[I]n a polarized, siloed media environment, there’s all the more reason to have dissenting voices inside the tent than outside. If alignment on economic power brings more socially conservative voters into the Democratic fold, we have a better chance to pull them out of the Fox News echo chamber, challenge their biases, and win them over. Keeping them out gives progressives almost no chance to persuade them.
Though painful to admit, it is also not clear Democrats are fully committed to an agenda that breaks up corporate power, especially in the technology economy; holds colleges accountable; and makes clean government a priority. Over the past quarter century, Wall Street interests, technology industry and university elites, and anonymous donors have all gained strong footholds in our party’s power structure. Though Democrats are far, far less compromised than Republicans, it would be a mistake for our side to feign self-righteousness. The status quo—which gleans short-term material advantage as the country spirals into spiritual rot—holds immense power in our party, too.
During the 2024 general election, the meticulous, intense chair of the Federal Trade Commission [FTC], Lina Khan, unexpectedly became a campaign lightning rod. A thirty-two-year-old Columbia Law School scholar when nominated, Khan had been President [Joe] Biden’s surprise pick for the job. She was part of a new movement arguing for revitalized antitrust in the age of tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
Once confirmed, Khan jolted awake a sleepy agency—opening investigations and filing cases against dominant firms. If you imagine what a revived FTC would do to counter the cult of profit and cult of technology, Khan was doing it. The agency sued Amazon over practices that harmed competition and sellers, moved to ban noncompete clauses that lock workers in place, and pursued Google in landmark antitrust cases.
To the cult-of-profit crowd (Wall Street bankers, private equity managers) and the technology elites (the Silicon Valley titans whose business model relies on big companies quickly swallowing up smaller companies), Khan became enemy number one. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page attacked her relentlessly, excoriating efforts to curb concentrated corporate power. Meanwhile, her revitalization of antitrust drew cheers on the left (and some on the right)—and growing calls for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, to pledge Khan’s reappointment.
But some of Harris’s prominent financial backers—most notably Mark Cuban—pushed back, arguing that ensuring growth and dominance in the global technology race trumped considerations of income distribution, worker power, and consumer protection. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies,” Cuban complained of Khan’s agenda, “you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence.” Harris had to choose: side with Khan and the anti-monopoly push or with market fundamentalists inside the Democratic coalition.
Harris chose not to rock that boat. She refused to commit to keeping Khan if elected. She closed her campaign standing with cult-of-profit cheerleaders like Cuban and Liz Cheney, rather than populists like Bernie Sanders or UAW president Shawn Fain. After the convention, she even stopped using phrases like “living wage,” “union jobs,” and “paid family leave,” swapping in less populist economic language. Cuban crowed that “the progressive and liberal principles . . . of the Democratic Party . . . are gone. It’s Kamala Harris’s party now.” Knowing Harris and her true concern for workers and economic justice, I knew that wasn’t entirely fair criticism, but it did feel like one wing of the party had won—at least temporarily.
But that was then. Since the 2024 election, [Donald] Trump’s total, transparent abandonment of his lower-income base—prioritizing tax cuts for the wealthy over help for low- and middle-income families and spending most of his time trying to further enrich himself and his rich friends—has created a new opening to persuade his supporters that the Democratic Party is their home if they want government to do the work of destroying the cults that corrupt our civic and spiritual life.
Shortly after his election, I got together with three of my Senate colleagues—Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Adam Schiff of California, and Tina Smith of Minnesota—to start exploring what an aggressive agenda would look like to break up concentrated power and infuse meaning back into low- and middle-income work. Our first task was to do some research, to make sure that our theory of the growing economic realignment was accurate. So we commissioned a national poll, and what we found supports the arguments I’ve made in this book: 88 percent of voters supported legislation to ban insurance companies from refusing to pay for treatments doctors recommend, 84 percent of voters wanted a law to stop private equity firms from owning single-family housing, and 78 percent of voters supported breaking up the big tech firms like Google and Meta.
And yet, despite this clear hunger for major, power-shifting economic change, many leading Democrats—and even more in the pundit class—treat populist leaders like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani as fringe threats to the party’s electoral success. They believe that any pugilistic criticism of corporate power, any policy solution that does more than tweak market rules, and any public-sector effort to stimulate social connection smacks of socialism. This is simply wrong. There’s a reason Bernie Sanders is the only national Democrat who can fill stadiums—and a not insignificant number of people in those stadiums voted for Trump. There is an unmistakable appetite for a politics that not only directly confronts concentrated power, consumerism over citizenship, and government corruption but also offers solutions with real—not incremental—impact on the work of restoring dignity and meaning to American life.
Voters chose Trump because they wanted a revolution. But my party doesn’t yet seem completely ready to seize this moment. That is tragic, unacceptable, and worth having a fight over.
The good news is that you do not have to wait for Washington. That would be its own kind of spiritual surrender. There is a role for all of us because the common good is not just a set of policies waiting to be enacted. It is a way of living, a decision each of us makes every day about our own priorities. It lives in the millions of small choices made by citizens who decide that their neighbors’ well-being matters as much as their own advancement. The choice to shop at the local hardware store. To coach the Little League team. To show up at the town council meeting. To know your neighbors by name. These choices, too, can crack the foundations of the cults.
Excerpted from Crisis of the Common Good:The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by Chris Murphy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. May 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Chris Murphy. All rights reserved.
