Looking for Unity to Fight Loneliness

Senator Christopher Murphy wants a national discussion about social isolation and says it is an issue Democrats and Republicans can agree on

- By Alex J. Rouhandeh

Democratic Connecticut Senator Christopher Murphy has been spending the last several months talking about an unusual subject for a politician: loneliness.

"If democracy can't deliver on the disconnection and disaffection that Americans feel, they're going to give up on democracy," Murphy tells Newsweek. "Some demagogue, much more effective than Donald Trump, will come along and pick up on all of this anxiety and disaffection and disconnection and channel it into a political movement that will overturn democracy." Murphy was the congressman representing the Connecticut district containing Sandy Hook at the time of the 2012 school massacre there. Last year, in the wake of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, Murphy-an ardent gun control advocate with an F rating from the National Rifle Association was one of the Senate sponsors of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

The measure, which, among other things, provides more funding for mental health programs and tightens some existing gun restrictions, was the first gun control bill to make it through Congress in decades and was signed into law by President Joe Biden in June.

Murphy says the experience proved that if Republicans and Democrats were frozen in place on most gun legislation, there were still some things they could agree on. That, he tells Newsweek, spurred him to try to reframe the political discussions about polarization and violence in America. Last December he wrote an article for The Bulwark, a conservative anti-Trump website, entitled the "The Politics of Loneliness," where he warned "social isolation threatens devastating consequences for the social fabric of our nation."