Yoopya with The Conversation
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.”
Wait, slow down: “We” have not been here before. The major, most obvious – and virtually always ignored – difference between the Gilded Age and our own time is that we did not live in it. None of us were alive in the late 19th century. The people who were alive back then didn’t think like us or act like us. Finding structural similarities does not turn writers into Nostradamus, able to discern the signs and predict the future.
It is all too easy to use the past as a tool for driving home lessons derived from modern beliefs or ideologies. Without knowing much about either Thompson or Mangione – let alone anarchists or Horatio Alger heroes – Mangione becomes the equivalent of a 19th-century avenger of the working class, while Thompson is a modern “Ragged Dick,” rising to his post through pluck and hard work.
Most popular and political appeals to history are not just superficial, they are also quite ahistorical. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the courts.
Jonathan Gienapp’s new and brilliant book, “Against Constitutional Originalism,” eviscerates what he describes as the sloppiness, ahistoricism and anachronisms of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative members, who often justify their decisions by invoking what the nation’s founders intended. According to Gienapp, their core sin is simple: They are ventriloquists putting their modern ideas in the founders’ mouths and claiming they have recovered original meanings.
Emerging from the morass
This ahistorical thinking runs across the political spectrum. It comes from asking the wrong questions, and thinking that structural similarities produce roughly identical outcomes.
The two periods share more than soaring inequality and vast technological change. There were attacks on racism and resurgent racism; mass immigration and backlash against it; frequent swings in party control; economic booms and busts; a dearth of bold leadership; failures in governance; and outbursts of violence.
Both eras also experienced declines in lifespans, environmental deterioration that has affected health, and the efforts of the well-to-do to seal themselves off from the diseases of the less fortunate.
But often left out is the fact that the Gilded Age confronted these issues; it was also, paradoxically, a period of reform. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, lifespans increased, childhood mortality fell, epidemic diseases declined, and public health produced remarkable results.
Now, that trajectory has reversed. Death and disease are at the heart of the murder of Brian Thompson, who was on his way to meet with investors hoping to profit from a company whose calculated decisions sentenced some people to suffer for the gain of others.
Useful questions might be: How did the Gilded Age escape its crises? And why did solutions that seemed to gradually improve health and well-being for most people over generations cease to work? How did UnitedHealthcare, the people who profit from it and those eager to invest in it come to be?
There is a history there.
Author:
Richard White | Professor of American History, Stanford University