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
