Did Robin Hood Kill The United HeathCare CEO? Madame Thérèse DeFarge? Who's Next?

My immediate reaction to the Brian Thompson shooting was to ignore it— more tragic gun violence. But then I noticed that the media was treating it as a major national event, more so than anyone else who was murdered that day— average is 117 per day in the U.S. And then I saw the glee and schadenfreude breaking out all over social media, although the Twitter poll I did showed most people feel murder is never the right answer.

I was always a big Robin Hood fan when I was growing up and I look forward to seeing if this was just a one-off or if more CEOs will be targeted. NY Times reporter noticed it too— “Even before any details were available, the internet was awash in speculation that the company had refused to cover the alleged killer’s medical bills— and in debates about whether murder would be a reasonable response… Then came the reports that bullet casings bearing the words ‘delay,’ ‘deny’ and ‘depose’ were found at the scene. ‘Delay” and “deny” clearly echo tactics insurers use to avoid paying claims. ‘Depose’? Well, that’s the sudden, forceful removal from a high position. Ah… Names and photos of other health insurance executives floated around. Some of the posts that went most viral, racking up millions of views by celebrating the killing, I can’t repeat here.”

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The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic. It was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters.

Even on Facebook, a platform where people do not commonly hide behind pseudonyms, the somber announcement by UnitedHealth Group that it was “deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague” was met with, as of this writing, 80,000 reactions; 75,000 of them were the “haha” emoji.

Politicians offering boilerplate condolences were eviscerated. Some responses came in the form of personal testimony. I don’t condone murder,  many started, before describing harrowing ordeals that health insurance companies had put them through.

…I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.

The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication platforms allow millions of strangers around the world to converse in real time.

But the currents we are seeing are expressions of something more fundamental. We’ve been here before. And it wasn’t pretty.

The Gilded Age, the tumultuous period between roughly 1870 and 1900, was also a time of rapid technological change, of mass immigration, of spectacular wealth and enormous inequality. The era got its name from a Mark Twain novel: gilded, rather than golden, to signify a thin, shiny surface layer. Below it lay the corruption and greed that engulfed the country after the Civil War.

The era survives in the public imagination through still-resonant names, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt; through their mansions, which now greet awe-struck tourists; and through TV shows with extravagant interiors and lavish gowns. Less well remembered is the brutality that underlay that wealth— the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives to industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they met when they tried to organize for better working conditions.

Also less well remembered is the intensity of political violence that erupted. The vast inequities of the era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist tried to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick after a drawn-out conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on.

As the historian Jon Grinspan wrote about the years between 1865 and 1915, “the nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections ‘won’ by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations.” And neither political party, he added, seemed “capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives.” No, not an identical situation, but the description does resonate with how a great many people feel about the direction of the country today.

It’s not hard to see how, during the Gilded Age, armed political resistance could find many eager recruits and even more numerous sympathetic observers. And it’s not hard to imagine how the United States could enter another such cycle.

A recent Reuters investigation identified at least 300 cases of political violence since the 2021 assault on the Capitol, which it described as “the biggest and most sustained increase in U.S. political violence since the 1970s.” A 2023 poll showed that the number of Americans who agree with the statement “American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country” was ticking up alarmingly.

And the fraying of the social contract is getting worse. Americans express less and less trust in many institutions. Substantial majorities of people say that government, business leaders and the media are purposely misleading them. In striking contrast to older generations, majorities of younger people say they do not believe that “the American dream” is achievable anymore. The health insurance industry likes to cite polls that show overall satisfaction, but those numbers go down when people get sick and learn what their insurer is and is not willing to do for them.

Things are much better now than in the 19th century. But there is a similarity to the trajectory and the mood, to the expression of deep powerlessness and alienation.

Now, however, the country is awash in powerful guns. And some of the new technologies that will be deployed to help preserve order can cut both ways. Thompson’s killer apparently knew exactly where to find his target and at exactly what time. No evidence has emerged that he had access to digital tracking data, but that information is out there on the market. How long before easily built artificial-intelligence-powered drones equipped with facial recognition cameras, rather than hooded men with backpacks, seek targets in cities and towns?

The turbulence and violence of the Gilded Age eventually gave way to comprehensive social reform. The nation built a social safety net, expanded public education and erected regulations and infrastructure that greatly improved the health and well-being of all Americans.

Those reforms weren’t perfect, and they weren’t the only reason the violence eventually receded (though never entirely disappeared), but they moved us forward.

The concentration of extreme wealth in the United States has recently surpassed that of the Gilded Age. And the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished. I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest. Corporate executives are already reportedly beefing up their security. I expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns. Calls for a higher degree of public surveillance or for integrating facial recognition algorithms into policing may well follow. Almost certainly, armed security entourages and private jets will become an even more common element of executive compensation packages, further removing routine contact between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us, except when employed to serve them.

A day earlier, Rolling Stone carried a piece noting that “Thompson’s violent death outside a hotel where UnitedHealthcare was hosting an investor conference didn’t just prompt scathing jokes but heated criticism of the insurer he had helmed since 2021. One image that made the rounds online was a chart from the personal finance website ValuePenguin, which found that UnitedHealthcare denies 32 percent of all in-network claims relating to individual health insurance plans— twice the industry average. Some pointed to headlines describing how UnitedHealthcare has used an allegedly faulty AI algorithm to assess claims and deny care for seriously ill patients on private Medicare Advantage plans, as described in an ongoing class-action lawsuit brought by the estates of two deceased people who were denied coverage for their care at an extended-care facility.”

Among those who amplified that story was right-wing podcaster Tim Pool, suggesting that Americans across the political spectrum can find rare consensus when it comes to disdain for their free-market health care system. “It’s actually kind of touching that the one thing that can bring together our fractious and disunited country is celebrating the assassination of a health insurance CEO,” wrote University of Virginia historian David Austin Walsh on Twitter.

…For once, too, it seemed that no extremist factions were quick to blame the murder on ideological opponents, as they typically have in the wake of high-profile shootings throughout the U.S. in recent years (save one Fox News commentator who suggested the NYPD hadn’t yet located the shooter because they were too busy dealing with immigrant crime ). Online influencers known to shape a narrative before the facts emerge instead proved willing to wait and see where the case would lead. Within the feverish climate of social media, this made for an unfamiliar sort of restraint— almost as unusual as the street homicide of an American businessman.

This afternoon, Jia Tolentino wrote that “To most Americans, a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it. UnitedHealthcare insures almost a third of the patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage, a government-funded program facilitated by private insurance companies, which receive a flat fee for each patient they cover and then produce their own profits by minimizing each patient’s care costs… [T]hese private insurance companies, which cover more than a third of American seniors on Medicare, collect hundreds of billions of dollars from the government annually and overbill Medicare to the tune of around ten billion dollars per year; UnitedHealthcare has used litigation to fight its obligation to repay fees that were overpaid. In 2020, UnitedHealth acquired a company called NaviHealth, whose software provides algorithmic care recommendations for sick patients, and which is now used to help manage its Medicare Advantage program. A 2023 class-action lawsuit alleges that the NaviHealth algorithm has a “known error rate” of ninety per cent and cites appalling patient stories: one man in Tennessee broke his back, was hospitalized for six days, was moved to a nursing home for eleven days, and then was informed by UnitedHealth that his care would be cut off in two days. After a couple rounds of appeals and reversals, the man left the nursing home and died four days later. The company has denied requests to release the analyses behind NaviHealth’s conclusions to patients and doctors, stating that the information is proprietary… Thompson’s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another.”

The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung coined the term “structural violence” in 1969, in a paper that offers a taxonomy of violence—ways to distinguish between the forms that violence can take. It can be physical or psychological. It can be positive, enacted through active reward, or negative, enacted through punishment. It can hurt an object, or not; this object can be human, or not. There is either— Galtung notes that this is the most important distinction— a person who acts to commit the violence or there is not. Violence can be intended or unintended. It can be manifest, or latent. Traditionally, our society fixates on only one version of this: direct physical violence committed by a person intending harm. The pretty girl killed by a boyfriend, the C.E.O. shot on the street, the subway dancer strangled by the ex-marine. You don’t even need a human object— people are generally more troubled by the Zoomers throwing soup at paintings in a weird bid to raise attention about climate change than by the more than ten thousand farmers in India who die by suicide every year in part because of the way erratic and extreme weather renders their debts insurmountable. If one were to, hypothetically, blow up an unoccupied private jet in protest of the fact that the wealthiest one per cent of the global population accounts for more carbon emissions than the poorest sixty-six per cent, this would be seen by many people— like Thompson’s murder, and unlike the tens of thousands of human deaths per year already caused by climate change— as a sign of profoundly alarming social decay.

…It’s hard not to be curious about what, if anything, might happen to UnitedHealthcare’s claim-denial rates. I was at a show in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, and when the comedians onstage cracked a joke about the shooter the entire place erupted in cheers.