Don't Cheer For Luigi Mangione

Murder and the edifice of liberalism

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A disquietingly large percentage of my generation, as well as previous ones, seems quite happy with the murderer Luigi Mangione. Mangione, as one who has read the news recently knows, shot dead UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4th. Thompson was 50 years old.

Normally, murder is the sort of offense that we look down on as a society. Political murderers are one of the most dangerous kinds of murderers, as they not only kill, but make future killings likelier. It only takes a few Luigis to puncture the norm against political killings. A world of political killings benefits neither left nor right, but lawlessness and anarchy.

Yet Luigi has been lauded as a national hero, rather than a demented murderer. My generation has been fiercely debating his hotness, and about half of them think his action was acceptable. Few among my generation seem bothered by the cold-blooded murder of Thompson, the fact that his children will grow up without a father, that his wife will be a widow. While the Unabomber was regarded as a deranged crazy-person, when a hotter Unabomber comes along, people seem unable to contain their glee, as they cheer for his murders.

The murder of Brian Thompson was bad for the same reason that most murders are bad. A person was killed, deprived of many years of happy life, and those around him will never see him again. The killing seemed to have been motivated by impotent rage at the healthcare system, rather than something specific that Thompson did. Few of those cheering for his murder can clearly articulate how they think it will make the world a better place.

Will UnitedHealthcare now accept more claims? Is the American healthcare system likely to become one jot more humane as a result of this murder? Those cheering on Mangione have seemingly given this question little thought. They like the murder, because it’s murder of someone they dislike, rather than because of any plausible story about how it will make the world a better place. As Mon0 writes:

If a man is executed in broad night-life, I would expect clear, well-articulated, and overwhelming reasons for why so many people are calling the act justified—reasons that almost anyone could explain quickly and concretely. Something more substantial than vague outrage like “everyone knows insurance companies are evil.” I would expect these reasons to be front and center—consistently invoked by those praising the shooter as a hero—to justify their actions and to outline future steps needed to honor the hero's sacrifice, advancing his perceived vision.

But so far, I’ve seen very little of that.

The action was little more than impotent rage against the machine. The healthcare system will continue running much as before, except one of the people running it will be replaced. The pavement ran red with his blood, but ultimately, nothing was achieved. Mangione’s killing was like that of a person angry at police who executes a police officer; wholly unable to achieve anything broader, but merely an act of pointless violence.

But more dangerous than the immediate effects of Luigi’s killings is the dangerous long term effect. We have a little thing called liberalism, wherein we settle disputes with speech rather than violence. Liberalism is why America does not have violent coups. Norms are what distinguish prosperous Western countries from dictatorships.

And our norms are fraying.

It’s easy to cheer the lone Luigi who subverts norms to get back at people you don’t like. But the norm against political violence cannot survive repeated acts of political violence. If Luigi is copied, and his followers are copied, and so on, then America is in for a terrifying spiral of violence.

It’s not just your side that has political aims. The other side does as well. So far, both sides are kept in check by the fact that violence is unthinkable. But the more one side unilaterally breaches the norms against violence, the likelier the other side is to breach those norms as well. One of the reasons Trump’s attempt to overturn the election was so dangerous is that it sets a precedent: now future presidents can do the same thing without consequence. If every president refuses to accept election results, and tries to overturn the results of elections they don’t like, eventually one of them will succeed. That is the end of Democracy.

A world of routine political violence is a similar danger to Democracy. Politicians would need, to an even greater extent, 24/7 security. Huge amounts of money would be spent hiring security guards for the wealthy and powerful, if violence against them became routine. More serious acts of political violence, like bombings to take out the senate, would become likelier.

Political polarization would skyrocket. Things have to be more polarized when violence is breaking out. Violence would not only be directed towards those you dislike; its excess would become a mainstay of American politics. This is, in fact, how things work in much of world, where violence reigns, having never been crushed under the boot of liberalism. Much of the middle east is such a mess because the liberal norms against violence are non-existent.

When you glorify Mangione, you make it likelier that others will follow in his footsteps. A precedent has been set: if you murder a healthcare CEO, you will immediately become famous. Millions of women will take to the internet to talk about how hot you are. You will become reviled by the stodgy old conservatives who desperately cling to their outdated norms like “don’t kill people,” but the young, the cool, the hip, will universally love you.

Even the people who do not talk explicitly about how great you are will go on at length about how, while they’re opposed to your actions, they understand why you took them given the state of the modern healthcare system. You’ll get somewhere between sympathy and support from most of the modern left, and even a disturbingly large faction of the modern right. Just look at all the criticism Ben Shapiro got from his own fans for coming out against murder.

For committing murder, Luigi Mangione has become a bipartisan hero. Morons on the left and the right have united to praise him. A political climate that lauds Mangione is one that is deeply diseased, and threatens to get more diseased. Hopefully others do not follow Luigi. But if right-wingers follow, violently acting out their political agenda, Luigi’s supporters will have only themselves to blame.