Sen. Chris Murphy opens his new book with a youth hockey game and ends up making a larger point about America itself: even the rink is no longer outside the reach of profit. In Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Murphy describes hearing that he could not record his son’s game for other family members because the team would be penalized if he did.
The reason was Black Bear Sports Group, a private equity-backed company that had imposed a ban while selling access to a subscription video service that streams every game for up to $50 a month. The anecdote, which opens the June 2026 discussion of the book in The American Prospect magazine, is meant to show how ordinary parts of life have been turned into revenue streams. Murphy uses it to argue that proud parents, not just consumers, have been disempowered by corporate forces that dictate the terms and structure of the marketplace.
The book arrives at a moment when that argument has purchase. Consumer sentiment recently fell to levels below the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, even though unemployment remained relatively low and inflation was only modestly elevated before the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Murphy’s broader claim is that the economic numbers do not fully explain the mood. Americans, he says, are living with a pervasive sense that they are under siege and outgunned.
That is where his political biography matters. Murphy first won election to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1998 at age 25, and he has served in public office for the entirety of this century. He is not writing as an outsider discovering distrust in the system for the first time. He is writing as someone who has watched the system harden around people who once expected more say over their daily lives.
The book also fits into a longer argument about the failure of public confidence in both government and the marketplace. Ronald Reagan’s 1981 line that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’” once captured a broad suspicion of state power. Murphy’s version of the problem is different. The force Americans now seem to fear less is government itself than a private system that can reach into something as personal as a child’s hockey game and turn it into a paid product.
That is the tension at the center of Crisis of the Common Good. Murphy is not saying that markets are the enemy in every case. He is saying that when private power sets the rules everywhere, even family life starts to feel like a transaction. The hockey ban is small on its face. It matters because it is familiar. A parent, a child, a game, a camera — and then a corporation decides who gets to see it, and at what price.
Murphy’s point is not that Americans lack material things alone. It is that they are losing shared space, shared purpose and the sense that normal life should not require permission from a company looking for another monthly fee. The book’s opening image, and the argument built around it, leaves little doubt about his conclusion: the crisis is not only political or economic. It is personal, and it is already inside the routines of everyday American life.
