Chris Murphy Wants to Make America a Little Less Lonely

Much of the ennui was surely brought on by the pandemic, but things have been trending this way for a while: Back in 2000, Robert D. Putnam warned in Bowling Alone of a sharp decline in civic and community involvement, that the bonds that once held us together seemed to be breaking. It seems to Murphy that those ties—the ones he’d watched hold a tragedy-scarred Newtown together after Sandy Hook—are now in danger of being ripped apart completely. The problem runs deeper than infrastructure or climate change or even gun safety: Americans are “worn out,” “overwhelmed,” and their leadership feels “mechanical,” he told me. “The project of trying to address this unspooling of America that’s happened is really enormous,” Murphy said. “And I think that that’s caused a lot of leaders to just not try.”

Murphy grew up in Wethersfield, Connecticut—the same town where his parents met in high school. His father’s family, he said, went back generations and was well-off. But his mother lived in public housing in nearby New Britain and moved to town when she was in elementary school. “My mother always reminded me that her life was very different than my life,” Murphy told me. “That was very formative for me—the understanding of just how lucky I was.”

His good fortune, as he saw it, came with a civic obligation—a “responsibility to serve”—and politics seemed a natural way to fulfill it. “I think I was just kind of an organizer out of the womb,” he said.

But he struggled upon arriving at Williams College in Massachusetts for undergrad: He was “overwhelmed from the start” academically, he told me, and lost his race for freshman representative to the college council. I “got skunked,” he recalled. “I was definitely on my back feet, sort of wondering whether I was good enough to continue to pursue the things I wanted to pursue, which was a life in public service.”

Then he read What It Takes, the late Richard Ben Cramer’s classic on the inner lives of 1988 presidential aspirants, which Murphy describes as “the most important book” he’s ever read: “That book just knocked me off my feet,” he said. “I was once again hooked by this idea that there was a nobleness to public service.” (Murphy now gifts the book to each of his Senate interns every year: “I think that I, today, probably contribute 50 percent of the proceeds to Richard Ben Cramer’s estate,” Murphy joked. “I buy, like, 60 copies of What It Takes every year.)

Murphy was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives at 25, the state Senate at 29, and the United States Congress at 33. But while Murphy was a talented politician, he was not particularly ideological or especially well-known when he mounted a run for the Senate seat Joe Lieberman was vacating in 2012. “He was really a backbencher in Congress,” 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. “He was not considered a major force.”

Sandy Hook changed that. “My life took a hard about-face,” Murphy wrote in his 2020 book, The Violence Inside Us. “I now had my calling…my mission in life.” 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.

“He was an extraordinary quarterback,” Senator Cory Booker, one of his closest friends in the Senate, told me. “He was just a Joe Montana–type tactician working the ball down the field and did something a lot of people can’t speak to as a senator, which is putting points on the board.” Or maybe he was more like a hockey player, with a “real ability to see around corners and see ahead for where the puck is going, not where it is right now,” as Senator Richard Blumenthal, his fellow Nutmegger, described him. Or perhaps more of a point guard? “He’s been amazing to watch,” says Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, an admirer of Murphy’s who told me his own gun safety activism—which included an impassioned pregame speech after Uvalde—has been inspired by the Connecticut senator. “I 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.”