Sen. Chris Murphy’s new book opens at a youth hockey rink, where he is told he cannot record his son’s game for other family members because the team will be penalized if he does. The reason is simple and blunt: Black Bear Sports Group sells access to a subscription video service that carries every game, and the monthly fee can run as high as $50.
That scene is more than a parental annoyance in Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Murphy uses it to argue that everyday life has been carved up by corporate forces that dictate the terms of the marketplace and turn even youth sports into a profit opportunity. He calls it a spiritual crisis, not just a political one.
The book arrives as consumer sentiment has fallen to levels below both the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, even though unemployment had remained relatively low and inflation only modestly elevated before the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Murphy’s warning is that the numbers do not capture the deeper mood. Americans, he says, increasingly feel under siege and outgunned, and that feeling has become part of the national weather.
Murphy is not approaching the subject as an outsider. He has served in public office for the entirety of this century, beginning with his election to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1998, when he was 25. That history matters because the senator is now writing about the culture he has spent decades inside, not describing a country he has only observed from the sidelines.
The book also fits into a larger critique of politics that keeps showing up in this campaign season and beyond: Democrats, Murphy argues, have too often bent themselves around swing voters and lost sight of a shared moral case. His answer is not another recalibration of message. It is a call to rebuild connection in a country where even parents at a youth rink can be told they are not allowed to share what they see.
That is the tension at the center of Murphy’s argument. He says modern America has trained people to accept isolation, to pay more for access to ordinary experiences, and to treat frustration as a personal failing rather than a public condition. The hockey rink becomes the metaphor because it is ordinary, specific and immediate — exactly the kind of place where the country’s deeper unraveling now shows itself.
Murphy’s case is sharpened by the fact that the very institutions meant to bind people together now often ask them to pay, subscribe or step aside. In that sense, his book is not really about hockey at all. It is about a political order and a commercial culture that have left many Americans feeling less like participants than customers. And Murphy’s answer is clear: if the country is going to feel whole again, it will have to recover some common good first.
The question the book leaves behind is not whether the problem is real. It is whether American politics, after years of chasing narrower and narrower appeals, can still muster the language — and the will — to repair it.
