Analysis
Luigi Mangione, the anti-capitalist avatar in a country awash in firepower
Each year, 650,000 Americans declare bankruptcy for medical expenses. The cheers of the many who celebrated the murder on social media revealed an uncomfortable truth: in their hearts, millions of Americans were dreaming of such revenge.
The only words coming from Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth, in Manhattan, have so far been those caught on camera as police officers manhandled him toward an evidentiary hearing in Pennsylvania: “...completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience...” It’s impossible to tell what those words were actually referring to; predictably, however, they fueled the churn of speculation about the young man's motives.
Thomas Dickey, his defense attorney, has said that he will fight the New York prosecutor's extradition request, at least until evidence is formally presented to justify it. This is a procedural objection, most likely intended only to delay the trial for a murder for which the evidence collected by police so far seems to have Mangione dead to rights, including a gun compatible with the shell casings inscribed with words against health insurance companies, surveillance footage, and writings accusing the Thompson-run company of abuse that Mangione had with him at the time of his arrest, in a McDonalds in Altuna.
In the writings, he denounces health insurance companies which “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.” “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” he writes in what has been called his “manifesto.”
The possible motivations that drove him to extreme measures on Dec. 4 will likely be the number one focus of the investigations and the trial, but one historical and incontrovertible fact has already been noted: the massive and immediate identification of vast sectors of the public with the young alleged killer.
Sympathy for him, coupled with mockery, if not outright contempt, for the victim and the company he represents, is widespread across the U.S., marking the latest watershed in a divided country.
The cheers of the many who celebrated the murder on social media revealed an uncomfortable truth: in their hearts, millions of Americans were dreaming of such revenge. Indeed, of all the anonymous and unaccountable forces that govern the daily lives of citizens, for-profit healthcare is the one that most consistently inflicts torment and the cruelest injustices on helpless citizens.
Health insurance is particularly at fault: a $1.6 trillion-a-year industry whose business model is to collect exorbitant premiums from customers – who are hostages to a monopolistic market – and then provide as little service as possible, drawing staggering profits from the difference (for UnitedHealth, $371 billion in 2023 alone).
Interactions with insurance companies are a universal and bipartisan trauma. There is no American who isn’t intimately familiar with the harrowing experience of having to negotiate a life-saving treatment, drug or operation with anonymous officials and accountants on the other end of a phone call or email, the helplessness in the face of denied authorizations or reimbursements without the possibility of appeal, and, not infrequently, the despair of seeing loved ones pay with their lives for incomprehensible and always corporate-friendly regulations.
There is no concept of a right to health care in the American legal system. The market reigns supreme, and, within it, the insurers: intermediaries who provide no care but extract their profits from doctors and patients according to an inflexible and completely man-made logic.
From the perspective of the ordinary person, American healthcare is a litany of horror stories.
Women discharged on the day of birth for not having sufficient insurance. Tens of thousands of dollars billed for one emergency room visit. Care denied because essential procedures are declared “elective” or “excessive” by insurers (including, in the case of the elderly, because “logical life expectancy has already been reached”).
Each year, 650,000 Americans declare bankruptcy for medical expenses. Only this week, an announcement by insurance giant Anthem made headlines: it would continue to reimburse doctors for surgical anesthesia, but only “for a limited number of minutes.” Per capita health spending in the country is more than $13,000, double the average in other countries, while life expectancy is the shortest in the developed world.
This is the backdrop against which the tragedy in Manhattan unfolded. The catharsis set off by the murder of the CEO who was on his way to celebrating another quarter of stratospheric profits with shareholders was proportional to the violence inflicted by that industry on the populace at a minute and intimate scale.
Nevertheless, the affair immediately led to bad faith and cynical exploitation.
Many conservatives, in particular, engaged in performative outrage at the praise of Luigi Mangione on social media, conveniently forgetting their own virtual monopoly on rhetorical violence against the weakest (and on violent attacks, which are the virtually exclusive purview of right-wing extremists). The strategy can be seen in the Wall Street Journal headline which described Mangione as an “Ivy Leaguer With Anticapitalist Leanings.” Italian newspapers such as the Corriere della Sera immediately picked up the theory that the young man had been “radicalized” by universities dominated by elites who have supposedly converted them into hotbeds of “radicalism.” However, U Penn, where Mangione graduated, is also the alma mater of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
And Mangione’s social media history features plenty of expressions of admiration for both Musk and Peter Thiel, the puppet master behind Silicon Valley's neo-reactionaries.
The first partial accounts we have of Mangione do not match up with the anti-corporate revolutionary many had imagined, but rather with a post-ideological young man with a passion for technology. Another young man who may have been “self-radicalized” in the post-everything vacuum of the internet and who was plagued by health problems.
He is certainly also a creation of the abnormal levels of violence and firepower in America, awash in rage and guns. All these features also make him look similar to the perpetrators of the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, the fact that he focused his rage on the healthcare-industrial complex has turned him into an ideal avatar for millions of Americans, at the instinctual level. All this while a cartel of ultra-capitalists is preparing to install itself in the most powerful roles in the country, aiming to dismantle it and start the most massive privatization in history.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/luigi-mangione-lavatar-anti-capitalista-a-processo on 2024-12-13