No, Senator Murphy, I don't want to join your cult.

Politics isn't where you should find meaning.

Farthing Downs is part of the South London Downs National Nature Reserve which comprises 121 acres of countryside along the border of Surrey and Croydon. (Photo by: Chris Harris/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images). Illustration by The Argument/Chat GPT

Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on August 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Over the next six weeks, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.

Today’s essay is mine. Taking U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s recent book as a starting point, I examine the growing obsession with the common good among the postliberal right and left.

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– Jerusalem Demsas

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U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s new book Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America subverts the norms of its genre. Politicians who seemingly aspire to higher office tend to focus on sharing their biography and bland, poll-tested policy prescriptions.

Murphy, to his credit, did not bore me.

In the prose of an AI that has been trained on religious texts but is itself not an embodied soul, Murphy calls for a “cult of the common good” which we can worship instead of “false idols” like technology or profit. In his chapter outlining what his “cult of the common good” would look like, Murphy favorably recounts the following anecdote from Puritan Massachusetts:

“In 1639, a local shopkeeper named Robert Keayne became the subject of great public shame for charging eight pence for six-penny nails. According to Winthrop, ‘the cry of the country was so great’ against this attempted price gouging that Keayne faced trial before the General Court, which fined him £200 (an exorbitant sum), and then an ecclesiastical trial before his own church, which publicly admonished him for ‘selling his wares at excessive rates, to the dishonor of God’s name.’ He narrowly escaped excommunication—a sentence the colony imposed on eight people for economic offenses during this period.”

Murphy presents this anecdote as an indictment of modern-day America where we have a constitutional prohibition against excessive fines and maintain separation between church and state. I was curious, though, about those other people charged economic offenses and discovered the story of Ann Hibbens.

The trouble for Hibbens began when she “questioned the bill from her carpenter.” Despite winning a civil lawsuit, Hibbens was censured by her church for her “abrasive” behavior in court.

Historian Monica D. Fitzgerald recounts Hibbens’ tale, arguing that she was doomed in part because of her gender, citing one church leader who complained: “More offensive than any of her sins, she has one sin worthy of reproof: and that is transgressing the rule of the Apostle in usurping authority over him whom God hath made her head and husband and in taking the power and authority which God hath given to him out of his hands.”

She was eventually excommunicated. Years later, after her husband died, she was tried as a witch and hanged.

Now, obviously, I don’t think Murphy supports hanging women for witchcraft. Nor does punishing someone for price gouging necessarily lead to witch trials. But it’s also not an accident that a community with enough coercive power to punish someone for charging a lot for nails ends up using that coercive power in other realms of life as well. The regulation of prices, religious orthodoxy, and women’s behavior all stemmed from the same view: that “the community” could define the good, interpret dissent as moral disorder, and punish the dissenter.

Murphy repeatedly calls for a “cult of the common good,” only to retreat from his own language by assuring the reader that he is “half-joking.” Each chapter is organized around a cult Murphy is criticizing and as a writer, I sympathize with becoming overly committed to parallelism and perhaps that’s what happened here. But the metaphor is more revealing than he intends. A community may influence its members, impose obligations, and cultivate shared values. But a cult claims something more comprehensive: authority to tell its members what is true, what their lives are for, and how they must live it.

I could not find a clear explanation of what would limit the jurisdiction of Murphy’s cult. A liberal order begins with the presumption of freedom — yes, including economic freedom — and then requires public justification when the government chooses to intervene (often for good reason!).

The cult of the common good reverses that presumption. It begins with an Official Version of the Good Life and then treats the law and politics as the way to direct people towards it.

Who gets to decide the common good?

What’s odd is that Murphy seems to understand the danger of political leaders defining the good life when it’s someone else’s definition.

At one point in his book, the senator recalls “wincing” when he heard then-President Barack Obama try to nudge people onto his version of the good life: “Tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training.” Murphy says that this challenge didn’t recognize the plurality of paths to achievement: “others seek different routes into the job market.” Murphy argues that this “helped cement a stigma against those who could not achieve a higher degree.”

Yet, in the very same book, Murphy calls for requiring six months of national service for every young American.

All Obama did was make an appeal, and Murphy condemns it for stigmatizing people who are on other paths. Yet, Murphy’s plan is not only to stigmatize paths he disagrees with, but to ban them and create one government-approved option for young people. An American who ignored Obama’s challenge faced no material consequences. What happens to one who refuses Murphy’s? He doesn’t say. Murphy’s objection, then, is not really to political leaders defining the good life, it is to someone else defining it differently.

Many such cases.

American Compass founder Oren Cass, whom Murphy cites favorably in his book, is similarly excited to reorient society around the common good. He’s useful to consider because he provides more detailed examples of what it looks like to reassemble politics and policy around a cult of the common good.

Cass’ work reveals that in his view, common-good politics entails using culture and government to privilege particular ways of living and to orient individual behavior towards those predetermined paths.

Earlier this year, American Compass released a manifesto arguing that to revive American citizenship we need to “[offer] individuals well-defined paths down which they can confidently and successfully travel.”

I publicly pressed Cass to explain what those well-defined paths were and how governments should restrain people who rejected them. The most banal reading could just claim this as the status quo — we do not let people go around murdering others willy-nilly. But clearly Cass means something more than that. While every policy decision contains within it implicit nudges, there is a world of difference between a government oriented around making it easier for people to live the lives they choose and a government that preordains certain paths and punishes you if you fall out of line.

The Cost-of-Thriving Index is a tool created by Cass and American Compass as a “better way to understand the challenge for working families” than typical inflation-based adjustments. One important choice Cass makes is to build the index around a male earner’s paycheck.

His reasoning is that it “holds constant the economic experience of a group recognized as the family’s traditional breadwinner” whereas an aggregate wage “experiences downward pressure from a ‘mix shift’ as women account for more of the workforce.”¹

But Cass’ index embeds a particular ideal of middle-class life: a family supported by one male breadwinner. On the index’s own 2022 figures, a couple earning the median male and female wages would make about $115,000 — enough to cover its $76,000 basket with nearly $40,000 left before taxes. Cass’ index treats a two-income household as evidence of failure.

And if you think the common good is constrained by the law, think again. On Liberation Day, when Trump unilaterally enacted his illegal tariffs, Cass celebrated, writing that they “lay the groundwork for a new set of arrangements…that prioritize the national interest and the flourishing of the nation’s working families.”

Good-faith people disagree with each other

Despite my deep disagreements with them, I think both Cass and Murphy are good people trying to figure out the best way to improve the country. So how do we end up in such different places?

In part because of empirical disagreements that we might be able to hash out if we were so inclined. But a large part of our disagreement comes from the fact that different people, reasoning well, often end up believing very different things. Edmund Fawcett identifies that part of the liberal tradition is the “acknowledgment of inescapable material and ethical conflict within society.”

There is no final debate round where you will convince everyone that your economic project is right. There is no homogeneous community that will one day arise, content to live under the same economic, political, and social paradigm. Even within the same families, siblings raised together will come away with very different ideas about how best to conduct themselves.

As political philosopher Charles Larmore put it, “reasoning about ethical matters, once it goes beyond platitudes and seeks some precision, is as likely to drive us apart as to bring us together.”

Once you accept this fact about the world, the question of political philosophy reveals itself to be: What are legitimate exercises of power?

Where should we find meaning?

I am a Christian. I believe in God, I go to church, I pray, and I volunteer with my congregation. When I’m facing a difficult decision, I usually call my father, who will help guide me through it using our shared moral principles and framework. This is where I find meaning.

Religion provides (at least) three functions:

1. Epistemological: God is an authority through which we can understand what is true.

2. Ontological: God tells us what is real and meaningful. Why are we on this planet? What is our purpose?

3. Ethical: God tells us how to live. What is good and evil? What duties do we have to our neighbors?

You do not have to be religious to have those functions fulfilled. There are people who have very strong ethical codes by which they live and friends and family who share that moral code with them.

One modern secular example is the effective altruist community. It has a well-developed moral philosophy (complete with priests!), they have a faith community within which they actively debate their theology (complete with sects!), and they have clear ways of applying their theology to people’s everyday lives to help them act rightly.

Meaning is important, and if you lack it in your life, I do not think it will be easy to live happily or well, however you define those concepts. But where I depart from Murphy’s call for meaning-making is that politics isn’t where people should find meaning.

“If America is going to worship any idol, let it be the common good,” writes Murphy.

I’m not even totally sure what this means but I can heartily say: No. This would be bad.

Recent presidential elections have divided the electorate closely. Nearly half of the electorate is disappointed when the winner is announced. In what world, then, does victory constitute a mandate to define a small set of well-defined paths? As the parties have sorted more consistently along ideological lines, elections have taken on greater stakes.

Many of my favorite political leaders have been overt about their own morality. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln urged “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” while calling for “malice toward none” and “charity for all.”

I want political leaders whose moral convictions constrain their exercise of power, not leaders who use power to impose their moral convictions.

A senator can make it easier to raise a child, but he cannot tell us why we should have one. He can protect our freedom to worship, but he cannot give us religion. He can regulate hospitals, but he can’t tell us when to move our ailing parents into hospice. Politics shouldn’t create meaning, it should make room for it.

More in the How do we live with each other? series:

1. Of course, if Cass were genuine about wanting to filter out composition effects, as economist Matt Darling pointed out, you would build this measure solely around women‘s wages.