Yet a rude awakening awaits those who imagine that ending the Iran war or booting the GOP from power will end the inflation crisis. For much of this decade, inflation has been a problem for consumers and firms, and a salient political issue for voters. And although policy choices like the Iran war have no doubt played a role, today’s structural inflation has a much deeper cause: it is the unintended price of voters’ choice to end the model of neoliberal globalization that defined the post-Cold War period.

The process of deglobalization began under Trump I, accelerated during Covid and Biden’s tenure, and has become more destabilizing since Trump’s return to the Oval Office. It is greater and more challenging than any one policy agenda. High costs of living are thus likely to remain impervious to changes in policy or shifts in party power. 

Inflation is baked into deglobalization. Major revisions to global trade — whether stemming from war and sanctions, protectionist concerns, or efforts to combat climate change — entail major changes to production and distribution. These changes are far from seamless, since they involve finding new suppliers, retraining workers, or rebuilding factories. At each step, there is a risk of bottlenecks, shortages, and price spikes. 

Sweeping programs to reduce immigration likewise reverberate throughout the labor market, creating disruptions in critical sectors like home construction, food production, and health care. “Choke points” — a term that became ubiquitous at the height of the pandemic lockdowns — will continue to multiply, self-inflicted or not. Consequently, rising prices show no sign of abating, despite optimistic forecasts by the Federal Reserve that interest-rate hikes will bring inflation close to its 2% target by 2028.

Of course, the main driver of inflation at present is the cost of energy, brought on by US foreign policy — another dark irony, given Trump’s disdain for fuel alternatives and pledge of $2 gas. The high cost of energy affects not just home utilities and the commute to work, but nearly every system that furnishes the basic comforts to which Americans are accustomed. It also exacerbates the nationwide housing shortage: building becomes more expensive, as does borrowing (the latter prompting current owners to hold on to their current homes purchased at lower rates).

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But the Fed’s main method for taming inflation, rate hikes, afflicts workers and small businesses who have weathered messy tariffs and exploding health bills. As household debt continues to reach historic levels, higher interest rates mean heftier borrowing costs. Mortgages, car payments, and credit-card bills — all get more expensive to carry, so more of each paycheck goes to interest. Simply treading water in today’s economy will become more expensive, further diminishing purchasing power.

Yet a Democratic Congress is unlikely to generate a different and workable approach. The simple dynamic of divided government and mutual enmity with the White House is certainly one factor, as is the Fed’s insulated control over monetary policy. But there are deeper political reasons at play that inhibit Democrats from offering more than vague promises to crack down on price gougers, reclaim Congress’s authority over trade policy, and curb immigration raids.

For starters, the “easiest” solutions to inflation are the very policies that gave rise to Trumpian populism in the first place. That naturally has created some hesitation in the Democratic coalition to do more than attack Trump’s overreach and corruption. A return to “free trade,” for instance, would probably ease price pressures. Yet the bipartisan embrace of trade during the 1990s and early 2000s devastated America’s industrial heartlands, creating the working-class grievances that made Trump appear attractive beginning in 2015. While many former Trump supporters now bemoan his tariffs, this frustration doesn’t amount to a wholesale rejection of all protectionism — at least, not in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where Democrats have suffered the most humbling setbacks.

The same predicament is true of immigration. Labor shortages are real, prompting mainstream economists and business lobbies to urge a more liberal approach. But it would be politically untenable to resume a laissez-faire border policy akin to Biden’s, which not only worsened Democrats’ standing with traditional blue-collar workers, but fueled defections to Trump in normally blue, immigrant-heavy cities and counties in 2024. A majority of voters may now recoil at the inhumane methods employed by Trump’s deportation regime. Yet the preference for a tighter border overall will prevail so long as immigration flows are associated not with lower costs and dynamic growth, but new burdens on housing, public services, the safety net, and social cohesion.

In both cases — trade and the border — Democrats are chary of defending the pre-Trump state of affairs. In an electoral environment that could see the first major upsets in red states in a generation, Democrats don’t want to alienate Right-leaning independents and other swing voters fed up with incumbent Republicans. Surprisingly competitive Farm Belt states, such as Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, are emblematic: their electorates are unhappy with ICE’s unaccountable conduct and the high prices generated by Trump’s tariffs, but they aren’t keen to return to globalization, either.

As if that weren’t complicated enough for Democrats, they also have their “Brahmin Left” base to worry about. Mainstream Democrats, after all, once loudly touted the benefits, cultural and economic, of globalization. They thus can’t afford to be seen by the liberal base as capitulating to any aspect of Trump’s restrictionist agenda. Democrats, accordingly, are reluctant to thread together a set of proposals that may irk “woke” progressives in the short-term, even if such policies would help set the stage for a commanding Democratic victory in 2028.

The Right, meanwhile, seems paralyzed by Trump’s succession of own goals on inflation. Retreating from either protectionism or hard-line immigration policies is a political no-go as long as Trump leads the party. That has forced vulnerable Republicans to defend his record, even though many privately regret shredding the neoliberal order that Reaganite Republicans had pursued before Trump. Republicans are also afraid to break from the White House’s accelerationist position on the AI build-out, the energy demands of which are inflationary and probably unconstrained by high interest rates.

Meanwhile, for all the fanfare over the past decade about the GOP becoming a vehicle for the “multiracial working class,” fealty to corporate profits remains an article of faith across the party. A few individual Republicans may gesture toward collaborating with Democrats to tackle the cost of living, but when push comes to shove, the legislation and congressional votes never actually materialize. Deviating from the conservative donor class on this point is punished severely.

Partisan myopia also forces both parties into positions that prolong inflation. Neither party, for example, is prepared to reform the immigration system in a manner that would promote non-inflationary growth while also prioritizing social stability. That would mean some combination of external and internal enforcement (anathema to many Democrats) and a willingness to grant citizenship to long-standing residents and welcome foreign workers to labor-starved sectors (a nonstarter for Republican hawks).

Nor can the two parties agree on which sectors warrant tailored industrial protection and which would benefit from integration with traditional allies in Europe and middle-income states in Asia and Latin America. Silicon Valley’s unrivaled political influence is another dilemma. Democrats increasingly talk tough about Big Tech but are hardly unanimous about how and to what extent it can and should be reined in.

In short: having largely spearheaded deglobalization, America is saddled with its inflationary consequences due to a party system that failed to anticipate them.

To be sure, the Democrats’ recently revived antitrust tradition is, in part, about lowering prices (on the theory that consolidation allows sellers to set the price). And there have also been more radical proposals for targeted price controls. But such reforms aren’t realistically in the offing for the remainder of Trump’s term. Thus, Democrats’ affordability agenda in 2026 is really a pledge to confront high prices if their party is also returned to the White House — in two years. 

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Yet even assuming Democrats take back the White House and put their backs into it, the affordability effort will still likely fall short of solving persistent, elevated inflation through the 2030s. Unstoppable structural changes in the world economy, even more than dysfunctional domestic politics, present the biggest challenge to an inflation-weary America. Multipolarity — the rise of multiple nodes of global power — all but assures more unpredictable alliances and more exposed supply chains, with corresponding impacts on prices. And although the dollar’s hegemony shows no sign of collapsing in the near term, the prospect of “de-dollarization” is no longer quite so remote. But even if that challenge to the world’s reserve currency is forestalled, the average American consumer may nevertheless lose his place atop a global food chain that assured him a “comfortable lifestyle” even as his wages flatlined.

The peak years of neoliberal globalization — from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2008 financial crisis — were predicated on a rosy formula that assumed ever-deepening economic integration between advanced economies and rapidly industrializing ones like China. Price stability could be achieved through anemic wage growth in the Global North and labor repression in the Global South; diversified supply chains with leaps in logistics that enabled “just-in-time” production and shipping; and unprecedented economies of scale that would seemingly keep essentials affordable even as massive conglomerates increased their market share (and thus their power to set prices as they saw fit).

That formula rested on many faulty assumptions, not least the notion that America would do everything possible to perpetuate the liberal international system it had constructed since World War II. Instead, Washington has instigated the system’s rupture. The arrangements that underpinned the unofficial bargain between America’s business elites and the rest of society — above all, the juggernaut trade relationship known as “Chimerica” — have been hammered and fractured by Trump without consideration of America’s underlying socioeconomic problems. Put another way: Trump gleefully broke Chimerica, without giving much thought to problems like infrastructure, workforce training, health costs, corporate power, and regional development.

Rapprochement with Beijing by either political party won’t inherently undo the damage. Worse, America’s image as a declining, volatile hegemon has led other countries to imagine a development path unyoked from the appetites and aspirations of American consumers. On top of more wars, more energy shocks, and more extreme weather events, that dynamic will make Trump’s inaugural boast of a “new golden age” all the more disconnected from the realities of the global economy and America’s fading stature within it.

Democrats are delighting in the possibility that Trump’s hubris may have finally caught up with him. Still, those who are alert to the broader fragmentation of the world economy should beware an empty triumphalism. Inflation is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

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 had lost their working-class base. Soon, though, soul-searching gave way to lawfare aimed at reversing the election’s outcome: Russiagate, the Ukraine phone call, this, that — all futile.

Not Murphy. For several years, the senator has been on something like a spiritual quest: not to find God or himself, but what ails America at a much deeper level than most of the center Left has either allowed or even bothered with. Murphy’s new book, titled Crisis of the Common Good, is the thoughtful, surprisingly well-written, densely researched product of that quest. This, even as Murphy carries a separate persona as a fierce #Resistance liberal on social media and the network formerly called MSNBC. 

Whether these two dimensions can work together, and perhaps elevate him to higher office, is the central question of his career.

Crisis of the Common Good is remarkable for many reasons. For one thing, its pages and notes section are littered with positive references to conservative intellectuals, mostly from the post-liberal-ish corner of the Right. These include the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the American Affairs editor and re-industrialization advocate Julius Krein, the political economist Oren Cass, and, ahem, yours truly.

“I’ve certainly been enamored of the intellectual Right,” he tells me, “and I think there’s a lot of overlap.” In a way, that understates things. Murphy’s deepest project involves translating to American terms and conditions the political tradition known as blue Labour in Britain and Left conservatism in continental Europe. 

Proponents accept the necessity and blessings of market activity. But they’re also acutely aware of the dangers posed by unrestrained capitalism to family, religion, belonging, and community — the goods historically cherished by conservatism. 

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To mitigate the dangers, they turn to social-democratic means, or what Murphy in his book describes as the “social-contract” model of American political economy: business regulation, labor unions, wage floors, industrial policy, jealous guardianship of public goods that private actors can’t preserve even if they want to. The “conservative” or “blue” half of the equation identifies what must be preserved; the “Labour” or “Left” half sets out the means. 

Or as FDR, quoting Macaulay in a 1936 speech, put it, “Reform, if you would preserve,” adding in his own words: “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” Reform the market if you care to protect society.

The words and speaker are significant. America came closest to adopting a blue-Labour or Left-conservative politics during the New Deal order, roughly from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. To cite one example: the New Dealers’ massive rural-development programs — emergency farm credits, foreclosure moratoria, rural electrification — kept hundreds of thousands of landowning families on farms they would otherwise have lost.

Under Eisenhower and Nixon, the Republican Party upheld these reforms in many areas, and even expanded their logic in others. Then came the neoliberal counterpunch under Reagan and the Bushes. Yet as Murphy is the first to admit in his book, neoliberal Democrats also did their part in tearing down the socially managed capitalism of the midcentury. 

The senator devotes the bulk of his book to chronicling the consequences with anecdotes and data. He organizes his chapters under several “cults” that enthrall Americans: the cults of profit, “everywhere,” technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption. (The religious undertone here isn’t accidental; surprising for a progressive, Murphy seems to premise his thinking on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally religious animals; all culture is cultus, and some cult or other always commands our obeisance.)

He opens the chapter on the profit cult, for example, by noting how he and his fellow parents are barred from filming their own kids playing hockey by the for-profit entities that now control much of youth sports. Why? Because the firms insist you pay a monthly fee to access footage from their proprietary cameras. 

The example is well-chosen. The small businesses and wealthy donors who once underwrote youth sports in his part of Connecticut did so not expecting to turn a profit, as Murphy notes. They did it because they valued the camaraderie and public-spiritedness cultivated — cultus again — by youth sports. But now, profit-maximizing enterprises have invaded this corner of American life; the days aren’t far when you can place Polymarket bets on high-school sports.

The examples pile up grimly: a lonely teenager who killed himself after an AI chatbot convinced him that he could join her in the afterlife; the class-based stratification of literally every corner of public life ($20 gets you someone who will stand in line for you at a congressional hearing; $100 a night gets you special amenities in the California prison system); the obscene commodification of higher education; and much else of the kind.

In the book — if not always in his cable-news commentary — Murphy frames Donald Trump not as the cause of these transformations and the social alienation to which they’ve given rise. Rather, Murphy treats Trump as a symptom. “Literally the first time I mention his name in the book,” the senator tells me, “it’s in the context of drawing him as a symptom, not the cause, of our spiritual rot.”

The distinction matters, because many conventional Democrats would prefer to frame Trump as a demonic aberration — the easier to avoid the systemic rot the 45th and 47th president has revealed. Says Murphy: “It’s so easy to blame all of our problems on him. He is the main character, and he is, perhaps, an existential threat to democracy, so he’s an important character, and he can’t be avoided. But I just worry that it’s not enough to beat him in an election.” The underlying political, economic, and cultural crises would still churn beneath the surface.

More than that, Murphy is surprisingly willing to acknowledge Trump’s preternatural ability to register and address America’s subterranean ailments, even as the senator vehemently disagrees with Trumpian solutions (such as they are). And while the post-liberal intellectuals of the American Right, he believes, offered useful diagnoses and prescriptions, “my impression is that Donald Trump has effectively obliterated that small but previously growing movement within the party” that sought to re-orient the Right toward worker power and social solidarity. I think that’s overstated but, alas, directionally correct.

So does the Left have anyone who comes close to Trump’s capacity to “get” American discontent? And wouldn’t Democrats have to change course on immigration, especially, if they want to get within striking distance?

In his book, Murphy identifies a sense of place and belonging as one of the goods ravaged by corporate-led globalization and neoliberal capitalism. He rails against the commercial ideology of “everywhere” that runs roughshod over local community — “a belief that efficiency and scale should trump rootedness and place, that it really doesn’t matter where you live so long as you can order the same products, watch the same streaming shows, and follow the same influencers online,” as he writes. 

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But isn’t American discomfiture with mass, low-wage migration — a defining cause for the Trump campaign in 2024 — part of the same rejection of the cult of “everywhere”? 

Murphy seems to bristle a bit at this question. “I hope I’ve put my actions where my mouth is. I spent five months in a locked basement room trying to drag my party to the center on immigration.” He was a major proponent of a bill that would’ve given the president the authority to close the border if average daily crossings crossed 5,000 in a given week. Restrictionists objected — rightly, I believe — that the president already has the statutory authority to shutter the border, while the bill championed by Murphy would have legitimized a huge number of illegal crossings annually as long as figures stayed south of the threshold.

He goes on: “I think you have to have an answer to the existing, often unrestrained migration patterns this country has dealt with over the last decade. It is hard to live in a country where people are different from each other, in which there are so many new entrants. And one of the ways you keep a multicultural, multilinguistic country together is to have clear rules about who can enter — how you become a member of our club, how you become a citizen, how you become a worker. The Democratic Party has been far too casual about answering that question. And I do believe there’s a way for the Democratic Party to be stronger on the question of border security, stronger on the question of a true immigration rule of law.”

Fair enough, but doesn’t the right to call somewhere home also entail the expectation of some stability in who else gets to live there? More to the point, the #Resistance Murphy has joined many further to his Left in calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What gives?

“Well, you have to have an internal immigration enforcement mechanism,” Murphy says. “You have to have a means to control the border. But he has literally built a personal political police force. There’s no way to just make a few personnel changes and have an actual internal immigration enforcement office that is obeying the law. So, yeah — I’m someone who believes we have to have a way to enforce our immigration laws internally. But I also believe we’re going to have to rebuild it in a different way when he’s gone.”

Perhaps this line — yes to what ICE does, no to ICE itself — is just enough to position Murphy in the sweet spot between a national electorate and where the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing is taking it. Speaking of which, is Murphy planning a presidential run in 2028?

“I mean, I don’t know,” he replies, sounding earnest. “I really don’t. A reporter said to me earlier today, this would not be the book you’d write if you were running for president — because it’s not a book about me. It’s a book about a deeper set of questions about the country. And I’ve had a couple of my friends — who I absolutely know are running for president in 2028 — text me and say, ‘Hey, listen, I think you’ve found a way to frame some things that people have been having trouble talking about, this spiritual rot in the country.’ And, you know, hopefully, if this gives a vocabulary to people to use in 2028.”