The US has become one of the most violent countries in the developed world, whether you measure that by declining life expectancy, traffic deaths, incarceration rates, or the militarization of police and the resulting civilian deaths. At the same time, we have staggering income inequality contributing to that decline in life expectancy, and we have what the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “anti-state state” — a state that no longer feels it has a duty to protect the society it governs. That combination produces what I borrow from Friedrich Engels to call “social murder.” It’s not one person killing another by hand; it’s underlying structures producing death and harm at scale.

The 2008 financial crisis is a good example. I call it an act of violence. People lost homes, pensions, jobs — and unlike past recessions, the recovery was radically uneven. The coasts and the tech hubs bounced back; large parts of “flyover country” never really did. The opioid crisis is another. At its peak a few years ago, close to 110,000 Americans a year were dying of overdoses. To put that in perspective: over the entire decade the United States was in Vietnam, about 55,000 Americans were killed, an experience that seared itself into the national memory. Here we have twice that many deaths in a single year, and we’ve simply tolerated it.