If you’re wondering what the hot new trend among Brooklyn progressives is—apparently, it’s stealing from Whole Foods. That’s according to a recent episode of The Opinions, a New York Times podcast, in which host Nadja Spiegelman and guests Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino discuss what Spiegelman calls “microlooting”—“taking small things from big corporations and . . . feeling justified.”
The full half-hour discussion is something the late Tom Wolfe could have written as satire. Piker, who resides in a $2.7 million West Hollywood mansion, and Tolentino, whose family is sufficiently well-off to run an alleged human trafficking ring, present themselves as stalwart defenders of the poor and downtrodden engaging in “radical” action against a “violent” system. Piker endorses stealing not just from Whole Foods but also the Louvre. Tolentino says blowing up pipelines is probably moral. Spiegelman does a lot of giggling.
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It’s unlikely that “microlooting” has much currency outside of the circles in which Spiegelman evidently runs. More broadly, however, the endorsement of casual antisocial behavior represents a genuine current on the American Left—a view that such conduct is permissible because it’s really “the system” that’s unjust. That idea is likely to gain greater acceptance, and it’s worth saying clearly why it is wrong.
Of course, the radical chic on display on The Opinions goes back at least to the sixties. More recently, recall the defense of looting and violence during 2020, including NPR’s inexplicably friendly interview with the author of In Defense of Looting. Spiegelman invokes the “looting around the 2020 protests,” which was, she says, “such a huge talking point. It made people so uncomfortable. And I’m curious: What do you think the root of that is?”
The idea that opposition to looting is confusing or in need of serious investigation is both ridiculous and alarming. People dislike looting because they would rather their stuff wasn’t taken, especially by force. There’s no deeper “there” there.
Yet many on the leftist fringe believe that Americans have a barely suppressed taste for crime. Piker, for example, implies that many regard Luigi Mangione’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as justified (more than four in five actually do not see it that way). On this view, Americans ostensibly think that the “system” is comprehensively “broken,” and that that brokenness justifies radical, illegal action. Not only are individual laws unjust, but the whole system of law is unjust. So why not steal?
This stance, or variants of it, seems increasingly common in the Democratic Party. Take, for example, the plan offered by Tom Steyer—a leading candidate for governor of California—to arrest and prosecute ICE agents enforcing federal immigration law in his state. Or consider the growing tax revolt among Democrats, predicated on the idea that if the rich don’t pay their fair share, neither should you. Such politics, one suspects, are likely to become characteristic of the 2028 Democratic primary.
These ideas are profoundly corrosive. A healthy political order depends on the collective commitment to play by shared rules and to acknowledge the legitimacy of those rules. Crowing about shoplifting as political action cuts at the very foundation of our society. That is, in fact, what “microlooting” amounts to: an attack on the social order as such.
In Lying for Money, his book on fraud, the economic analyst Dan Davies identifies the “Canadian paradox.” Canada, he asserts, is a modern, functional economy, with elaborate formal institutions of trust—all of which are riven with fraud. Greece, by contrast, is a less functional economy, but one in which “shipowners . . . will regularly do multimillion-dollar deals on a handshake.” This, Davies argues, is because fraud is an equilibrium quantity: different natural states of economic system cash out to different levels of it. In Canada, robust institutions of trust make commerce possible but also make taking advantage of trust more common. In Greece, everyone relies on family and other informal relations, a system that minimizes downside risk but ultimately makes the Greeks much poorer.
Fraud, Davies writes, “is parasitical on the overall health of the business sector on which it preys.” Parasitical is a good way to describe shoplifting and other acts of petty theft and destruction. As Piker observes, businesses build an expectation of theft into their balance sheet, so-called “shrinkage.” But the level of shrinkage is an equilibrium quantity, and when it gets too high, the system shifts. Toothbrushes get locked behind plastic, or stores close down altogether.
Stealing, in other words, isn’t bold political action. It’s a way of making sure that the rest of society gets a little poorer just to defend itself against your antisocial behavior. There’s nothing noble about that. It’s just another behavior that eats away at the foundations of our society.