Against ‘But …’

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 

Declan Garvey, our esteemed executive editor, suggested that between Nick and Kevin’s excellent pieces on the meaning of Luigi Mangione that maybe I should tackle a different topic. Fair enough. Being an editor is in part a form of portfolio management or menu curation; diversify the options for the reader. And since I largely agree with Nick and Kevin, I think it’s smart advice. Declan suggested that I instead build on my conversation on The Remnant earlier this week about clawing back the pardon power. 

 

On the other hand, I’m pissed off. And for the writer, anger is an opportunity. As I wrote in my underrated second book:

 

Annoyance is an inspiration, aggravation a muse. That which gets your blood up, also gets the ink—or these, days, pixels—flowing. Show me an author without passion for what he holds to be the truth and I will show you either a boring writer or someone who misses a lot of deadlines, or both. Nothing writes itself, and what gets the writer to push that boulder uphill is more often than not irritation with those saying wrong things righteously.

 

So I’m gonna try to do it all, because I think the two topics can be reconciled. 

 

Let’s start with why I am pissed off. 

 

There’s an old idea, most recently popularized by Game of Thrones, that says “Everything before the word ‘but’ is bullsh-t.”

 

“I really like Todd, but … ”

 

“I don’t believe in censorship, but …  ”

 

“I’m not gay, but … ”

 

This isn’t a truism though, but a rule of thumb. Truisms are obviously true statements that don’t add anything to the conversation or our understanding of a topic. Rules of thumb are observations, based on common experience, that are very often true but not necessarily always true. “Don’t drive angry” is a good rule of thumb, but one you can discard if you’re chasing someone who kidnapped your dog. 

 

The idea that everything after the “but” is BS in the case of Luigi Mangione is both true and false simultaneously. The people saying, “Murder is wrong but …” feel the need to say the right or responsible thing, but what they really desire is to talk about how the murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thomposon had a point. “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren insists. (In fairness, she backtracked, a bit, after people accurately interpreted her statement.) 

 

My point here is that murder is wrong and everything after the “but” is BS. I’m not saying that the complaints about health insurance companies in general or UnitedHealth in particular are entirely untrue or unfounded. I’m saying that the conversation people want to have after the but is appalling and grotesque. 

 

New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino has a piece contextualizing the response to the cold-blooded murder of Thompson titled, “A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing?” 

 

I caught an interview with Tolentino on NPR yesterday in which she said:

 

And me personally, with my own anti-capitalist views, do I think that being a CEO of a company like UnitedHealthcare, with its ideological responsibilities to its shareholders – do I think that that’s compatible with actually taking care of patients? I don’t. And I think that puts us in this strange moment where that’s suddenly baldly out in the open.

 

The employee of Condé Nast, a multibillion dollar privately owned global media company that disproportionately profits from monetizing elite Veblen conspicuous consumption, is an anti-capitalist. Putting that irony aside for a moment, Tolentino is hardly alone in thinking the real problem is capitalism. The assumption seems to be that if we had some other non-capitalist system of health care, people wouldn’t be laughing at the thought of a father of two being murdered by a spoiled rich kid. That profit motive is at some fundamental level  incompatible with the provision of health care and that a more enlightened, single-payer system of the sort advocated by Sens. Warren or Bernie Sanders wouldn’t ration it the way ours does. 

 

Never mind that 68 million people are on Medicare, which is a single-payer system. So are the Indian Health Service and the VA system. Medicaid, with 72 million Americans enrolled, is dual payer—state governments and the federal government. If you don’t think these systems “delay, defend, deny” services, you don’t know anything about these entities. In the U.K., which has precisely the kind of enlightened system the “murder is wrong but …” contexualizers admire, rationing is openly considered a feature of the National Health Service, not a bug. As Alan Millburn said when he was England’s health secretary, “The NHS—just like every other health system in the world, public or private—has never, or will never, provide all the care it might theoretically be possible to provide.” And as Ezra Klein explained a few years ago, the U.K. “has embraced the idea we fear most: rationing. There is, in the UK, a government agency that decides which treatments are worth covering, and for whom. It is an agency that has even decided, from the government’s perspective, how much a life is worth in hard currency.”

 

Reducing human lives to dollars and cents (or pounds and pence) is supposedly not just the cardinal sin of American insurance companies, but the justification for the outpouring of glee over a murder and the mockery of the victim. But across the pond, it’s something to be celebrated if government bureaucrats do it. (Heck, I’m old enough to remember when one of the main selling points of Obamacare was to ration health care to lower expenditures.) 

 

So, let me ask you: If some punk kid stalked and shot the director of the VA, Medicare and Medicaid, or the U.K.’s National Healthy System in the back, would we hear the same, “Murder is wrong but … ” garbage? I very much doubt it. 

 

The obvious objection to this hypothetical is that government isn’t a for-profit business, so rationing would be a necessity for the greater good. Or something like that. Fair enough, but we’re getting close to the problem. That’s an aesthetic judgement as much as it is a value judgment: Profit is icky, socialism is just. 

 

Mangione’s mini-manifesto declares, “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.” 

 

This is misleading to the point of being economically illiterate. For starters, spending on health care tracks with wealth. Rich countries spend more on health care than poor countries. And the richer a country, the more it spends on consuming health care goods and services. Health care, meanwhile, is only one factor in life expectancy. One reason we have a lower aggregate life-expectancy has to do with the way we measure infant mortality. Another reason is American culture. We’re a more violent country, and homicides are concentrated among younger people. We also drive more than other countries and auto fatalities factor in. Native Americans have the lowest life expectancy of any demographic group in America and probably rely more on socialized medicine than other demographic groups. Asian Americans have the highest life-expectancy, and I strongly suspect they rely on private health insurance more. 

 

Now, none of this is to say that our health care system is ideal. And if you want to talk about the distorting effects of employer-provided health benefits, or the bureaucratic morass that is Medicare and Medicaid and the VA, I’m here for it. 

 

But that’s not what anyone is talking about. They’re talking about how angry people are.  In fairness, that’s the relatively sophisticated response compared to the morons saying, “Yeah, that’s all interesting but Luigi Mangione is hot!” 

 

It’s also worth noting that saying “Murder is wrong but … ” is morally superior to saying “He had it coming!” But what enrages me about the “Murder is wrong but … ” crowd is they want to apologize for, and even valorize, the “He had it coming crowd.” You have to understand people are angry! People can only be pushed so far! 

 

On pardons and populism.

 

Which brings me to the thing Declan wanted me to write about. 

 

Liberalism is unnatural. You’ve heard me make that point a million times, so I won’t rehash it here. But that doesn’t mean it’s wholly contrary to human nature. It rests on layers of religious, philosophical, and cultural assumptions about how people can live with each other without reducing everything to contests of raw power and violence. The Christian idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God finds expression in the liberal idea that we should all be equal in the eyes of government. Christianity alone was insufficient for the task of enforcing that idea. Monarchs and other rulers reserved the right to harm or kill people for being wrong or to get what they wanted long after they embraced Christianity. It took liberalism—the liberalism of the Enlightenment—to enshrine this idea not just in law but in custom, culture, and the human heart. 

 

The Enlightenment is a metaphor for illumination, but the illumination wasn’t like that of a light switch flipping on. The illumination was gradual and there are, as Kevin notes, still many shadowy pockets even today. We remain a violent country, and illegitimate violence remains the worst violation of any right. The right to life is the first right. 

 

The pardon power is the other side of the coin of the power to punish. We all understand that it would violate our conception of legitimate government and authority if the president had the monarchical power to kill, imprison, or otherwise punish without due process of law. But for historically understandable reasons, the president retains the explicitly monarchical power to pardon. With some exceptions, presidents have respected this power by enshrining guidelines—those mockable norms!—restricting their own power. 

 

Those restrictions were a tribute to the principle championed by the Founders, by Edmund Burke, John Locke, Montesquieu, and other Enlightenment thinkers who objected to the use of “arbitrary power.” Power must be constrained by the rule of law and follow the strictures of justice and just administration. Since there’s little in the Constitution that limits the pardon power and because there were only three federal crimes at the time of ratification—treason, counterfeiting, and piracy—presidents thought it wise to come up with rules to guide them, if not bind them, as the number of federal crimes exploded. 

 

Those self-imposed rules have been deteriorating for a while, but Donald Trump ripped them up, and then Joe Biden spat on them.

 

A lot of people were very angry at me when I wrote last week—with some Swiftian irony—that Biden should be impeached for his blanket pardon of his son and erstwhile business partner. The reaction has pushed me to rescind any Swiftian caveats. But we can talk about that another time.

 

On The Remnant, Keith Whittington and I talked about the differences between a republic and a democracy. I think there are real differences, philosophically and historically. I just don’t think most of the people who smugly say “We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” have any idea what they are. But one of those differences, at least for the Founders—and for me—is that democracy refers to unrestrained rule by the masses while a republic refers to a form of popular government restrained by institutional and countervailing imperatives. The Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court are not very democratic, but they are exceedingly republican. 

 

Joe Biden pardoned a family member for understandable but ultimately selfish reasons. Donald Trump says he wants to pardon the January 6 rioters for understandable but even more selfish reasons. And Biden’s pardon greases the political skids for Trump to do just that. I have so much more to say about that, but I should bring this in for a landing. 

 

So what does this have to do with the apologias for Mangione? From where I sit, a lot. It’s just another front for the argument that the rules can be suspended, bent, or ignored if people feel like they should be. 

 

For years, people have told me that I have to forgive the bad behaviors of populist mobs on the left and the right because “people are angry.” 

 

Anger can be righteous. But anger confers no righteousness. Two-plus-two equals four, even if the crowd angrily insists it’s nine. 

 

Sadly, though, we live in a time when we invest in authentic feelings a moral and intellectual seriousness unearned by reason, fact, or argument. The people who think Brian Thompson had it coming because some people are angry about their health care are in profound moral error. The mob whisperers who attempt to explain why that anger is justified even if their methods in this case are wrong—i.e. “murder is wrong, but …”—are trying to exploit literally murderous anger to peddle their preferred policies (in much the same way many people tried to defend Hamas on October 7). They are rationalizing a profound moral error in service to a profound analytical error (they’re not even right about the unpopularity of American health care). There are debatable moral arguments for socialized medicine (I obviously disagree with them), but none of them become stronger by appeals to popular anger. 

 

(Out of curiosity, I searched Twitter for the phrase “Pardon Mangione” and the idiots did not disappoint.)

 

I do not subscribe to the view that the powerful and “the powerless” are subject to different moral rules, never mind legal ones. Liberalism is binding for everyone, not just the powerful and not just the powerless.  I believe passionately in speaking the truth. I think the “speak truth to power” canard is mostly a tool for seeking power, not fighting it. 

 

The Founders understood that mobs and despots alike could abuse their power. That was the essence of their fear of democracy and their fondness for republicanism. Arbitrarily using power outside the rule of law is wrong whether done by one person or a million—or in service to one person or a million. And lawlessly murdering someone is wrong no matter who does it and no matter who the victim is—and so is celebrating it.