Mailbag: Lynching and Vigilante Justice
What differentiates Luigi Mangioni from Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry? From the KKK?
One reader writes:
Your distaste for vigilante justice is understandable, but why should some who materially benefit from human suffering through systemic methods be protected, while those who respond through unsanctioned violence be thoroughly condemned? What degree of separation transforms obscene cruelty into permissable business? And how are the powerless, who are dismissed by the powerful as fools, going to enact meaningful change when the levers of power are being manhandled by demagogues and anti-intellectuals? This singular act of violence has accomplished an impressive level of unification regardless of political spectrum, Luigi Mangione was no leftist, he was a Liberal in every sense, but even though we can sit down with any group of people and generally agree that violence is not ideal, there isn't a single person that can argue that it isn't effective.
Your compassion for the downtrodden and frustration at the injustice of the world are in the right place, and I hope you hold on to those moral instincts forever.
To understand my issues with the current political moment we need to take a step outside of the narrative above and do our best to try and see it, and ourselves, from the outside. To do so, compare Luigi Mangione to Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry.
Consider the following story: the Left thrives on causing and profiting from public chaos. Not the fun “woo, party!” kind of chaos, but the “I am afraid for my life” chaos. The Left wants everyone to feel divided and afraid to believe that only biggest government can save you.
In this story, the BLM riots and mental health episodes on the subway are twin phenomena.
During the BLM riots, Democratic elected officials refused to denounce the violence or make any gesture of support and restitution to those who suffered from it. No amount of property damage is morally equivalent to murder, so go for it. Black people deserve immediate reparations anyway, so if you feel like a smash-and-grab looting spree would serve you then anything you see is yours for the taking. Whatever makes you feel like America is primordially evil and that voting for us is your only hope of redemption.
Similarly, out of a respect for ‘neurodiversity’, people who are constitutionally incapable of integrating into society are not institutionalized and treated but are instead left to roam the streets and abuse public spaces. If you object to the ambient risk of being forced to watch someone screaming and shitting themselves and jerking off all at the same time whenever you take the subway, you’re a bigot and there is no future for you.
In this story, these two things are obviously evil and wrong and are also actively aiding and abetting the powerful and unaccountable. To be very clear, I’m personally generating this story as a thought experiment. That said, should someone who believes in the story I just told take violent action to strike back? If not, how do we determine which claims of acting on behalf of the oppressed are legitimate? What sort of process should we follow?
My basic point is this: we are capable of profound error and permanent damage and claiming to act on behalf of the oppressed is not a magic spell we can cast to justify atrocities and self-indulgence in general.
One last thing re: “unification” - I know a lot of people are excited by this guy, but I’m really not, and I’ve gotten a fair amount of quiet support from people who don’t feel good speaking out about it as much as I have. Gloat if you want, but the world is a lot bigger than the bubble of people who agree with you, and I think the ultimate consequences of this will not be to your liking.
Even if you got your way and slaughtered everyone you declared to be your enemy the consequences would not be to your liking either.
Another reader writes:
Calling the CEO’s murder a lynching when you’re white and the victim is white really should have put a poor taste in your mouth, seeing as you’re de-racializing a purposefully racialized word signifying violence perpetrated against one single racial group. “Execution” serves the same purpose without erasing a specific type of violence perpetrated against a specific group of people to whom your victim does not belong.
I chose the term “lynching” deliberately, to create discomfort in people who are celebrating the extrajudicial slaughter of someone they identify as belonging to a parasitic/oppressive group. I want to directly and viscerally connect the phenomena. I want people to feel as disgusted by class-based executions as they are by race-based executions, to use your suggested language. I think that celebrating one and decrying the other is a disgusting hypocrisy which makes the world worse. It’s precisely because I think that racial lynchings are evil that I want to prevent them from recurring in a twisted form by people who deny that that’s what they’re doing.
I appreciate your commitment to justice in language use, and your thoughtful response. I understand where you’re coming from, and also I disagree with (what I see as) the hyper-prioritization of race and the hyper-prioritization of language in contemporary justice-discourse. Not that those are trivial issues, just that as I see it there are things even more important than those, such as the sacrosanct life and dignity of individual human beings.
The race-based lynchers were frustrated by the democratic process that led to compulsory racial integration, and the class-based lynchers are frustrated by the democratic process that prevents them from getting their preferred health care policies enacted, and both think they get to kill to get what they want. You can’t reject one without rejecting the other.