Shoplifting isn’t a political statement Middle-class crims are the worst

Every weekday at 8.30am, subway stations in New York swell with yawning workers. The usual characters appear: J.P. Morgan’s Midtown warriors in gilets and brown brogues, homeless men fented out on benches, pretty women with giant claw clips and Goyard bags en route to marketing agencies, tiny and furious old ladies with dogs. When the train pulls in, packed passengers glare at platform-dwellers — so many extra sardines. The most aggressive cram into the car: rugged individualism is alive and well. Toes are trampled, protests huffed, poles claimed. Five times a week I am elbowed in the face, and five times a week I have the same thought: most of these fuckers haven’t even paid.

In New York, hopping the barriers to dodge the three-dollar fare is completely unremarkable: every minute, 330 metropolitans do just that. Fare evasion here is impressively egalitarian: silver-haired arty men in natty glasses, glam Zoomettes wending their way to wine bars, shouty tweakers in soiled trousers and bashful grads in Docs and Dickies — they all hurdle through as a matter of course, completely indifferent to the equally indifferent MTA staff and utterly unashamed in front of paying passengers, in whose armpits they are likely to be lodged for a good 10 minutes.

The couldn’t-care-less mentality is endemic in New York, the product of old-school braggadocio enthusiastically taken up by waves of secretly delighted transplants. Shoplifting, spitting, yelling, pissing, littering, and barrier-hopping — these will never abate, and are mostly tolerable failings of the best city in the world. But they are not political statements, acts of protest or a kick in the teeth to “the man”. Nevertheless this is how I’ve repeatedly heard such transgressions justified by friends whose parents pay their rent and still leap over barriers, by those who post about “climate revolt” and hock gum on sidewalks to choke pigeons, and of course by the hopelessly misguided trio who appeared on a New York Times podcast last week to brag about filching from Whole Foods.

The New Yorker columnist Jia Tolentino, the NYT’s Nadja Spiegelman, and Hasan Piker — the midwit Marxist streamer accused of electrocuting his dog and who admitted having solicited a prostitute (not so against the free market now, ey?) —  gabbed about “microlooting” — small thefts justified by the fact that, as Spiegelman puts it, “It’s so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” Quick-fire scenarios are floated; stealing from the Louvre, Piker says, is “cool”. Stealing from supermarket chains is “not a big deal” in a “utilitarian sense”, says Tolentino. And Spiegelman wonders why she should “have to pay for organic avocados” when Jeff Bezos “has too much money” (Amazon, which he founded, acquired Whole Foods in 2017). Antisocial behavior is justified here — explicitly or tacitly — under the lazy logic of “protest”.

Unlike microlooting, however, Tolentino finds “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup… profoundly selfish, immoral [and] collectively destructive” — presumably the bimbo-coding of that drink is unrelated. The lines of moral permissibility seem to be drawn, in other words, along the exact same lines of what these rich, educated progressives consider “cool”.

And that’s the real problem. Progressives have always found extravagant ways to reframe the ills which they personally enjoy — prostitution, pornography, choking women. Now shoplifting gets the same treatment. Tolentino is not really stealing lemons because it’s a way of flipping the bird at Bezos; she’s stealing them because she wants them. Nor are the barrier-bumpers actually trying to signal their dissatisfaction with the frequency or cleanliness of public transport — reasoning I have actually heard with my own ears, despite the fact these things can only be improved by the very funding the free riders are withholding; they are bumping barriers because they just don’t want to pay. Nicking groceries and dodging fares are age-old problems. What’s new is the towering cowardice of those who can’t admit that they, like most people, act mainly out of self-interested desire.

The appealing but deceptive idea that low-level criminality is a laudable demonstration against “the system” in fact conceals envy towards those in that “system” who, like Bezos, have known success. This resentment is particularly native to the media class, whose peers tend to out-earn them in higher-salaried fields like law and finance — conferring on writers like Spiegelman and Tolentino the faintly plausible whiff of bookish martyrdom. Nevertheless, and particularly in New York, mag luminaries can still live in $2.2 million brownstones in Clinton Hill; sticking it to the man by pilfering in the produce aisle might pass in grim artists’ squats, but five-finger discounts are harder to justify on six-figure salaries.

The thrill that these comfortably middle-class crims surely feel when larping “direct action” by pocketing expensive pesto is doubly insulting when you consider the fact that those from different racial or class strata are far likelier to be punished for the same behavior — or else to feel the consequences of price hikes when corporations adjust for lost profits. Among types so fixated on questions of privilege and identity, the asymmetry of the consequences of shoplifting seems a convenient omission.

Yet if it is cringingly tone-deaf for multimillionaire socialists like Piker to advocate for petty crime, the problem exceeds hypocrisy: it furnishes the craven justification of greater and darker acts. Tolentino steals lemons; Luigi Mangione allegedly executes the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in broad daylight. The NYT podcast vaulted from discussing one crime to discussing the other, framing them not as unrelated acts of greed or brutality but as twin expressions of discontent within an unfair system. Nobody condoned Thompson’s slaughter, but neither was there particular concern. According to Piker, a pub bore-level parroter of bastardized theory, Thompson was “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder” (cribbing Engels).

Sometimes the coherence of an argument can be determined by its level of abstraction from bald facts; if you have to dig up a 19th-century corpse to explain why it’s OK to shoot a father of two in the back, you’ve probably already lost. Nevertheless, the bullshit theory of microlooting as 1,000 righteous cuts to an evil system can only lead the way of vigilantism and mobocracy: both nicking and killing are really about desire — for goods, for blood. Seen for what they are, these urges look rather less noble.

When public intellectuals corral theory to justify flagrant acts of laziness, selfishness and greed, it collapses serious social questions into wishy-washy pools of moral relativism. The Left’s power of advocacy is being eroded as a result: these movements once claimed to hold the monopoly on moral authority, but it’s difficult to take young metropolitan socialists seriously when they make adoring memes about an accused killer. Piker’s musings on Mangione read very differently in the days after an attempted shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner, in a room full of journalists not unlike the circles in which the NYT’s podcast trio undoubtedly mingle.

Again, Cole Tomas Allen appears to have been motivated by Mangione-like grievances. Would Piker, Tolentino and Spiegelman be inclined to more strongly condemn vigilantism if they were in the room where it was carried out, as many of their colleagues were? It is important that liberal chin-strokers are not allowed to dissolve the borders of acceptability: the consequence is the vertiginous slip into political violence and anti-social apathy that increasingly flavors both the news cycle and everyday life. Notions of “social violence” of the kind supposedly perpetrated by the slain CEO rely on cynical academic fudging; answering it with actual, bloodied, writhing violence of the kind Allen planned on Saturday can lead only to chaos. The Left has forgotten what harm means, bogged down in fashionable nostrums while forgetting the difference between words and wounds. The two are apples and oranges — both of which Tolentino would probably slip into her deep, deep pockets anyway.

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