It’s the conditions, stupid

Deplore violence. Then ask why it's happening

Assassination isn’t how we get what we deserve. It isn’t how you change the world. It’s wrong. In this tinderbox time, it’s dangerous.

All of the above should be clear. And this week, in the wake of the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, it was not clear enough to many people.

But even as we saw the glorification of violence from some, we saw a typical but no less facile response from others: a righteous deploring of the individual act, with little curiosity about the conditions that enable it.

Deploring individual acts of political violence is right on. The problem is the common tendency to have one’s thinking stop there.

In the UnitedHealthcare killing, the facts are only beginning to trickle in. But whatever turns up, the establishment habit of deploring the individual deed and soldiering on oblivious to surrounding conditions is going to get more people killed.

We endanger our leaders and ourselves when we huff the fantasy of the bad apple, the lone wolf, the fallen scion, and refuse to see people as the social biopsies they are.

If you are willing to think, actually think, not just tsk-tsk people who break the rules, you cannot separate this one act of apparent political violence from the state of healthcare in this country — a system that millions experience, every day of their lives, as a kind of bureaucratic violence.

No more than you can separate the Trump assassination attempts this year from the conditions of a rising encouragement of political violence, often by Trump himself.

No more than you can separate riots that might break out in neighborhoods from the conditions of poverty and criminal justice and historical treatment in those places.

No more than you can separate the January 6, 2021, insurrection from the conditions of greed-fueled, lie-filled, hate-for-profit media that pump skulls full of disinformation.

There is a strange tendency in American life. When certain violent acts happen, there is a feeling in some quarters that one can either deplore or explain. Can’t do both.

Well, we can, actually. Our brains will not break.

We have to be brave and wise and curious enough to deplore the symptoms of the disease while also taking on the disease.

There is simply no question that that an America full of loneliness, isolation, despair, stagnation, status anxiety, revivified hatreds, undereducation, corporate cruelty, media collapse, and rampant disinformation is an America where desperate acts and political violence are more probable.

At this moment, more than most, we must be able to do two things at once: Deplore the things that must be deplored, condemn the actions that must be condemned, but also understand why things are happening.

Let’s deplore Trumpism while also trying, earnestly and thoughtfully, to understand the system failures that have facilitated it.

Let’s deplore the January 6 coup attempt without lapsing into the comfortable, self-congratulatory feeling that They are idiots and We are not. It’s a harder, but truer, thought that the breakdown of so many of our institutions, a breakdown in which we are involved, has engendered a situation in which many have given up on any conventional method of shaping the future and now believe only madness delivers.

And let us deplore, loudly and clearly, the assassination of a corporate leader and a family man in Midtown Manhattan while recognizing that the health insurance industry locks so many Americans in despair. That so many of our brothers and sisters and neighbors and friends have experienced that industry not as healing but as a desperate battle against bureaucrats who often seem determined to withhold the most fundamental of human obligations — care.

It is not wrong to talk about both of these things in the same breath. It is wrong not to. If we were meant to think only a quarter of a thought at a time, our brains would have been the size of walnuts, easier to carry.

We are not going to walnut-brain our way out of the dangerous condition America is in, whether it’s by individual acts of murder, the bombing of ballot boxes, insurrections, riots, vigilante acts, or any other form of go-it-alone, screw-the-system, take-matters-into-your-own-hands violence. It’s the conditions, stupid.

History shows us very clearly that this kind of go-it-alone violence fluctuates according to surrounding social circumstances. There is more of it when systems don’t work and when people don’t feel heard and helped. There is less when systems work, when people have faith in institutions.

All around us, on the left and right, we keep getting mad at individual social phenomena without mustering much curiosity about why they occur. Why did he have to kill him? Why are people so exercised about a trans issue that barely touches them? Why did so many people fail to show up for Kamala Harris? Why are extremists rising everywhere? Why are so many people succumbing to conspiracy theories?

These are disparate phenomena — and they are connected. They all take root in a basic political emotion millions seem to hold now, across the political spectrum, of defenselessness: of the cavalry not coming, of the truth not being something you can count on from anyone connected to power, of companies and governments and other large institutions not caring about you, of the establishment having no idea what your life is like, what makes it hard at present and what might, if they cared, make it easier.

Perhaps the only thing shared by Americans from left to right is the feeling that no one hears you and no one is going to help.

This is not just about one CEO killing, any more than it was about one insurrection or one protest-turned-riot. It is about the deep condition of the country, the generational pessimism of tens of millions of our neighbors and kin. Until we are talking about that every day, not just the individual desperate act, until we are thinking about how to fix it, we are just tap dancing around the thing.

Let me even offer one practical place to start. In honor of the late Brian Thompson’s life, and in the hope that no leader ever meets such an awful fate again, let us immediately pass universal, publicly provided healthcare once and for all. If we do, the words “deny” and “delay” will become distant memories, never to be seen on insurance company letters or bullets again.

If you want to tell people there is a better way to get the world they want, show them.

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