HISTORYHow Should We Look to History to Make Sense of Luigi Mangione’s Alleged Murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson?

By Richard White

Published 20 December 2024

When I and most other historians talk about parallels between the Gilded Age and today, the comparisons are structural. They reflect broad conditions affecting millions of people. It’s when pundits pull particular examples from the past to explain the actions of individuals today that trouble arises.

I’m a Gilded Age historian who has drawn parallels between our current moment and the late 19th century, two periods known for staggering economic inequality and sweeping technological change.

But much of the coverage of the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing him, has given me pause.

As many journalists and pundits would have it, both Thompson and Mangione appear to have wandered into the New York borough of Manhattan from the late 19th century.

In their interpretation, the two Gilded Ages are no longer running on parallel tracks. They have collided, mixing their occupants and baggage into a chaotic mess.

When I and most other historians talk about parallels between the Gilded Age and today, the comparisons are structural. They reflect broad conditions affecting millions of people. It’s when pundits pull particular examples from the past to explain the actions of individuals today that trouble arises.

We Haven’t Been Here Before
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens casts Thompson as a character out of a Horatio Alger novel: a working-class hero who pulled himself up by the bootstraps. Also writing in The New York Times, sociologist Zeynip Tufekci comes close to making Luigi Mangione a reincarnation of Alexander Berkman, the anarchist who tried to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Over in The New Yorker, Dhruv Khullar suggests that in its arbitrariness and callousness, the prototype for the U.S. medical system, which Mangione excoriated in his manifesto, originated somewhere in the Gilded Age.

Today’s historians and journalists obviously think the past has much to teach their fellow citizens. And their motives are sensible: They want to push back against the idea that the past is irrelevant, that everything important has occurred in the past 15 minutes – a view reflected in a favorite phrase of President-elect Donald Trump to describe whatever crisis du jour is afflicting the United States: “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

So comparisons between two periods can serve as a brake on hasty claims that everything has changed and that the current moment is unprecedented. But in my view, specific comparisons often make a categorical mistake. They substitute modern beliefs and judgments for those of people in the past.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder, Tufekci wrote that “The currents we are seeing are expressions of something more fundamental. We’ve been here before. And it wasn’t pretty.”