Luigi Mangione, Western Hero

The worst are full of a passionate intensity. - Yeats

We live in times of extreme moral certainty. Dangerous times.

From all points of the political spectrum and in every medium of communication, doubt is rare. What critical thinkers know to be shades of gray, is now only stark black and white. Ukrainians wear white hats, Vladimir Putin, black. Criticize Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians and you’re an antisemite. Criticize Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Jews and you support genocide. Suggest that unlimited immigration isn’t wise policy and you’re a racist, that men shouldn’t compete against women in athletics, and you’re transphobic. Agree with the Dobbs decision and you hate women. Etc.

Where is the subtlety or nuance that makes up about 99% of human life? When do we hear “Let’s discuss this calmly?”

Moral certainty on one side begets moral certainty on the other, eventually resulting in extremism on both. This may feel like the run-up to the French Revolution, but it’s also elementally, American.

Consider Luigi Mangione who’s charged with the killing of health insurance executive, Brian Thompson. His “manifesto” is free of doubt. To him, Thompson was not a fallible human being entitled to empathy, United Health not a corporation run by human beings inside a massive context of laws, regulations, market forces, uncertainty, ignorance, etc. No, each is a “parasite.” Period.

What Mangione allegedly did, and the applause it’s received, fit comfortably into a specific American cultural context - the mythologizing by Anglo-Americans of our settling of the American West, a core feature of which is clear moral certainty.

That enormous body of fiction began with Fenimore Cooper and gained momentum with the invention of the steam-powered rotary press in 1843. That made books cheap to print and easy to purchase and, in the urban centers of the East, story papers and dime novels were born.

From the start, the myth of the American West sold… stupendously.

For well over a century, the lore of the West was possibly the largest-selling fictional genre (perhaps excepting popular romance) in the country. Western heroes like Kit Carson became household names. Buffalo Bill Cody, a showman who outshined P.T. Barnum, paid dime-novel writers to publish adulatory, and mostly imaginary, accounts of his exploits. His stage productions were wildly popular in New York City and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West toured the U.S. and Europe for three decades. Queen Victoria saw it twice.

Then came longer novels, like those of Owen Wister and Zane Grey and, throughout the first half of the 20^th century, a flood of western fiction by the likes of Louis L’Amour and Elmer Kelton. Beginning in 1903 with the iconic The Great Train Robbery, the movies capitalized on the same genre. Finally, there was television that, through the 1960s, featured a welter of westerns (and, to a lesser extent, still does).

Little of that had much to do with the actual lives of white settlers moving west, but reality wasn’t the point; the point was to teach a lesson.

To wit: the movement of Anglo-Americans west often outran the ability of state power to impose law and order and protect the settlers. That vacuum allowed naked power to rule. It did so by the use of violence for the benefit of the powerful and to the detriment of everyone else. Often that power was simply money - the local cattle baron (Shane), a mining magnate (Deadwood) - or simply a band of outlaws (High Noon, Hombre) intimidating others who lacked the strength and courage to resist. There might be a local sheriff, but he was too weak or feckless (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) to stand up to the ruthlessness of monied power.

So the need for a countervailing force arose, a principled force, one that acted, not for himself, but for the many. Enter the Western Hero (Sheriff Will Kane in High Noon, Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke). This lone man’s attributes were courage, steadfastness, skill with firearms and, above all, a powerful sense of right and wrong – the willingness to protect those who can’t protect themselves. In the final conflict between the hero (Good) and lawless power (Evil), Good prevails precisely because that sense of morality imbues him with the strength and determination that Evil lacks.

Hear John Wayne as Davy Crockett in The Alamo:

There’s right and there’s wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you’re dead as a beaver hat.

The violence used by Evil of course requires a violent response by Good. The use of bloodshed to subdue Evil becomes itself an aspect of Good.

Such is the message of a fictional genre that, for over a century, dominated popular fiction in the U.S., read, viewed and heard by hundreds of millions of people. In a way, it still does, albeit outside the 19^th century western U.S. context. Every Marvel comic hero, every Dexter slipstreams behind 150 years of fiction about the American West.

Which brings us to the (of course) handsome and buff Mangione whose “manifesto” channels those very messages. The powerful are lawless:

[T]he reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit

The many are helpless to resist:

the American public has allowed them to get away with it.

A lone man must step forward to combat evil:

Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

Who, in Mangione’s understanding, was Brian Thompson but the ruthless, powerful abuser of the weak, whom state power was either unable or unwilling to stop? So, like the Miller Gang in High Noon, he needed to be stopped and a hero was needed to do the job.

Unsurprisingly, Mangione’s supporters agree; they too channel our mythologizing of the West. Here, Heather MacDonald summarizes their take:

The unknown assailant had provided a public service by taking out a leader in a predatory and heartless industry…

Almost too perfectly, once the deed was done, Mangione’s fans papered Manhattan with Wanted posters featuring images of other health insurance CEOs. Of course they did.

Ironies abound. The Western Hero is the quintessential individualist, but, in the mythologizing of the West, he’s necessitated by the absence of state power. His very existence is, then, a cry for greater state presence in the lives of everyday people, hardly a feature of an individualist’s manifesto.

Then there’s the problem of morality. No serious person regards vigilantism of the type that killed Brian Thompson to be moral.

And yet the Western Hero’s strong sense of right and wrong comes from the narrative’s insistence that Evil is relentless; it won’t stop of its own accord and state power won’t/can’t stop it, so it must be stopped. Hence, the normally immoral becomes moral.

Given that the killing of the United CEO fits comfortably into one of the most dominant of all American narratives, we can expect more of the same. Governments are widely (and often rightly) seen as absent without leave, incompetent or simply uninterested in doing their jobs. (See, e.g., L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom.) Absent effective government, expect more “Western heroes” to take matters into their own hands.

Mangione and those who applaud Thompson’s killing agree. United Health Care was a rogue force, so,

It had to be done.

Don’t be surprised if, in this environment, it is again.