The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month appears to be what it looked like: a political attack. In this case, one motivated by hatred of the American insurance system. In a leaked manifesto, the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, blames the insurer’s corruption and greed, and claims to be the first to face it with “brutal honesty.”
If true—and a grand jury in New York will soon decide—that makes the murder another in a string of ideologically motivated violent attacks over the past few years, including:
Assassination attempts—two against Donald Trump as well as the shootings of Rep. Steve Scalise and (further back) Rep. Gabby Giffords;
Political riots, from the BLM violence of summer 2020 to the riot in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to the pro-Hamas riots of last fall;
Intimidating protests against Supreme Court justices, or individual attacks like the assault on Paul Pelosi;
A wave of bomb threats as well as the pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democrats in 2018, reflecting domestic terror hitting its highest level in decades.
None of this is new. The late 1960s and early 1970s were wracked by political violence.
There were the assassinations—of JFK in 1963, MLK and RFK in 1968, and two attempts on Gerald Ford in 1975. There was rioting, culminating in the “long, hot summer” of 1967, which saw over 150 incidents, 83 deaths, and half a billion dollars in property damage within America’s urban ghettos. And there was terrorism, by groups like the Weather Underground, a far-left organization founded by university students, which committed dozens of bombings including of the Pentagon and U.S. Senate.
All of that feels like a world away. Indeed, many people under the age of 40 might be shocked to read about how regular political violence was in this country. That’s because between then and now, even as other crimes like murder and assault soared, political violence became almost unimaginable.
What changed? We stopped justifying political violence.
The violence of the ’60s and ’70s was excused, defended, and sometimes even celebrated. The Kerner Commission, set up by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the 1960s riots, blamed them not on bad behavior but on “white racism,” which had to be addressed before the riots abated. John Lindsay, the idealistic liberal Republican who was mayor of New York in 1967, identified the cause of Harlem’s riots—which kicked off when an off-duty police officer killed a man in self-defense—as “general conditions,” and used them as pretext to seek more federal welfare funding.
Support for individual revolutionaries went further. The prosecution of five Black Panthers for the 1969 murder of 19-year-old Alex Rackley—three of whom were eventually convicted—became a cause célèbre, including a fundraising gathering at Leonard Bernstein’s famously skewered by journalist Tom Wolfe. The Weather Underground’s manifesto attracted attention not only in far-left circles but in the mainstream media, according to historian Bryan Burrough. In fact, two of the group’s ringleaders—Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers—went on to distinguished academic careers after their terrorism days were over.
The political violence of the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t ended by revolution. It was ended by the National Guard and the FBI’s targeting of far-left groups. While these steps had their own problems, namely that civil liberties were violated through aggressive policing and the FBI’s COINTELPRO crackdown, they show that the violence could be ended by something other than addressing so-called root causes through radical social change.
More fundamentally, the great period of declining political violence coincided with a cultural shift. It began with Richard Nixon, who was swept into office by the millions of Americans whom he called “the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.” By 1970, large majorities of Americans opposed campus and anti-Vietnam protests, in no small part due to their radical tinge. The public’s hard line against disorder of any kind persisted into the 1980s and 1990s, when tough-on-crime presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton invested in the criminal justice system to keep all kinds of violence under control.
In recent years, though, political violence—violence meant to send a message or achieve a specific goal—has come back. When people cheer the UHC shooter, like Jimmy Kimmel, who called the suspect a sex symbol, or the DJ who projected his face at a recent concert, they are unwittingly repeating the ’70s elite’s fascination with violent terrorists. What is more, they are encouraging such acts—creating more of them in the process.
Why would rioters, terrorists, and murderers be treated with pity, or even admiration? The answer comes down to what the urbanist Fred Siegel called “the riot ideology.” The riot ideology argued, à la Mayor Lindsay, that violence was merely the effect of structural injustice, and would continue so long as injustice endured. “Violence is bad,” the argument goes, “but violence will continue until the situation improves.”
This argument, of course, recurs today. It comes from Columbia professors, and from Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called denied health insurance claims their own “act of violence.” It comes from anyone who justifies rioting, whether by appeal to racial inequity or to Trump voters’ sense of aggrievement about the 2020 election. And it comes often from those who flirt casually with affection for domestic terrorists, from Angela Davis’s fans on the left to Ted Kaczynski’s fans on the right.
This argument is wrong on a moral level—unfairness does not legitimize violence. By contravening the basic rules of our democracy, namely that disputes should be settled civilly, violence makes fairness impossible. But it is also wrong on a practical level.
As the political scientist and gadfly Edward Banfield observed, the riots of the ’60s and ’70s eventually went away, even without massive social reform. Banfield argued that rioting—or any goal-directed violence—is a product of opportunity, as much or more than structural conditions. In other words, if people can get away with it, they will do it. Excusing political violence turns it into a bargaining tactic, making it a more attractive option.
Even if fewer people want to do it, and those who do fear getting caught, they can still be motivated by a sense that the violence’s message will be taken seriously, even respected.
All of this suggests that political violence is downstream of public support, and that political violence happens because we let it. Conversely, it implies that every time someone utters the line “violence is never justified, but. . . ” they are increasing the rewards for engaging in exactly the violence they are nominally condemning.
Such a situation is unsustainable, because political violence cannot coexist with a functioning democracy. Democracy depends on peaceful liberation, allowing each person to have her say, while violence replaces the ballot box with the bullet. If we want the former, we must be unambiguous in our condemnation of the latter.
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.