The Return of Political Violence
The reactions to the public execution of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson were vicious. Matt Novak collects some of these reactions. Some sought to be clever: “My empathy is out of network for this one,” or “Sorry. But my insurance and Medicaid don’t cover Thoughts and Prayers.” Then there were comments more chilling in their heartlessness aroused by justifiable anger:
“My uncle paid you guys for 22 years without missing a single payment and then when he died you denied his life insurance claim. You even had the nerve to cash a check from him the week he died. Scum bags. Sometimes you get what you deserve. I hope all of you suffer the way my mom has for the past year she has had to endure the nightmare of losing her brother and then almost filing for bankruptcy due to your denial of a life insurance claim paid punctually and faithfully for 22 years. Then you turn around and spit on his corpse. Your empathy claim has been denied. I hope you all get what’s coming.”
We live, as Pankaj Mishra has argued, in an age of anger. Instead of experts, journalists, and civil servants who rationally produce an authoritative version of reality we all agree upon, social media and algorithms designed to induce rage have elevated feeling, emotion, anger and rage. Democracies are being transformed by the onslaught of viral memes that replace rational consensus with the power of feeling. The victory of Donald Trump seems poised to further the age of anger. Whether it is Kash Patel who promises to come after those who he holds responsible for what is in his mind a stolen election in 2020, or whether it is protesters celebrating the massacre of Israelis and Jews on October 7th, or whether it is embittered Americans celebrating the murder of a father of two children because his company uses algorithms to heartlessly deny insurance claims, the anger pulsing through American society is palpable. Much of Donald Trump’s movement is built on resentment and anger. So too is the woke movement that tears apart anyone whose opinions are thought to defend civilized norms. It does seem that the so-called establishment or the “system” is under attack from all sides.
We are in what Hannah Arendt called a “revolutionary situation.” Authority is no longer respected. The way things have been and the way things are are subject to ridicule. Power is lying in the streets, ready to be picked up. The question is, can anyone pick it up?
The problem with anger is that while it is activated by injustice it rarely leads to the doing of justice. Instead, anger usually degenerates into a spiral of violence. Violence, like anger, can serve justice. Killing the person who murdered your children can serve justice as an expression of retribution, an eye for an eye. Arendt also argues, rage and violence can be rational when they are the only way to make an injustice visible. Thus blowing up a building to bring attention to oppression can serve the cause of justice. The powerless often have no option besides rage-inspired-violence to make the world notice the injustices they suffer. The problem with violence‚ however, is that most often, violence simply leads to more violence, not to justice.
Novak rightly sees that the rising anger presages a change of tone in the country. He writes:
It makes sense that Americans might be more loose with their sense of decorum these days. The re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency signaled a kind of right-wing populist nihilism as the Republican leader embraced conspiracy theories, threatened to go after his political enemies, and demonized immigrants in wildly racist ways. The sometimes celebratory attitude of such a broad swath of Americans on Wednesday felt like an embrace of that same sort of nihilism.
The history of the U.S. is one of tremendous violence, but the past two decades have been relatively stable when it comes to blood being spilled domestically for political purposes. The U.S. was averaging about five bombings a day in the early 1970s, according to the FBI, a simple fact that isn’t often remembered here in the 21st century. And a century ago, it was completely normal for dozens of people to be killed at once during labor actions in the U.S., as workers and bosses fought for control. All of which is to say this is likely the beginning rather than the end of people embracing political violence, especially as Trump prepares to take power with promises of retribution. Peace and stability are not the norm."