What The Hell America!

The bullets Mangione used to kill Thomson had “deny,” “delay,” and “depose” inscribed on them. It was an expression of anger against an industry whose business model rests on an enormous amount of human suffering. While the majority of Americans do not believe that Mangione’s actions were acceptable — only 17 percent support his actions — the percentage is much higher among the young. Forty-one percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine would describe Mangione’s actions as acceptable.

It’s not hard to understand the views of this demographic. A recent poll found that one out of every six Americans was staying in a job that they would otherwise leave out of fear of losing their insurance, although even among the insured delays and denials are common. And they’re the lucky ones. Tens of millions of Americans don’t have insurance at all. The whole system is grotesque.

None of this, of course, is to say that what Mangione did was justifiable or wise. The theory that individual acts of violence will somehow spark mass revolt and bring about structural change (what used to be called “propaganda of the deed”) has been tested by assassins all over the world, in a wide variety of circumstances, for centuries. We know it doesn’t work. At best, the assassins have an afterlife as folk heroes, and at worst their actions are used to justify repression of the Left, but the injustices that motivate the assassins never go anywhere as a result.

While political violence and murder tend to be ultimately futile, state-sponsored murder is not just cruel but deeply immoral. Bondi’s bid to give Mangione the death penalty should be an opportunity to turn back to the arguments that socialists have long marshalled against capital punishment. The practice is, and always will be, indefensible.

Just as “propaganda of the deed” has failed everywhere it’s been tried, governments that respond to assassinations with bloodthirsty repression have tended to be equally unsuccessful in achieving their goals. The conditions that inspire the assassinations don’t disappear, and meanwhile the dead assassins become martyrs to inspire their successors.

This is a special case of a much broader point about the death penalty, which is that it simply doesn’t work as a deterrent. In an article about capital punishment for ordinary crimes, Karl Marx asked whether it might not be time to change the economic system that breeds street crime “instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?”

Writing in the New-York Daily Tribune, Marx mocked the idea that executions functioned as an effective deterrent, dryly noting the continued occurrence of “murders of the most atrocious kind, following closely upon the execution of criminals.” Of course, defenders of the death penalty can insist that there are fewer atrocious murders because of the deterrent effect of executions, but twenty-first-century statistical evidence simply doesn’t bear out that claim. We can compare the murder rates in states that don’t have the death penalty to the murder rate in states that do, and make similar country-to-country comparisons.

A classic response to this point is to compare the “warning” issued when criminals are executed to the effect of a lighthouse. We know about the ships that crash anyway but we have no way of knowing how many shipwrecks lighthouses prevent. Surely, this line of thought holds, the lack of statistical evidence about how many ships steered to safety when the captains saw lighthouses isn’t a good enough reason to abolish the institution of lighthouses.

This is an absurd comparison. Imagine that we kept up all the lighthouses on the East Coast and ripped down all the lighthouses on the West Coast. Pretty quickly, we would know about how many shipwrecks lighthouses prevent. This is the kind of evidence state-by-state and country-by-country comparisons between jurisdictions with and without the death penalty have already given us.

Of course, you could accept all this and still insist that murderers deserve to be executed. But that’s a morally indefensible position. As Marx noted in the New-York Daily Tribune article, both Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel defended capital punishment on these grounds, but he dismissed this attempt to give a “transcendental sanction to the rules of existing society,” thus proclaiming society’s “brutality” as an “eternal law” with extreme contempt.

This theory, considering punishment as the result of the criminal’s own will, is only a metaphysical expression for the old [rule of] eye against eye, tooth against tooth, blood against blood.

It’s one thing to say that you can be morally justified in killing enemy soldiers who are invading your country or shooting someone who attacks you with a knife in a back alley. But giving the state the power to coldly and calculatedly take the lives of a safely contained prisoner is an entirely different matter. It’s no coincidence that most liberal democracies have long since stopped using the death penalty, and that so many of the states that still practice it have little regard for human rights in general.

Many aspects of criminal-justice reform are legitimately complicated and messy. This isn’t one of them. The death penalty is an abomination.