I would like you to imagine what news headlines and op-eds would be published if a Brazilian CEO was shot in Brazil, or an Indian CEO in India, or really if a CEO was shot in any other country other than the United States. What would the headlines be? Perhaps they would blame national unrest, or political corruption, or the tenuousness of democracy, nationalism, machismo, or some other nebulous concept. None of these would be particularly good explanations, but I doubt they would imply any paritcular sort of disbelief or shock. Why then, when such an event happens in the United States, are pundits so surprised when many among the middle classes seems to look the other way, or even tacitly celebrate?
I was recently struck by this very funny interview the new york times did with Tim Urban, the author of Luigi Mangione's favorite book What's Our Problem?, a defense of pragmatic liberalism. I'm particularly drawn to this line of the interview:
If I imagine the Venn diagram circles of “people who not only like my stuff but evangelize about it” and “those who not just support political assassination but do it themselves” … if he is in fact guilty, he might be the only person in the overlap. And what that tells me is that, most likely, he had a really bad mental health break of some kind.One really has to wonder, do these authors not know who their audience are? The only explanation I can come to is that they have their head in the sand. The sort of people who read these books, the ones who listen to these podcasts, the ones who scroll op-eds citing krugman, haidt and harari are in fact the same sort of people who committ assassinations against CEOs. The fact that the shooter had this political diet isn't suprising. The United States produces lots of shooters, after all. Why would reading Tim Urban change that?
What seems to perplex the pundits more than the shooter is the reaction. Some pundits, the more annoying sort, have blamed the extreme left, sometimes the extreme right, and sometimes extremism in general for the reaction. The smarter pundits seem to know that this explanation is bunk: most people in the United States, especially most of the middle classes, had no disgust for this murder. Additionally, many saw and still do see Luigi as a sort of criminal folk hero, not a saint, but a sort of heroic outlaw. In fact, many of the middle class people in the suburbs that the democrats saught to convince in this election are the sort of people who cheer it on, or at least look the other way.
If it is not surprising that in other countries that elements of the middle classes are radical, often with an equal contempt for those they see as elites as the poor, then why are they surprised that US americans act in the same way? Of course the US middle classes are more conservative than most for wide variety of factors for a wide variety of factors (relative wealth, lobbying, the power of land ownership). Nonetheless, there is very little reason to think they would have more political class solidarity in either direction. In fact, I suspect the reason so many pundits are confused is their default view of american exceptionalism - in particular, the idea that US americans are somehow spiritually more attached to democracy and liberalism than other people.
It should be obvious by now that this isn't true; to the extent US americans care about democracy more than other people it is in that democracy is an important element of american nationalism, often subsumed by it. If people do not learn this, then the whole of political organizing around democratic norms will always fail.
Personally, I don't particularly see the need to browbeat people about democratic norms; I don't see the shooter as a hero but I'm not particularly hostile to the people that do. I find that I am somewhat desensitized to how much seneless violence that happens in the United States, and how much violence the United States does to other people.
I do see the need to browbeat on one particular point - the american middle classes are not the base of the coalitional left, they are not internationalists. They may be radicals, they may be our jacobins or even our sans-culottes, but their class position does not align their interests with internationalism. Many can be and need to be convinced, but they can just as easily form the base for reactionary movements as ones oreinted towards justice. Their celebration is not a victory for the left. In fact, it nakedly shows how effectively lobbying and special interest can prop up boutique rent seekers to the detriment of even the politically powerful middle classes and entrepreneurs. It is a sign of how much more work there is left for us to do.