So far, the person who killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson seems to have gotten what he wanted. It has been 13 days since Thompson was gunned down on a Manhattan street, and at this point the murder has been rather comfortably situated as an act of political violence. Authorities have charged a man named Luigi Mangione with the crime, and if a note he was carrying with him at the time of his arrest is to be believed, Thompson was killed as a response to the cruelty and depravity of the American healthcare industry, which has since become an urgent topic of conversation in American media and culture.
Evidence of the killer’s victory can be found on any news channel, or in any number of mainstream publications. There was a brief period of time when one could get away with dismissing the enthusiasm that swelled around Mangione’s alleged act as something that only existed in the unreality of the internet—the byproduct of a small, irony-poisoned segment of the country that best understands how to use social media as a megaphone. If that enthusiasm ever was contained, it has since escaped: Saturday Night Live is now a safe place to joke about Thompson’s death, and respectable publications like The New Yorker and New York magazine have acknowledged Mangione’s folk-hero status. The effectiveness of the killing can also be found in reactions from those in the government. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has convened a “safety summit” for New York CEOs, and Florida authorities charged a mother with making terroristic threats for saying “delay, deny, depose” (the words Mangione allegedly wrote on his shell casings) during a phone call with her insurance provider. Senator Elizabeth Warren evidently takes the groundswell of support for Mangione seriously enough to pander to those who sympathize with him. She recently went on TV to say, “Violence is never the answer … but you can only push people so far.”
For someone like me, a person who broadly holds CEOs in contempt and believes that the private health insurance industry is inhumane and should be destroyed, this has been a strange time. Zoomers making TikToks about Mangione being hot is not surprising, but I never expected to encounter so much mainstream media coverage that not only accepts the killing of Thompson as a political act, but seriously considers its utility. I certainly never thought I’d see a politician as experienced and establishment-friendly as Elizabeth Warren more or less adopt Mangione’s possible motive as one of her talking points. All of this has caused me to reconsider what I had initially dismissed: the idea that an assassination such as this one could lead to any meaningful change. Could something real be happening here?
Or maybe this is just a different version of a story I’ve seen play out many times before. For as successful as Thompson’s killer was in delivering his intended message, the killing itself and the attendant coverage has been haloed by a cold familiarity. When I first watched the surveillance footage of the gunman firing at Thompson, I was struck by how routine it felt. The killer is just one of the dozens of disaffected and/or disturbed Americans I’ve seen rendered through blurry surveillance footage, hunched over a gun that will deliver their violence. If political violence is not something that has meaningfully defined America in my lifetime, gun violence certainly has. Thompson’s killer cannot be extracted from this. His target and his motives may separate him from the school shooter or the trigger-happy police officer, but he joins them through his methods. He wanted to exert some control over the world, and he did so by firing a gun.
From this angle, the cultural and political reaction to Thompson’s death loses a great deal of its novelty. If this country excels at anything, it is quickly and smoothly going through the motions of reacting to gun violence. Even if the particulars are inverted this time around—public anger is directed not at the gun industry that enabled a killing, but the insurance industry that invited one; it is not a victim that’s been turned into an avatar of the movement, but the alleged prepetrator—the outcome could still be the same: nothing actually changing.
Warren has been around long enough to have a feel for how to effectively react to the public anger that is spurred by gun violence, and to help bring that anger to a blunted and passive end. Whereas previous shootings have invited politicians like Warren to bolster their liberal bona fides by railing against the gun lobby while stopping short of passing meaningful legislation, this instance requires only a slight shift in the direction of her ire. The end result could be the same: Warren has earned herself some goodwill from the increasingly large segment of voters who want a shooting to lead to meaningful change, without committing herself to enacting any of that change. The same goes for the media: If millions of words are still to be written about the insurance industry and its ill effects on American society, it will be a long time before this scrutiny equals that which has been applied many times over, without effect, to the still-robust gun industry.
Maybe this is too cynical. I genuinely don’t know yet. How would an earnest, sincere intention to respond to this—to yet another headline-grabbing gun murder, or to the near-universal hatred and resentment of the U.S. healthcare system laid bare by the public reaction to this particular gun murder—look or sound different from what Warren has said? What might any American politician be doing or announcing or demanding right now if they genuinely believed our country’s healthcare system is malign and inhumane enough to drive its subjects to commit murder? Would I even recognize that belief if it were right in front of me? How?
Perhaps the cost of living in a country built on such a solid foundation of violence is that no single act of violence can avoid swift metabolization. Perhaps the cost of living in a society so politically sclerotic is that its organs for metabolizing any given act of violence operate infinitely more efficiently than those that might avert the next one. If political violence is meant to tear a hole in the societal fabric and reveal a potential new reality beyond, then what use does it serve in a country already woven together by violence—one that numbly accommodates regular massacres of schoolchildren as something like its national heartbeat? I would like to be wrong about this. I would like to believe that Thompson’s killer, one of the few members of America’s vast fraternity of murderers who seems to have attempted to imbue some measure of purpose into his transgression, has pushed us toward a different future. I wish for this because I would like to believe that this country is not operating on rails as firmly as it appears to be.
I also wish for this because of what may follow, if nothing does change, in a society where no amount of gun violence appears to be enough. Nobody needed to kill Brian Thompson to prove that there is a great deal of anger at the insurance industry in this country, or to demonstrate that such anger yearns to be turned into political will. It wasn’t so long ago that we witnessed a populist presidential campaign premised on that understanding, and then watched it be swept aside by a political order that neutralizes insurgency just as swiftly as it metabolizes violence. “Medicare for all” went from being one of the most urgent and prominent political slogans of my lifetime to a relic of a dead language over the course of a few short years. If a widely popular political movement couldn’t upset the course of things, and a jarringly popular act of targeted political violence proves just as futile, then what comes next?
