It’s Going to Be Normal to Have Extreme Beliefs

I promise not to make every installment of this newsletter a further elaboration on what it means to live after the post-Cold War liberal order, in a world where a certain kind of neoliberal consensus politics has dissolved without any new consensus sweeping in to take its place. But I’ll go once more to the well for the case of Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, and who has become a source of general fascination and, to some, a peculiar kind of outlaw hero.

Last week, trying to describe what American politics looks like now and going forward, I wrote that “whatever form of extremism or bigotry or paranoia you fear most will probably have greater representation in our debates than you would like.”

In the wake of Thompson’s violent death, a seeming 21st-century analog to the “propaganda of the deed” favored by some late 19th- and early 20th-century anarchist assassins, we have a clear example of this representation. The extreme view that the health insurance pigs had it coming is out there percolating in online spaces for everyone to see, while the less extreme but still manifestly illiberal conceit that murder is wrong, but public enthusiasm for the murder of an executive in a deplorable industry reflects the understandable anger of people pushed too far has been taken up by mainstream politicians, including notable tribunes of the left like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Just as a technocratic matter, I think turning the American health insurance industry into a special policy villain — on the grounds that, to quote Ocasio-Cortez, “people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them” — reflects a fundamental misreading of the developed world’s health care experience. (Ocasio-Cortez said she was not justifying acts of violence, and Warren subsequently supplemented her “people can be pushed only so far” warning with the addendum: “I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”) We can argue about where to find the true profiteers in the American health care system — whether the worst profit-seekers are among the doctors and hospitals, who are more sympathetic characters than the insurers but also seem to soak up way more of our spending, or whether the costs of the insurance system really seem to reflect administrative bloat.

But the idea that the American model of private insurance is uniquely evil and engaged in acts of social violence because it denies people too much treatment is an evasion of the reality that every system denies people treatment, because the potential forms of care are always larger than the budget — public or private or both — that’s available to pay for them. Maybe it feels better when the dirty work of denial is handled by a bland government bureaucrat rather than a private company, but the effect, broadly speaking, is the same.

So that’s a technocratic complaint about the “murder is wrong, but …” discourse. The more urgent and non-technocratic complaint, meanwhile, is that adding a “but …” seems to tiptoe toward justifying assassination even if you insist that you’re disavowing violence. And having leading politicians doing this kind of tap-dance illustrates how easily toxic elements can slip into mainstream politics right now.

Understanding our larger political situation, however, also requires keeping both toxicity and radicalism in perspective. Despite what some have implied, it’s not at all clear that the creepily enthusiastic online discourse about a health care executive being gunned down reflects a systemic discontent that might yield a New New Deal or a left-populist groundswell were it only adequately harnessed.

The Covid-19 era has soured more Americans on the health care system but the majority of Americans still report themselves at least somewhat content with their health care, and if anything some of the online reaction to Thompson’s killing seems linked to a growing sense of futility around left-wing politics, not its untapped strength. With the stalling-out of the Medicare for All push, the pressure of inflation and the triumph of Donald Trump, the idea of a socialist revolution — led by Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez or anyone else — receded over some distant horizon, awaiting a very different economic and political dispensation.

So if you’re horrified or just unsettled to find yourself sharing a culture with kinda-sorta apologists for violence against health insurance executives, just be aware that such expressions of extremism could be with us for a long time — but without ever necessarily gathering themselves into a mass movement.

Which is a crucial thing to understand in general about our era. Whatever faction you fear most — socialists or reactionaries, cranks or racists — is likely to persist as an influence on one or both political coalitions to a degree that would have seemed quite alarming 20 years ago. But that persistence doesn’t prove that the extreme elements are destined to fully achieve their wildest dreams or worst intentions. Instead, the fate of many of these groups is probably to coexist somewhat chaotically rather than to dominate and rule.

Finally, there is the suspect himself, who seems to have shared the frustration of some of his online admirers over the supposedly parasitic role of health insurers — but whose general worldview, as analyzed and parsed through scrutiny of his life and online profile, is more complex and contradictory and even illegible, and thus likewise illustrative of a destabilized political culture.

As Katherine Dee writes, the most familiar political role that he seems to have inhabited was not that of a militant anticapitalist leftist, but rather the kind of “centrist tech bro” drawn to self-help books, critiques of wokeness, the world of Silicon Valley futurism but also certain laments about an online-dominated life. And then his transformation or descent seems to have followed a path with some culturally familiar signposts — struggles with chronic pain, interest in psychedelics, a dip into Ted Kaczynski’s critique of industrial society, a Westerner’s quest for meaning and authenticity that took him to Thailand and Japan — but without a trajectory that might be simply distilled to either a migration “left” or “right.”

Shake up the elements in his life and worldview, mix up his reading list a little differently, and you could imagine conversions or radicalizations with entirely different destinations.

Indeed, reading through the profiles I’ve felt intermittent shocks of personal recognition, not just because he shared some of my pundit’s preoccupations — concern about falling birthrates, anxiety about smartphone culture — but because one influence may have been a case of chronic Lyme disease, a mystery illness that reshaped my own life.

Having spent a lot of time, because of that experience, in communities stamped by disillusionment with medical authority, I’ve seen people start from that kind of disillusionment and end up — well, all over the map, with all sorts of worldviews, all kinds of enemies and scapegoats.

And that phrase, all over the map, is as good a way as any of thinking about our wider moment — suggesting a landscape with no certain ruling power and lots of places to get lost.