When police identified Luigi Mangione as the primary suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson a few weeks ago, observers on the Left and Right were quick to point out the tension between the young man’s background and the crime. The alleged perpetrator: A dashing, well-educated, recent Ivy League graduate from a wealthy Maryland family. The crime: Thompson, head of the nation’s largest health insurance company, was shot in the back as he entered a shareholder meeting.
In response to the explosion of online (and offline) support for the homicide, many rightly have expressed moral outrage. They should understand and call out in moral terms what the Southern District of New York has identified as a matter of law: that the whole American public has been subject to terrorism.
It is tempting to dwell on class-wealth contradictions, but they represent an ideological booby trap. A flurry of reports has “revealed” that Mangoine was never insured by UnitedHealthcare, as if that fact has any relevance to the legitimacy of his motive. It seems unlikely that Mangoine has ever wanted for healthcare or any other material necessity. Those whose outrage is based on the purported irony of the fact pattern, who are galled by the “hypocrisy,” fail to understand the revolutionary ideology held by those who would turn Mangione into a folk hero.
The neo-Marxists supporting Mangione both empathize with and disdain the American proletariat: a faceless and inert blob, powerless victims of conniving capitalists such as Thompson. While Mangione did not cite Marx in his short “manifesto,” we do know he regarded much of the public as mere NPCs (non-player characters). In this account, the masses are under the sway of a false consciousness whose silly and antiquated beliefs include the wrongfulness of murder and the rule of law. Such nursery tales about ethics and human relationships inhibit the oppressed from fighting their oppressors and even occasionally rally them to defend the power structure.
See, for instance, the violent anger directed at the unenlightened McDonald’s employee who reported Mangione to the police. In the revolutionary narrative held by both Mangione and his supporters, he is a hero because he allegedly sacrificed his wealth, comfort, and future in the interest of the largely undeserving and brain-dead American public. The victim, Thompson, was not a person in any meaningful way. He was nothing more than a representative of evil capitalism. Both Mangione and Thompson are archetypes in the great social justice drama that plagues post-liberal discourse.
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Here, the parallels between the post-Oct. 7 support for Hamas and this murder becomes clear. Just as Thompson wasn’t singularly responsible for the structure and loosely defined problems of the U.S. healthcare system, nobody claimed the slaughtered Israelis were individually culpable for the “nakba” or “occupation.” However, in the words of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), you can only push people so far.
When terrorists kill, their primary targets are not the direct victims of violence. The primary target is a way of life. Hamas’s mission was to make Jews leave Israel by making life there untenable. Mangione’s intent was to make the peaceful and lawful procedure of American commerce similarly impossible. Why should this stop at healthcare? As he puts it, an undefined group of parasites had it coming. In both cases, we cannot let them succeed.
Nina Saadat is a policy research assistant in Washington, D.C.