Story at a glance
- Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) announced the launch of their “Restoring The Common Good” initiative on Tuesday.
- The elected officials will host a series of forums across the U.S. that will focus on how to “restore the value of the common good to American life.”
- To assist the push, Cox and Murphy have brought on a bipartisan group of researchers, thinkers and authors, from both the left and right.
A Senate Democrat and a Republican governor are teaming up to tackle the U.S. happiness deficit, one conversation at a time.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) announced the launch of their “Restoring The Common Good” initiative on Tuesday. The elected officials will host a series of forums across the U.S. that will focus on how to “restore the value of the common good to American life.”
The roundtable conversations are intended to spark discussions on what gives Americans meaning and purpose while probing how policy can support the effort. To assist the push, Cox and Murphy have brought on a bipartisan group of researchers, thinkers and authors, from both the left and right.
The elected officials will be joined by the Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School Bishop William Joseph Barber II, Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, Reporter Sam Quinones, Brigham Young University psychology professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Harvard philosopher Ian Corbin and Tim Carney and Yuval Levin from the American Enterprise Institute.
“Many Americans are less happy and less hopeful than ever before,” Murphy and Cox said in a joint statement. “The source of this anxiety may vary, but many feel like they are powerless in their economic lives, disconnected from community, and distrustful of the institutions of government, media, higher education, religion, business, and others.
“These same Americans are wildly dissatisfied with the stasis of American politics, stuck on seemingly immovable fights that do not always appear to be intimately connected to things that make Americans feel so bad,” they continued. “This broad social and political disaffection begs for a diverse set of leaders to spark a conversation about what makes a truly good life and why this life feels so inaccessible to many Americans.”
The push for curbing unhappiness around the country comes as Americans feel less content with the quality of medical care, education and wealth distribution, according to recent polling.
In last month’s Monmouth University poll, one-third of Americans, 34 percent, said they would like to move to another country. Fifty years ago, the number was at 10 percent. Only nine percent of young Americans think the country is heading in the right direction, according to an April Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics survey.
The first roundtable conversation is set to take place in Salt Lake City on Friday, according to Semafor, which first reported on the initiative.
“Our goal is to convene a series of informal conversations across the country that seek to break down the traditional zero-sum limitations of our current politics and explore new areas of work that can bring together the right and left to show a path to help more Americans lead meaningful, fulfilled lives,” they said in the statement.