The Democrats’ soul-healer

“We’ve become such a technocratic party that we’ve stopped spending time truly analyzing the way people are feeling,” Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democratic senator and (suspected) presidential contender, tells me in a phone interview. “The Right has done a much better job than the Left of really thinking about how people are feeling, and of drafting policies that speak to people’s metaphysical state, not just their materialist state.” It’s the summer of 2026. Most of Murphy’s fellow Democrats have long given up on the sort of national soul-searching that followed President Trump’s first election in 2016. You remember: that brief window in which Left-of-center pundits and electeds crisscrossed the de-industrialized heartland for clues to why they lost their working-class base. Soon, soul