Will the Joker Emerge?

Meditations on the killing of the UnitedHealth CEO

Photo: Vanessa Ogle/Class Is In Session

There has been at least one folk song, one look-a-like contest, and one fawning fan account. There is the tripartite catchphrase graffitied on walls across America. There are the gleeful comments and posts, an avalanche of them, thousands and thousands. All of it has amounted to adoration and even lust for the alleged killer, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, who appears to have shot dead Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth, last week. During the manhunt, someone quipped on one of the social media platforms that New Yorkers hadn’t been this united since September 11th. And, as it became clear in the aftermath of the murder, it wasn’t just New York reveling in the death of a healthcare CEO who had a compensation package worth $10.2 million last year. America—left and right and center—was transfixed. This was the rare mass event to bridge the partisan divide. A murkier stream of reality, a darker sub-stratum, was exposed. All along, a conversation burbled, and now the volume was getting louder. Americans absolutely despised their healthcare system and it didn’t matter who they voted for in the last election. Punished by profiteering and bloodless bureaucracies, they were incensed, and they could only crack wise as a man lay dead.

The usual scolding didn’t work, if politicians and pundits of all ideological persuasions did their best. The Democratic congressman didn’t rack up the engagements he might have hoped for when he posted about a civilization “sowing the seeds of its own downfall” by celebrating a murder. Left-liberal media couldn’t shame any of the schadenfreude away. Meanwhile, Fox didn’t find, perhaps, the straightforward reaction they had desired, with commenters on their videos cheering on the killer and sharing their own healthcare horror stories. Anti-woke attempts to blame it all on the radical left fell flat too, and the far right, usually so giddy and crass, had relatively little to say about Thompson’s death. Donald Trump, who has a nimble grasp of the zeitgeist when not frothing at the mouth, has said nothing, and that’s politically wise: of all Americans, he knows a good anti-hero when he sees one, and he might understand that red and blue factions alike crave someone who is going to grant them a bit of catharsis in these uneasy, hyperreal times.

As Trump gained momentum this fall, there was a great deal of liberal handwringing over the conservatives who seemed to be valorizing Tony Soprano, Walter White, the Joker, and other fictional villains and anti-heroes who are, for all their allure, quite murderous. The writer John Ganz posited a link between the real-life gangster John Gotti’s fandom and those who flocked to Trump decades later. Recently, Adam Serwer, the Atlantic writer who gained a large following from his essays excoriating Trump, posited that a “moral degeneracy” had taken told among the Trump supporters “motivated by the need to ideologically justify the place of a corrupt authoritarian strongman.” What Serwer and many liberals don’t understand is that the valorization of the anti-hero is no longer a right-wing phenomenon. Leftists are drawn to Mangione just as much, and so are many otherwise apolitical Americans who see little more than rot in the institutions that are supposed to serve them. Mangione’s popularity could be viewed, in one sense, as an utter repudiation of the Obama legacy—liberals have told us the president fixed healthcare and was so successful that conservatives have stopped trying to destroy his crowning achievement. But the Affordable Care Act was a mild reform, not a fix, and there’s only so much expanding Medicaid coverage or banning insurers from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions can do. The ACA exchanges are quite expensive, and private conglomerates reap tens of billions off a system that, for the average American, ranges from the embodiment of numbing bureaucracy to outright evil. Leftists are within reason to talk up the benefits of single-payer or some kind of universal healthcare, but they should understand this anti-institutional rage boiling up now cannot be merely redirected by another campaign pledge that is probably not becoming law. Plastic campaign politics are, at best, ornamental here, and at worst they represent the inverse of what the masses now long for.

Who will be the Joker politician? Since we tend to think within a political framework, and America will be governed by a red-blue duopoly until we are all dead, base political terms must be considered. We live in a curious moment: Mangione represents, as the writer Mo Diggs has said, perhaps the greatest divide between institutions and ordinary people that we have witnessed in many decades. This is not a moral declaration, or a defense of the murder of Thompson. It is an observation, an analysis, as dryly rendered as is possible under the circumstances. Even at the height of the anti-institutional rancor of the 1960s, the Vietnam War protestors had Walter Cronkite. The mainstream was listening to and even co-opting the counterculture. No politician or media pundit today can properly reflect—not now, at least—the peculiar joy over Thompson’s murder. No Democrat or Republican will go there, and neither will the mainstream outlets. The digital insurgents are wary as well. The Free Press crowd would rather valorize Daniel Penny and call it a day; that’s their kind of vigilante man. There is certainly a market inefficiency to exploited here—a politician could do quite well saying, out loud, some version of what millions of Americans have been spewing forth online over the last number of days. “I don’t condone murder, but…” For many, rightfully, this would be its own horror, and assassinations cannot fix the American healthcare system. They can’t fix much of anything. The anarchists tried as hard as they could in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the gears of industrial capitalism ground on despite the impressive body count they racked up, including an American president.

Still, there’s a current here that can only be ignored for so long. It fizzes, it crackles, and it gets more untamable each day. Americans in 1963 did not feel affection for Lee Harvey Oswald, and their attraction to other killers over the course of the century was always more antic and ultimately marginal. Today’s political and cultural elites will need to start thinking harder about how the country got this way. If monocultures are melting away, this rage is what remains; this is the stuff a union is now made of, and that is unnerving for them. The rage did not arrive from the ether.

Thompson did not deserve to die. He was also the tremendous beneficiary of a system that can immiserate and even kill people. When the NYPD and FBI announced that the reward for information leading to the arrest of Thompson’s killer was increased to $60,000, I wondered, briefly, how many days in the hospital this would cover for someone who lacks insurance. (Just under three weeks, if they are lucky.) It’s remarkable, in retrospect, the two presidential campaigns had so little to say about healthcare. Trump doesn’t pretend to have a plan anymore. The Democrats, the party of plans, hoped vibes could win them an election, and Kamala Harris promised virtually nothing to her supporters. She didn’t even pretend to support a public option for the ACA, and hoped everyone would misremember her decision, as a senator, to co-sponsor Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation. Cheap health insurance wasn’t brat, apparently.

What is coming next, no one quite knows. The United States is not as violent as it once was, and the likelihood of copycat killing is unlikely. We aren’t prone to forming militias, either, and there will be no serious, tangible revolts—certainly no civil wars. Instead, the revolts may be psychic. As the age of Empire gives way to whatever this might be—a neo-Romantic era, perhaps—there will be a firmer break away from those who wield power from the institutional center. Traditional celebrity fandom, corporate fandom, political fandom—all, in various forms, are endangered. There won’t be another Barack Obama, another Taylor Swift. There won’t be another Steve Jobs. Worship will be conditional, and will not be universal. Or, if it arrives at all, it will take an unlikely form: a chiseled 26-year-old Ivy League graduate who probably murdered a wealthy corporate executive. His manifesto is rather short, and it will be shared widely. Mainstream media chose not to publish it, so an independent journalist did so on Substack instead. These are the new terms of engagement. The weather is changing.