The killing of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson in New York last week, which appears to have been motivated by “ill will towards corporate America”, is the latest sign that a new era of intense political violence is taking hold in the US.
What is significant about political violence in America today is the extent to which it garners significant mass public support. Luigi Mangione, the man charged with murdering Thompson, has become a hero to some on social media. And national surveys we have carried out at the University of Chicago have found that, from 2021 to 2024, 10 to 15 per cent of Americans consistently support violence for political goals that they endorse.
Political violence in the US has ebbed and flowed for decades, but past episodes of what can be called “violent populism” have been rare. In the early 1920s, for instance, America witnessed a dramatic rise in dues-paying membership of the Ku Klux Klan. This was a period of extensive violence against Black people, Jews and Catholics that swept across states from Indiana to Georgia and beyond, in support of the Klan’s political goal of ensuring the country was “one-hundred per cent American”.
