de tocqueville OG
ntbcw BS hijack RW
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yt chris murf thinker doer restore commons
WATCH: How to king-proof America, now and forever
1,144 views Oct 29, 2025
Senator Chris Murphy on fighting the authoritarian takeover, remaking the Democratic Party, and how you, today, can cure the disease that led to Trumpismhttps://the.ink/p/watch-how-to-king-p...
Transcript
...Um you were talking about the lack of stock taking. I'm curious for you. You're someone who's a I think unusually
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in our era, you're like a a doer thinker. I mean, you you you have this pretty uh demanding day job, but you
7:20
take some time to do these research projects. You write books that are not just like here's why I'd be a great
re-election candidate books, but like real books, um history of violence, other topics. So,...
Run for Something. Yeah. And obviously she you know on one level
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works in a very narrow way to do a very specific thing which is to get people to run for office. But as we were talking
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about this and she was kind of helping share with with people watching what they can do, so many of her ideas were
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what you would not call political in kind of narrow terms. She was saying like host people at your house more
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often, right? And and and you could imagine people saying like what the hell does it like Trump's doing this, Trump's
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doing that, like what's that going to do? And I was I was listening to her say all these different things and share her
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own experiences and it you know it struck me that like she was talking about Toqueville, right?
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She was talking about a habit of association that we lost in becoming
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consumers instead of people who associate with each other. And your congressman is not the only thing you
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can do, right? Rebuilding a thicket of connection of all kinds, non-political,
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right? if it's if if you're only asking people to do political things, it's like it's a little bit too late in the
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conversation, right? Um how do you but is there how do we get there? How do we
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we can talk about it? But are there policy levers to rebuild that habit of association?
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Yeah, it's a great it's it's it's a great question, right? And you know, you and I are both students of De Toqueville and it's just so amazing, right? How he
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sort of becomes more and more relevant, right? He worries so deeply about this country not being able to hold together
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because of our differences, but also because of our fierce, rugged in individualism. Of course, he thinks that
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it's it's the common project of democracy and religion, right, that are that are two of the things that will
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sort of stitch us together. And we're at the first point in American history where less than 50% of Americans, you
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know, consider themselves part of an organized religion. And politics, of course, has now become a forum to highlight our differences rather than to
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resolve them. Yes, I do think that um government has a role, a limited role,
but a role to play in setting the preconditions for individuals to make
better decisions about creating communion. Um, regulating technology is one of them, right? I mean, we these
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these devices are literally built to destroy us. They are built to to try to cycle us into withdrawal from people.
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And so if we just said, you know, we're going to we're going to make it harder for these devices to occupy so much of
our time, that time might be just naturally turned in to to communion, right? To
time with other with other people. I don't think that's what we were doing right before them. Yeah. Right. And I and I don't think
there's also any shame in saying, okay, we're going to be a little bit more purposeful in helping community institutions be healthier. Obviously,
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that's fraught if you're talking about government support for churches and religious institutions, but you know, we
could have a pretty comprehensive suite of of of assistance to try to just make
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it a lot easier for a union or a civic group or a neighborhood organization or a mosque or a synagogue to be healthy
and have more programming and open its doors. Um, again, that doesn't address some of the underlying problems of um,
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you know, the illegitimacy of institutions in people's minds, but man, it's better than nothing, which is kind
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of what we're doing today to try to help people find each other. Well, I think it's also very empowering
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for people to know that, you know, if you live in a town with one of these, as
[ufw hall empty 10 yrs]
... and have more programming and open its doors. Um, again, that doesn't address some of the underlying problems of um,
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you know, the illegitimacy of institutions in people's minds, but man, it's better than nothing, which is kind
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of what we're doing today to try to help people find each other. Well, I think it's also very empowering
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for people to know that, you know, if you live in a town with one of these, as
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I've seen all over this country, like empty VFW halls or Rotary Club hall, you
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know, where no one has walked in in 10 years, reviving that, reinventing that is a pol act --> shtdn
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