Bodies

Security footage showed the suspect stopping at a Starbucks before the shooting. He’d worn surgical gloves to handle his coffee cup. While the police were searching for him, something else – a ‘ceaseless feast of schadenfreude’ – was spreading online: ‘Prior authorisation is required for thoughts and prayers’; ‘Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage.’

Some pointed out that the NYPD’s reward for information, $10,000, was less than the average UnitedHealthcare deductible. The observation that justice had become as transactional as American healthcare – a system in which companies like UnitedHealthcare routinely imposes $14,000 deductibles on families – spread quickly, because it wasn’t really news to anyone. On social media sites, UnitedHealth Group had to disable comments after tens of thousands of users reacted to Brian Thompson’s death notice with the ‘clapping’ emoji.

The body has always been one of America’s primary political frontiers, a place where our deepest contradictions play out. A nation founded on radical freedom, built on radical bondage; a constitution that proclaimed liberty and enshrined chattel slavery, reducing human bodies to property, labour to capital. The contradiction persists in new forms, in a world where algorithms and actuarial calculations determine which lives matter and which don’t. UnitedHealth’s 32 per cent claim denial rate – double the industry average – isn’t a bureaucratic statistic; it’s a ‘death sentence by spreadsheet’, as one user on Reddit had it. In Texas, the state offers private citizens $10,000 to sue anyone who helps provide an abortion. The methods vary but the logic remains the same: some bodies must be controlled, and everyone must be enlisted in maintaining that control.

It isn’t that we lack the traditional warning signs. The torchlit parades, chants of ‘blood and soil’, are still part of our political repertoire. But our endless debates about whether fascism is coming – our fixation on these spectacular displays – obscure the ways that corporatised state violence has been here all along. That so many progressive Americans took such satisfaction in the death of a middle-aged father of two suggests how thoroughly each side has absorbed the other’s logic – and the media’s bafflement at this response reveals its continued inability to come to grips with men (Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk) and movements (MAGA, Project 2025) that had telegraphed their intentions at every turn.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr frames vaccine mandates as violations of individual freedom while championing restrictive abortion policies that place bodies under state control. The pandemic turned schools into battlegrounds where public health measures, driven by legitimate concern for safety, collided with deeply personal questions of autonomy.

In Texas, the lieutenant governor said:

No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.

Suggestions that older Americans, essential workers or the immunocompromised should have sacrificed themselves for the economy crystallised how thoroughly our bodies had become instruments of political will. Along with inflation, these are the faultlines – between personal freedom and state control, protection and coercion – that drove the American election.

The pattern repeats everywhere that power meets flesh. At the border, migrants become data points in a vast bureaucratic machinery, their bodies tracked, detained and processed according to algorithms that determine their value. In state legislatures, lawmakers dictate which bathrooms people can use, which medical care they can receive, which sports teams they can join, as if identity were something to be authorised or denied, like an insurance claim.

Even public health, meant to protect life, becomes another system of sorting and control. Essential workers. High-risk populations. Pre-existing conditions. Each category determines whose bodies matter, whose labour is necessary, whose lives are expendable, whose murders make headline news. The language changes as the underlying system resets: bodies must be classified before they can be controlled.

Fascism doesn’t start where the body ends; it begins by absorbing the body entirely – ‘everything within the state, nothing outside the state’ – and this absorption happens at a physical as well as a psychological level. The wave of euphoria over Thompson’s murder signals something beyond anger at a broken system. His death became a kind of collective revenge fantasy, his body transformed from person to symbol. As if here, too, some bodies must be sacrificed for the collective good.