WayOfTheBern

In his speech for the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, Senator John Sherman of Ohio made a number of legal points about how to understand competition. But the thrust of his argument was about law and order, for the specter of violence was hanging over a nation that had within living memory experienced a massive and traumatic civil war. And there had been significant, and violent, strikes involving railroads, sometimes nationwide.

Sherman believed America as a free people simply could not sustain the rise of immense concentrations of power in the industrial corporations he saw in his day. Congress had to act, or chaos would reign. Here’s what he said:

You must heed their appeal or be ready for the socialist, the communist, and the nihilist. Society is now disturbed by forces never felt before. The popular mind is agitated with problems that may disturb social order, and among them all none is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity that has grown within a single generation out of the concentration of capital into vast combinations to control production and trade and to break down competition.

Just two years earlier, President Grover Cleveland, in his 1888 State of the Union, discussed that same social chaos in the wake of the rise of large corporations and the inequality they brought.

Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government but the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.

The social contract, in other words, goes both ways. It’s not just mean for a small clique to run a corrupt system, but Americans who are put upon, if given no peaceful options, will fight back violently.

...one school of political thought is that a key way to maintain social order is through legitimacy. The people had to be persuaded that corporations and government were on their side. “If we desire respect for the law,” said Louis Brandeis, “we must first make the law respectable.”

Early on Wednesday morning, an assassin killed UnitedHealth Care CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan. UnitedHealth Care is the biggest health insurer in America, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, which is the largest employer of doctors, a giant pharmacy benefit manager, a technology firm, and so forth, basically a giant health care platform. (I wrote up how these types of firms formed in 2020 in a piece called How CVS Became a Health Care Tyrant).

We don’t know why the killer did it, though he scrawled “deny” “defend” and “depose” on bullet casings, indicating that he at least wants people to believe it’s a result of unjust and routine denials of care by the health insurance giant. "There had been some threats," his wife Paulette Thompson told NBC News. "Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage?” While I’m immediately suspicious of such a neat and clean-sounding motive, if you do take it on face value, that does sound a lot like the mob rule Jefferson, Sherman, Cleveland, and others warned about.

... almost everywhere outside of such official channels, pouring out through every seam of the internet, was a different message, a message of raw unadulterated hatred, of “this guy deserved it.” This picture, for instance, came from a Reddit channel dedicated to nursing. Yes, these are the people who heal for a living, and they are mocking this guy’s death. “My patients died while those bitches enjoyed 26 million dollars,” said one. There are endless angry comments about Thompson from people who try to stop people from dying. That’s how bad it is.

While I really dislike a lot of these people, none of us should want to live in a country where assassination becomes a method of political expression. It’s hard to see democracy surviving if elected leaders and corporate leaders feel they might be shot at any point. And that’s why we have to actually get our laws working again. I hope that men like Carl Nichols and Fortune 500 CEOs start to wake up, and see that there is deep rage outside their clubby environs that can’t be fixed with security measures but must be addressed by some measure of social obligation to the people who live here.

After all, societies that give citizens no way to control their own lives, but put the fate of their people in the hands of distant masters with no concern at all for their wellbeing, invite disaster. We’ve always known that. It’s one of the main reasons for the passage of our antitrust laws. So I hope we can get some control over our society again, before we truly do spin out of control.