The arrest of Luigi Mangione for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is more than a criminal case. It is a test of America's ability to distinguish right from wrong. At this point, far too many Americans have flunked that test.
Elizabeth Warren, for example. The Democratic senator from Massachusetts did not wait long to draw policy lessons from the heinous assassination that widowed Thompson's spouse and deprived his two sons of a father.
"Violence is never the answer," Warren told the Huffington Post, "but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone."
The mind reels. No other elected official so perfectly captures the progressive combination of credentialed self-regard, fraudulence, and imbecility. Warren's blinkered statement provoked a backlash, and rightly so. She hastily revised her comments. "Violence is never the answer," she said. "Period. I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder."
Ya think?
Yet Warren is not alone. She's inhabiting the zeitgeist—or, as her namesake might say, painting with all the colors of the wind.
The confusion extends beyond Warren to other elected officials, from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who have turned this shocking crime into what they might call a "teachable moment."
These luminaries of the anti-corporate progressive Left are experts in moral inversion. They reduce politics to the binary of victim and victimizer and justify the behavior of designated victims as acts of resistance. Brian Thompson's job as CEO automatically placed him in the category of oppressor, thereby diminishing the moral gravity of his murder.
The same illogic leads the progressive Left to equate Israel's defense against Hamas terrorists with the October 7 atrocities, and to draw false equivalences between Daniel Penny's intervention on a subway and Mangione's premeditated execution.
Thompson, Israel, and Penny are oppressors, you see. And in the topsy-turvy world of the global Left, oppressors are presumptively guilty. Condemned by reason of status. Appeal denied.
The oppressed, however, are desperately trying to be heard. Their grievances justify lawbreaking, havoc, rampage. Why? Because according to the Left, they have no other choice. Society did them wrong. They are depraved on account of being deprived. And if they, like Elizabeth Warren said, "lose faith" and "take matters into their own hands," can you blame them?
Oh yes, you can. Religion, tradition, and the law tell us that we are moral agents. We possess free will. We are responsible for our actions. And we will be judged by a higher power.
The moment you let morality out the door, the second you rationalize terrorism, you open yourself to nihilism and self-destruction. This isn't just the theme of great literature. It's the lesson of radical politics from the Jacobins to al Qaeda. The idea that some Americans would walk down the same dark road out of frustration with health insurers is horrifying.
Thus the case of Luigi Mangione highlights another deficit that threatens the country. A shortage of moral clarity enfeebles our sense of good and evil. It hampers our ability to arrest and punish criminals in our cities and on our college campuses. It blinds us from recognizing friend and foe abroad. One consequence is a rise in threatened and expressed political violence: swatting, assaults, riots, assassination attempts. Another is a gradual slide in manners, an erosion of the rule of law.
Insanity must be treated. Evil must be confronted. But what of the apologists for madness and criminality, the comfortable sophists who invert morality to score partisan points? They are the product of degraded and debased institutions. Families, neighborhoods, churches, and schools are the places where we form our characters and learn right from wrong. The reactions to Mangione's arrest tell us that many of these institutions—higher education most significantly—are not doing their jobs.
But some are. Not everyone is prepared to break their ethical compass on the anvil of the Left. The lionization of Mangione has been met with profound disgust. For every Elizabeth Warren, there is Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who said of Mangione, "Hear me on this: He is no hero. The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 at McDonald's this morning." Or as Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.), the conscience of our time, put it: "He's the a—hole that's going to die in prison. Congratulations if you want to celebrate that."
In the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, let's hope that Shapiro and Fetterman prevail over the addled Left. For a test of moral clarity is no ordinary exam. The questions are weighty. Failure leads to disaster. And there are no retakes.
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