Why are so many Americans acting like a pack of ghouls?

As David Hume would tell you, all moral statements are technically matters of opinion. I can’t prove to you that murder is bad, no matter how many facts I cite. I can tell you that it leads to a more violent, poorer society, but you can just shrug and say “So what?”. I can argue that murder is maladaptive for the survival of the human species, but you can just shrug and say “So what?”. At the end of the day, the only thing I can do to convince you that murder is bad is to make an emotional appeal — to ask you how you would feel if someone murdered your parents, or to tell you about the bereaved families of murder victims, or to appeal to the Bible, etc. If you’re the kind of person who just thinks murder is good, those appeals aren’t going to get through to you.

Usually, when you bring this up at 2 AM in a dorm-room philosophy discussion in college, some moral absolutist furrows his brow and says something like “But OK in practice, everyone agrees that murder is bad, right?”. And then everyone rolls their eyes and says “Well yes OK of course everyone agrees murder is bad, but there are lots of more interesting cases where opinions differ!”, and then after another half hour of that everyone goes out for some late-night pizza.

But guess what? It turns out that not everyone thinks murder is bad. The screenshot at the top of this post is from Taylor Lorenz, a prominent journalist who has worked for the New York Times and the Washington Post. After UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered the other day, Lorenz celebrated the killing in a number of posts, saying “We want these executives dead.” But she wasn’t the only one. In fact, quite a few Americans celebrated the murder on social media. In a poll, almost a third of Americans under the age of 45 had a positive opinion of Luigi Mangione, the probable murderer:

Even some top progressive politicians appeared to equivocate on the morality of the case. Elizabeth Warren defended those who felt triumphant about the murder:

“The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told HuffPost in an interview on Tuesday when asked about the cold response to Thompson’s death, which included celebratory posts on social media.

“Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” Warren added. “This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that denying insurance claims is also an act of violence:

I have to admit I was pretty astonished to see so many Americans publicly supporting a murder. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been. When Hamas massacred a bunch of random Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, leftist organizations in the U.S. adopted the symbol of a parachute — which some of the Hamas soldiers used to carry out the attack. Many exulted in the violence. Compared to that sustained outpouring of ghoulishness, the cheering of Thompson’s murder is small potatoes.

And the ghoulishness is by no means confined to the political left. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was left with a fractured skull from an attack in 2022, Donald Trump mocked him and his son Donald Trump Jr. joked about it, much to the delight of many rightists. Meanwhile, Republicans have come to tolerate an absurd level of personal immorality from their leaders. Matt Gaetz, who has been investigated for child sex trafficking and accused of having sex with multiple minors, withdrew his bid for Attorney General, but not before Elon Musk threatened to primary any legislator who didn’t vote for Gaetz’s confirmation.

And while a few leftists try to cheer Hamas, a much larger number of rightists enjoy ridiculing Ukraine for defending itself against Russian conquest and brutalization. Here’s just one small example:

In past eras, conservatives probably would have valued the immense courage of the Ukrainian defenders, including Zelensky himself, who has repeatedly placed himself at great personal risk. Now they jeer, despite the fact that most of the ones doing the jeering never served in the military themselves.

In their private lives, Americans are probably just as moral as ever. But publicly, they seem to be acting ever more vicious, callous, savage, and nasty. It’s possible, of course, that this “trend” isn’t real, and that Americans — or possibly, humans in general — were always like this, and we just didn’t see it as much because we didn’t have social media. There were people who cheered the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., many Democrats shrugged at the rape allegations against Bill Clinton, and so on. But for what it’s worth, Americans themselves seem to think their country has become less moral in recent years:...