders）的影响一样。他开始认为，民主党只能通过召集强大的企业反派来重新获得工人阶级的支持，他认为这是该国的问题。
Read: Is this how Democrats win back the working class?
阅读：这是民主党如何赢得工人阶级的方式吗？
Now, even as he is seeking to muster opposition to Trump, he’s trying to persuade fellow Democrats to follow him down the populist path. This might not be easy. After President Joe Biden’s experiment with new economic ideas ended in an electoral rout, the party’s free-market wing has been feeling vindicated and ready for some infighting. Meanwhile, Murphy, whom National Review recently called the “Most Boring Politician in America,” is not an obvious vessel for a rousing appeal to the working class.
现在，即使他正在寻求反对特朗普的反对，他仍在试图说服民主党人跟随他走上民粹主义之路。这可能并不容易。乔·拜登（Joe Biden）总统对新经济思想的实验结束后，该党的自由市场联队一直感到辩护，并准备好进行内斗。同时，墨菲（Murphy）最近称其为“美国最无聊的政治家”，这并不是对工人阶级引起呼吁的显而易见的船只。
Murphy knows that the party brand—out of touch, too focused on social issues, too judgmental—is desperately in need of a reboot. If he is the walking embodiment of Generic Democrat, perhaps that makes him the guy for the job.
墨菲（Murphy）知道，派对品牌（Touch）迫切需要重新启动。如果他是通用民主党人的步行体现，也许这使他成为了这份工作的家伙。
Democratic Party politics sometimes feel like a struggle between an old guard and an upstart youth movement. Murphy somehow belongs to both camps. He has held elected office since the Clinton administration, but at 51, he’s still the fifth-youngest Democrat in the Senate.
民主党的政治有时会感觉像是老后卫和新贵青年运动之间的斗争。墨菲以某种方式属于两个营地。自克林顿政府以来，他一直担任当选职务，但在51岁时，他仍然是参议院第五大民主党人。
He was just 25 when he won his first election, to the Connecticut state legislature, and 33 when he successfully ran to represent Connecticut’s Fifth Congressional District. That district includes Newtown, where, on December 14, 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered six adults and 20 children. Murphy, whose two sons were 1 and 4 at the time, was with some of the Sandy Hook parents when they learned their kids had been killed.
当他赢得第一次选举，进入康涅狄格州立法机关时，他只有25岁，而33他成功地竞选代表康涅狄格州的第五届国会区。该地区包括Newtown，2012年12月14日，一名枪手走进Sandy Hook小学，谋杀了六名成人和20名儿童。墨菲当时的两个儿子是1个和4个儿子，当他们得知孩子被杀时，他们和一些桑迪胡克的父母在一起。
By that point, he was already on his way to the Senate. He had been elected five weeks earlier, defeating Linda McMahon, the future education secretary. Murphy, who was 39 when he took office, would focus for the next decade on passing gun-control legislation.
到那时，他已经在前往参议院的路上。他五个星期前当选，击败了未来教育部长琳达·麦克马洪（Linda McMahon）。墨菲（Murphy）上任时39岁，他将在接下来的十年中专注于通过枪支控制立法。
As the junior senator from Connecticut, Murphy rarely drew national attention. One exception came after the 2022 schoolhouse massacre in Uvalde, Texas. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” Murphy demanded of his colleagues in an emotional speech on the Senate floor. “Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate—why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority—if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?”
作为康涅狄格州的初级参议员，墨菲很少引起全国关注。在得克萨斯州乌瓦尔德（Uvalde）的2022校舍大屠杀之后，一个例外是一个例外。“我们在做什么？我们在做什么？”墨菲在参议院的一场情感演讲中要求他的同事们。“为什么您要花所有的时间来参加美国参议院 - 为什么要经历这项工作的所有麻烦，使自己处于权威的位置 - 如果您的回答是随着屠杀的增加，随着我们的孩子的生活而增加，我们什么都不做？”
Murphy went on to partner with Senate colleagues on bipartisan gun-control legislation that passed the following month with 15 Republican votes. The law was modest, but it was the first significant federal gun legislation since 1994.
墨菲继续与参议院同事合作，完成了两党的枪支控制立法，该立法在接下来的一个月以15个共和党的投票通过。该法律谦虚，但这是自1994年以来的第一个重要的联邦枪支立法。
Even as Murphy was building toward his first concrete achievement on a signature issue, he was undergoing a kind of reinvention from gun-control advocate to economic populist. In October 2022, he published an essay in this magazine in which he argued that decades of free-market economic policy, embraced by both parties, had led to a host of ills: the hollowing-out of communities, a rise in loneliness, a sense of lost control and meaning. The Trump movement, he wrote, fed off these frustrations. It was the first of several articles he would publish on the theme.
即使墨菲（Murphy）在签名问题上建立了他的第一个具体成就，但他仍在从枪支控制倡导者到经济民粹主义者的一种重塑。2022年10月，他在这本杂志上发表了一篇文章，他认为双方接受了数十年的自由市场经济政策，导致了许多弊端：社区的空洞，孤独感，孤独感，失去控制和意义。他写道，特朗普运动消除了这些挫败感。这是他将在主题上发表的几篇文章中的第一篇。
Murphy’s interest in these ideas seemed to come out of nowhere. Other politicians and commentators had been making similar arguments for years, but Murphy was never part of that crew. How had the gun-control guy suddenly become the economic-populism guy?
墨菲对这些想法的兴趣似乎无处不在。多年来，其他政客和评论员一直在做出类似的论点，但墨菲从来都不是该船员的一部分。枪支控制的人如何突然成为经济流行主义的人？
I recently put that question to him during an interview in his Senate office. Murphy still looks young for a senator, but he has aged out of the boy-wonder era. His face, once doughy, has grown narrow and lined. He recently began sporting a scruffy beard, perhaps in a bid for a more working-dude aesthetic (a suggestion he denied with a laugh). “I watched the economy get better according to all of the metrics we think measure economic health,” he told me. “And then I listened to the people I represent, and people all across the country, tell me how shitty the economy was. And that seemed to be a real problem in general, but for Democrats specifically, because at the time, we were running on a growing economy and low unemployment, and we thought we were going to get credit for that if we just kept telling people that the economy was good.”
我最近在他的参议院办公室接受采访时向他提出了这个问题。墨菲（Murphy）对于参议员来说仍然年轻，但他已经超越了男孩时代。他的脸曾经一旦面团就变得狭窄而衬里。他最近开始穿着胡须，也许是为了寻求更加工作的习惯（这是他笑的建议）。他告诉我：“根据我们认为衡量经济健康的所有指标，我看到经济变得更好。”“然后我听了我所代表的人，以及全国各地的人们，告诉我经济多么卑鄙。这似乎是一个真正的问题，但对于民主党人来说，这是一个真正的问题，但是对于民主党人来说，这是一个真正的问题，因为当时，我们在经济增长和低失业率上奔跑，如果我们只是继续告诉人们，我们就会为此而受到信誉。”
I found this answer unsatisfying. Every Democrat discovered, at some point, that voters were unhappy with the Biden economy. Most did not make the turn that Murphy did. A few weeks later, in a follow-up interview, I asked the question more pointedly.
我发现这个答案不满意。每个民主党人在某个时候都发现选民对拜登经济不满意。大多数人没有轮流墨菲那样。几周后，在一次后续采访中，我更明确地问了这个问题。
“Probably the most important thing that happened to me was a decision in the summer of 2022 to go down a deep new-right rabbit hole,” he told me. Murphy started with Why Liberalism Failed, by the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen. In the book, Deneen argues that liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism and free markets, has sown the seeds of its own demise by undermining traditional social structures and neglecting deeper sources of human flourishing.
他告诉我：“可能发生在我身上的最重要的事情是在2022年夏天做出一个新的兔子洞的决定。”墨菲始于巴黎圣母院帕特里克·丹宁（Patrick Deneen）教授的自由主义为什么失败。在这本书中，Deneen认为，自由主义着重于个人主义和自由市场，通过破坏传统的社会结构并忽略了更深层的人类繁荣来源，从而播种了自己的灭亡种子。
“I dog-eared and highlighted the crap out of that book,” Murphy said. “While I don’t go to all the places Deneen goes, it opened my eyes as to how the market fundamentalism that had creeped into the Democratic Party had really corrupted the country’s soul.”
墨菲说：“我用狗牵引并突出了那本书中的废话。”“虽然我没有去Deneen的所有地方，但它使我对进入民主党的市场原教旨主义是如何真正破坏了该国灵魂的。”
“But then I went a step further,” Murphy continued, “and started spending time listening to the Red Scare, and reading Curtis Yarvin, and going through the stuff that the Claremont Institute was producing.” He came to feel that the new right—skeptical of free-market libertarianism and eager to use state power to impose its values on American institutions, including Big Business—was asking the right questions, even if its answers were alarming. “What I was hearing and what I was reading was a conservative movement that was actually spending real time trying to understand the spiritual crisis that the country was in,” Murphy said. “Listen: Blake Masters is a creepy weirdo, but a lot of the stuff he was getting into in 2022—about the emptiness of American life when all that matters is how much you buy and how good a consumer you are—really, it spoke to me.”
墨菲继续说：“但是后来我走了一步，然后开始花时间听红色的恐慌，读柯蒂斯·雅尔文，并经历了克莱尔蒙特学院正在生产的东西。”他开始觉得新的权利 - 自由市场自由主义，渴望利用国家权力将其价值观强加于包括大型企业在内的美国机构，也提出了正确的问题，即使其答案令人震惊。墨菲说：“我正在听到的内容和我正在阅读的是一项保守运动，实际上是在实时花费实时的时间来理解该国所在的精神危机。”“听：布雷克大师赛是一个令人毛骨悚然的怪人，但是他在2022年所遇到的许多东西 - 就美国生活的空虚而言，一切都重要的是您购买了多少，您的消费者是多么的好，这对我说话了。”
Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism
克里斯·墨菲（Chris Murphy）：新自由主义的残骸
Where Deneen critiqued liberalism as such, Murphy, like others on the left, saw the culprit as neoliberalism, the philosophy that favors private-sector solutions and defines good policy largely in terms of total economic growth. Neoliberal Democrats, according to their critics, had placed too much faith in free markets, relied too heavily on welfare programs to compensate the economy’s have-nots, and overlooked the political perils of concentrated wealth. The Biden administration thus sought to break from neoliberal ideas in key ways: reviving tough antitrust enforcement and consumer protection, strongly supporting labor unions, and directing huge sums of public money into domestic manufacturing. In his Atlantic essay, Murphy argued that this agenda provided Democrats a way to defeat Trump by selling “a new, winning message of actionable economic nationalism.”
在丹宁批评自由主义的地方，墨菲像左边的其他人一样，将罪魁祸首视为新自由主义，这种哲学有利于私营部门解决方案并在很大程度上定义了良好的政策。根据他们的批评家的说法，新自由主义的民主党对自由市场的信心过多，过于依赖福利计划，无法弥补经济的不知不觉，并忽略了集中财富的政治危险。因此，拜登政府试图以关键的方式脱离新自由主义思想：恢复强硬的反托拉斯执法和消费者保护，强有力地支持劳工工会，并将大量的公共资金投入到国内制造业中。墨菲在他的大西洋论文中辩称，这一议程为民主党人提供了一种击败特朗普的方式，通过出售“新的，可行的经济民族主义的胜利信息”。
This is not quite what happened.
这不是发生的事情。
Opinions differ on why the 2024 presidential election went so wrong for Democrats. One school of thought holds that Biden had been a fool to reject neoliberalism in the first place. “Policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions,” Jason Furman, an influential centrist Democratic economist, wrote in a postelection essay titled “The Post-Neoliberal Delusion.”
关于2024年总统大选的原因与民主党人如此错误有关。一所思想学校认为，拜登首先是拒绝新自由主义的傻瓜。有影响力的中间派民主经济学家杰森·弗曼（Jason Furman）在一篇名为“尼尔自由主义后妄想”的选举后文章中写道：“决策者永远不应再忽略追求幻想的解决方案的基本知识。”
The other possibility is that the theory was sound, but the implementation wasn’t. Perhaps voters would have rewarded the Biden administration if they hadn’t been so upset about inflation—a post-pandemic phenomenon that triggered anti-incumbent backlash in democracies around the world and that the administration was slow to recognize as an emergency. Or perhaps what sank Democrats was the fact that, thanks to the slowly turning gears of government, most of Biden’s concrete achievements—new infrastructure, reduced drug prices, and so on—had not materialized by the end of his term. (We can set aside the obvious problem of having a president so ravaged by age that he had to abandon his reelection campaign. Opinions don’t really differ about that.)
另一种可能性是该理论是合理的，但实施不是。如果选民对通货膨胀并不那么沮丧，也许选民会奖励拜登政府的政府，这是一种备受主义的现象，引发了世界各地民主国家的反对反弹，并且政府对紧急情况的认可很慢。也许沉没的民主党人是，由于拜登（Biden）的大部分具体成就（新基础设施，降低的药品价格等等），由于政府的大部分政府机器，在任期结束时都没有实现。（我们可以搁置一个明显的问题，即在年龄上遭到如此惨重的总统，他不得不放弃连任。意见并没有什么不同。）
Murphy believes that the decisive factor was communication: The administration failed to sell its own record. “Nobody knew what Lina Khan was doing,” he told me, referring to the Biden-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission whose aggressive agenda drew the enmity of much of corporate America (and for whom I briefly worked before joining The Atlantic). “Nobody understood that the president actually was in the process of breaking up concentrated corporate power.”
墨菲认为，决定性因素是沟通：政府未能出售自己的记录。他告诉我：“没有人知道莉娜·汗（Lina Khan）在做什么。”他指的是联邦贸易委员会的拜登任命主席，他的积极进取议程吸引了美国大部分美国公司的仇恨（在加入大西洋之前，我短暂地工作了）。“没有人知道总统实际上是在破坏集中的公司权力。”
David A. Graham: Independent agencies never stood a chance under Trump
大卫·格雷厄姆（David A. Graham）：独立机构在特朗普领导下从未有机会
As the nominee, Kamala Harris seemed unwilling to lean into a populist economic message. Two moments crystallized the lost opportunity for Murphy: One was when rumors swirled that Harris intended, as president, to reward her Silicon Valley supporters by firing Khan—rumors that Harris did not dispel. Another was when Harris proposed a ban on supermarket price gouging as a way to address voter anger over food costs. That plan was mocked by many economists and pundits, including liberal ones, who insisted that capping the prices businesses can charge for essential goods would lead to Soviet-style shortages. The campaign subsequently downplayed the proposal.
作为提名人，卡马拉·哈里斯（Kamala Harris）似乎不愿倾斜民粹主义的经济信息。墨菲（Murphy）失去的机会结晶了两瞬时：一个是当谣言旋转时，哈里斯（Harris）打算通过解雇汗（Khan）来奖励她的硅谷支持者，这是哈里斯（Harris）并没有消除的鲁默斯（Rumors）。另一个是哈里斯（Harris）提出禁止超市价格欺诈的禁令，以此来解决选民对食品成本的愤怒。该计划受到许多经济学家和专家的嘲笑，包括自由主义者，他们坚持认为，企业可以为必需品收取的价格上限的价格将导致苏联式的短缺。该活动随后淡化了该提案。
Ali Mortell, the director of research at Blue Rose Research, a leading Democratic-strategy firm, told me that a campaign ad in which Harris promised to “crack down on landlords who are charging too much” and “lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers” was in the top 1 percent of effectiveness among the many thousands of ads her firm has tested. But for whatever reason, the ad “was not necessarily what received the most airtime,” Mortell said. An analysis published by Jacobin found that Harris mentioned economically populist themes and policies less and less as the campaign went along. When asked during her first and only 2024 presidential debate whether Americans were better off financially than they had been four years earlier, Harris offered a stultifyingly dry sales pitch for what she called her “opportunity economy,” which seemed to consist exclusively of tax cuts.
领先的民主党策略公司Blue Rose Research的研究总监Ali Mortell告诉我，哈里斯（Harris）答应“打击收费过多的房东”，“通过追随Price Gougers来降低您的食品和杂货账单”，她在她的许多广告中占据了她的公司的最高效率中的前1％。但是，无论出于何种原因，广告“不一定是收到最多的通话时间”。雅各宾（Jacobin）发表的一项分析发现，随着竞选活动的进行，哈里斯（Harris）提到了经济上民粹主义的主题和政策越来越少。当在她的第一次和仅仅2024年的总统辩论中被问及美国人在经济上比四年前更好地脱颖而出时，哈里斯为她所说的“机会经济”提供了一个杰出的干旱销售，这似乎仅由减税组成。
In Murphy’s diagnosis, Democratic politicians must adopt a more confrontational style in which “you tell people who’s screwing them”—which is to say, giant corporations that wield their power to raise prices, nickel-and-dime consumers, and corrupt the government (and, in the case of tech companies, to addict our children to harmful social-media feeds). For Harris, that would have meant addressing grocery inflation by talking about collusion among monopolistic food companies. Instead, the administration “chose to just take it on the chin, over and over again, on inflation,” Murphy said. I asked why he thought that was. He was silent for a moment before saying, in an almost pained whisper, “I don’t know.”
在墨菲的诊断中，民主党政客必须采用一种更具对抗性的风格，在这种方式中，“您告诉人们正在搞砸他们的人”（这就是说，巨型公司都利用了他们的权力来提高价格，镍和角色的消费者，并破坏政府的政府（以及在科技公司的案例中，使我们的孩子都使我们的孩子有害的社会媒体饲料）。对于哈里斯来说，这将意味着通过谈论垄断食品公司的勾结来解决杂货通货膨胀。取而代之的是，政府“选择仅一遍又一遍地将其在通货膨胀上进行，”墨菲说。我问他为什么这样。他沉默了片刻，然后用几乎痛苦的耳语说：“我不知道。”
If pugilistic economic populism is such effective politics, shouldn’t Bernie Sanders be president right now? Maybe his problem was the S-word. Maybe a type of populism that aimed at fixing capitalism, rather than replacing it with socialism, would perform better—except that’s what Elizabeth Warren tried in 2020. For her troubles, she got to split a New York Times endorsement with Amy Klobuchar and finished behind Sanders in the primary.
如果狂热的经济民粹主义是如此有效的政治，那么伯尼·桑德斯现在不应该成为总统吗？也许他的问题是S字。也许是一种旨在解决资本主义的民粹主义，而不是用社会主义代替它，这会表现更好 - 除了伊丽莎白·沃伦（Elizabeth Warren）在2020年在2020年尝试的事情。对于她的麻烦，她必须与艾米·克洛布萨（Amy Klobuchar）分开纽约时报的认可，并在初级桑德斯（Sanders）后面完成。
But a lot of other things were going on back then. Social-justice issues dominated Democratic politics. Warren and Sanders were among the 2020 primary candidates who declared their support for unpopular left-wing positions such as decriminalizing border crossings, banning fracking, and abolishing private health insurance. To this day, the public overwhelmingly perceives the Democratic Party as caring more about progressive social causes than economic ones.
但是当时还有很多其他事情正在发生。社会正义问题主导了民主政治。沃伦（Warren）和桑德斯（Sanders）是2020年的主要候选人之一，他们宣布支持不受欢迎的左翼职位，例如非刑事过境，禁止压裂和废除私人健康保险。直到今天，公众以压倒性地认为民主党比经济事业更关心进步的社会事业。
Murphy puts forward a version of an argument that has been advanced by the likes of Steve Bannon and J. D. Vance: that millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities are to the left of the GOP on economics and to the right of Democrats on social issues, and whichever party can occupy that sweet spot will reap major benefits. “The race is really a matter of whether Republicans become more genuinely economically populist before Democrats open up their tent and accept in folks who aren’t with us on every single issue, from abortion to climate to guns,” he said. This approach cuts against both the economic self-interest and the cultural preferences of much of the Democratic donor base. But it seems to have worked for some swing-district Democrats, including Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Representative Pat Ryan of New York, social moderates who emphasized anti-corporate themes and ran far ahead of Harris in their congressional districts last year.
墨菲（Murphy）提出了一个论点的版本，该论点是由史蒂夫·班农（Steve Bannon）和J. D. Vance等人提出的：数以百万计的工人阶级美国人在共和党的经济学和民主党在社会问题上的左边，在社会问题上，任何一个党派都可以占据这一甜蜜地点。他说：“在民主党人开放帐篷之前，共和党人是否会变得更加真正的经济民粹主义者，并接受那些在每个问题上与我们在一起的人，从堕胎到气候到枪支，这真的是一个问题。”这种方法削减了经济自我利益和许多民主捐助者基础的文化偏好。但是，似乎对一些挥杆区的民主党人工作，包括华盛顿的代表玛丽·格鲁森坎普·佩雷斯（Marie Gluesenkamp Perez）和纽约代表的帕特·瑞安（Pat Ryan），他们强调反公司主题，并在去年的国会地区领先于哈里斯（Harris）。
Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?
阅读：您真的可以用民粹主义与民粹主义作斗争吗？
The political writer Matthew Yglesias has accused Murphy of “dog whistle moderation” for implying that Democrats are too “woke” without actually saying anything anti-woke. It’s true that Murphy does not offer any particular culture-war takes that defy progressive orthodoxy, perhaps because his record as a blue-state liberal makes this improbable. His critique is more about tone and emphasis.
政治作家马修·伊格莱西亚斯（Matthew Yglesias）指责墨菲（Murphy）“狗哨声节制”，暗示民主党人太“醒了”而没有真正说任何反击球。的确，墨菲没有提供任何特定的文化战争会带来那种反抗的正统观念，这也许是因为他作为蓝邦自由主义者的记录使得这不可能。他的批评更多地是关于语气和重点。
“It’s not just about that specific message of attacking corporate power,” he said. “It is also about having the discipline to spend 80 percent of your time on that message.” This is hard for Democratic politicians, who are much more comfortable talking about social issues. “Climate, guns, choice, gay rights, voting rights: Every single one of those issues is existential for an important community. But I think right now, if you aren’t driving the vast majority of your narrative around the way in which the economy is going to become corrupted to enrich the elites, then you aren’t going to be able to capture this potential realignment of the American electorate that’s up for grabs.”
他说：“这不仅仅是攻击公司权力的具体信息。”“这也是要花80％的时间在该消息上的学科。”对于民主党政客来说，这很难，他们更自在谈论社会问题。“气候，枪支，选择，同性恋权利，投票权：重要的社区中的每个问题都是存在的。但是，我认为，如果您不在围绕经济腐败以丰富精英人士的方式来推动您的绝大多数叙述，那么您就不会能够捕捉到美国选民的潜在重新挑战。”
“And listen—I own part of that responsibility,” he added. “I spent a lot of time trying to convince my party to spend more and more time talking about guns.”
他补充说：“听听 - 我自己的一部分。”“我花了很多时间试图说服我的聚会花越来越多的时间谈论枪支。”
In my conversations with him, I got the sense that Murphy was better at making the case for populism than at actually doing populism. Perhaps because he came to it relatively recently, he seems at times to still be trying on the ideas. Unlike Sanders or Warren, he doesn’t slip naturally into detailed, outraged explanations of how the economy has gone wrong. Even in his essays, he tends to hover at the level of abstract ideas.
在与他的对话中，我感觉到墨菲比实际民粹主义更好地为民粹主义辩护。也许是因为他最近遇到了这个想法，所以他似乎有时仍在尝试这些想法。与桑德斯（Sanders）或沃伦（Warren）不同，他对经济如何出错的详细，愤怒的解释并没有自然地陷入困境。即使在他的论文中，他也倾向于在抽象思想的层面上徘徊。
And Murphy’s economic argument, given its overlap with the intellectual movement surrounding Trump, exists in some tension with his effort to whip up opposition to the real-life Trump agenda. Murphy recognizes this dynamic. “I struggle with the question of how much time to be explaining that tariffs aren’t always bad,” he said. “That seems like wasted energy right now, because the way he’s doing them is definitely bad.” To the wing of the party that thinks Bidenomics was a catastrophic blunder, agonizing over whether Trump has a point on the downsides of free trade is political insanity. Yglesias, for example, argues that Murphy’s embrace of “pseudoeconomics” is the exact wrong way to broaden the Democratic tent. Better to celebrate cheap goods as the key to prosperity and return to the more corporate-friendly, growth-oriented approach of the Clinton and Obama eras.
墨菲的经济论点在与特朗普周围的知识运动的重叠之中，他努力反对对现实生活的特朗普议程的努力，存在着一定的张力。墨菲认识到这种动态。他说：“我为解释关税并不总是不好的时间而苦苦挣扎。”“这似乎现在已经浪费了能量，因为他的方式绝对是不好的。”对于认为比丁莫学的党派而言，这是一次灾难性的失误，对特朗普是否对自由贸易的弊端有一定的观点是政治上的精神错乱。例如，伊格莱西亚斯（Yglesias）认为，墨菲（Murphy）对“伪经济学”的拥抱是扩大民主帐篷的确切方式。最好庆祝廉价商品，成为繁荣的关键，并返回克林顿和奥巴马时代更友好，面向成长的方法。
Murphy is trying to prevent his colleagues from giving in to that temptation. But he faces skepticism from a party that is still uncomfortable with class-conscious politics. “There has always been a resistance to what very rich people call the demonization of wealth,” he said. “Part of the pushback is the idea that it’s a mistake to talk about the dangers of concentrated wealth, because it feels like that’s an attack on wealth, and people want to be wealthy. I think that’s a legitimate criticism, but I think we have to explain that the current structure of power in this country is a barrier to people becoming wealthy. I’d like to have fewer billionaires and a lot more millionaires.”
墨菲（Murphy）试图防止他的同事屈服于这种诱惑。但是他面临着一个对阶级意识政治仍然不舒服的政党的怀疑。他说：“人们一直对非常富有的人称之为财富的妖魔化。”“一部分挑战是谈论集中财富的危险是一个错误，因为这感觉就像是对财富的攻击，人们希望变得富有。我认为这是一种合理的批评，但我认为我们必须解释这个国家的当前权力结构，即人们变得富裕是一个富裕的障碍。我希望更少的亿万富翁和更多的百万富翁。”。
Recently, Murphy made his case at a policy retreat for Democratic senators. I asked how it went over.
最近，墨菲（Murphy）在民主党参议员的政策撤退中提出了诉讼。我问它如何结束。
He responded, “I wouldn’t say that I’m winning.”
他回答：“我不会说我赢了。”
