A murder in broad daylight on a city street usually prokes horror and revulsion. In the case of executive Brian Thompson, shot in New York on 4 December last year, there was some of that. But it was rapidly drowned out by a much louder vibe: the viral fame, and subsequent elevation to vigilante status, of the suspected killer, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, who even before the trial has become a social media phenomenon, the subject of a stage musical as well as of burgeoning conspiracy theories, and a political football. He has a Wikipedia page, and his supporters have spontaneously raised a fighting fund of more than $1m to pay for his defence in court.

Robin Hood or economic terrorist? The symbolic weight heaped on the slight figure of the suspect is enormous. Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges, including murder as a terrorist act, is innocent until proven otherwise. But that hasn’t stopped the case becoming instantly politicised along intransigently ideological lines. Long before the case is due in court, US attorney general Pam Bondi publicly directed prosecutors to demand the death penalty for a political, terrorist crime, something his supporters charge would be a state-sponsored killing in support of the ‘broken, immoral, and murderous healthcare industry that continues to terrorize the American people’, in the worlds of defence counsel.

In an Agatha Christie-type touch, three cartridge cases found near Thompson’s dead body were inscribed with the words ‘delay’, ‘depose’, ‘deny’. These turned out to be part of formulations commonly used by US insurance companies to avoid paying out on medical insurance claims, which they do in around 20 per cent of cases. 

Medical expenses are a constant worry for many Americans and a major cause of personal bankruptcy, for which profit-making insurance companies are often blamed. The largest US medical insurer is UnitedHealthcare, which also happens to be the meanest payer, reportedly refusing 30 per cent of claims – and Thompson was its well-paid CEO. (Mangione was not insured by United.) Observers tracking the twists and turns of the manhunt following the shooting quickly the relationship between the outcome of insurance claims and the company’s profitability and hence also Thompson’s pay. Protest movements sprang up and social media was soon awash with #freeluigi hashtags and anti-healthcare slogans. According to recent polls, most Americans, while not absolving the shooter from blame, believe responsibility for the killing is shared with social inequality, a healthcare system that is rigged against them, and the brutality of US capitalism in general.

In  that context, the murder, although not excusable, should only have been a surprise to anyone blind to American history.

Writing in the FT recently, Martin Wolf identified ‘the real US exceptionalism’ as its unique blend of entrepreneurial vigour and violence. Despite Trump’s complaints, the country is out on its own as an economic powerhouse, boasting not only the world’s biggest and most dynamically innovative companies, but an ever-renewing population of from-scratch unicorns that have no counterpart in the Old World. In terms of real GDP per head, meanwhile, while the US is surpassed by one or two small nations like Switzerland, it still pulling ahead of large advanced economies like Germany, the UK and France, which ought to be catching up.

Yet there is a vicious reverse to the rosy economic picture. Violence, H. Rap Brown famously pointed out in the 1960s, ‘is as American as cherry pie.’ It runs like a dark streak throughout American political history, from the slave plantations and Ku Klux Clan, to repeated political assassinations and the storming of the Capitol in 2021. And it’s there, remorselessly, in today’s statistics. A murder rate at 6.8 per 100,00 people in 2021 that was the 10th highest in the world, six times higher than that of the UK and 30 times that of Japan. The biggest prison population in the world, at 1.8m greater than China’s and four times Russia’s, and the planet’s fifth highest incarceration rate, after only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan. Civilian gun ownership at a staggering 120 per 100 people, more than double that of Yemen, the next highest, and four times that of neighbouring Canada (which will obviously have to do better if it becomes the US’ 51st state), and, not surprisingly the second highest number of gun deaths, accounting for 16 per cent of the world’s total in 2021.

America’s lopsided expenditure on healthcare – twice as much per head as anywhere else – also has its darker side. Healthcare, hospitals and drugs are three of the top five US industries by value, and healthcare is by far the largest component of US consumer spending on services. Yet health outcomes are dire. Life expectancy is four years lower on average than in peer nations. Infant, maternal (particularly for Black mothers) and avoidable mortality rates are the highest in the G7, while Americans suffer disprortionately from chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and depression. All this reflects waste, excess cost and corruption in the healthcare system, as well as deep-seated wealth and social inequalities in the economy as a whole. Which brings us back to Mangione and the cruelty of American capitalism, which, taking its clue from the President Trump, has been on full display these last few months. 

As the Nobel economist Paul Krugman pointed out on his excellent Substack, Trump takes a brutally zero-sum view of all relationships. There are only deals, and for every one there is a winner and loser. The sole arbiter is power. It behoves winners to flaunt their power and humiliate losers who can’t defend themselves, whose function is to grovel. (This is why Trump detests Zelenskyy, who in the logic of power should have rolled over for Putin, and whose failure to do so thus ‘started the war’.)

Or look at DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE represents the deliberate application of Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast and break things’ mode to the public sector. Behold Elon Musk brandishing a chainsaw and rejoicing at the prospect of chopping up jobs, livelihoods and putting whole agencies to death. But the chainsaw isn’t just symbolic. Condemning Musk for feeding the main conduit for US foreign aid, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), into his woodchipper, Bill Gates commentated: ‘The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one …I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money’. 

Perhaps because wealth and power are still such a potent part of the American dream, the excesses of the corporate world haven’t so far reaped the hate and violence that has spread through other institutions such as the government, politics, the university, and social media. With the attack on Brian Thompson, another threshold has been crossed. You don’t want it to happen, but those who live by the sword may have to get used to the idea that the blade is two-edged. Looking back, it was always going to be a matter of time before it came back to bite them.