Progressive Perspectives on This Moment of Rising Class Consciousness

– Luigi Mangione on December 10, 2024.
(Photo: Benjamin B. Braun | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP)

Luigi Mangione’s violent act against UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson [on December 4] is already being framed as the work of a deranged mind. But this interpretation risks obscuring the broader reality: a healthcare system so broken that it left a man in unrelenting pain with nowhere to turn. Mangione’s actions, while extreme, demand a deeper examination of how systemic failures in healthcare and class inequality drive people to such desperation.

I believe this moment of class consciousness is significant, though I worry that in the wake of his capture and inevitable sentencing, it will be forcibly reversed by media outlets, pundits, and politicians labeling him as “crazy.” Americans are notably hesitant to align themselves with someone labeled insane, so his mental state will likely be exaggerated to discredit his actions as the deranged work of a madman. It will very likely be suggested he was undergoing a psychotic event when he carried out the calculated murder of Brian Thompson. While unceasing pain can degrade anyone’s state of mind, at this point, such claims seem unlikely to me. Nonetheless, psychopathy will likely be posed to dismiss his actions as irrational, separating him from his humanity and rendering him undeserving of empathy in the eyes of a deeply ableist and saneist public.

– Rori Porter
Excerptyed from “Luigi Mangione, Healthcare Despair,
and Class Consciousness in America”
Medium
December 10, 2024

After the killing of the CEO of United HealthCare, the largest of [the] billion dollar insurance companies, there was an immediate outpouring of anger toward the health insurance industry. Some people have stepped forward to condemn this anger. I am not one of them.

The anger is 1000% justified. It is long overdue for the media to cover it. It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger.

Because this anger is not about the killing of a CEO. If everyone who was angry was ready to kill the CEOs, the CEOs would already be dead. That is not what this reaction is about. It is about the mass death and misery – the physical pain, the mental abuse, the medical debt, the bankruptcies in the face of denied claims and denied care and bottomless deductibles on top of ballooning premiums – that this “health care” industry has levied against the American people for decades. With no one standing in their way! Just a government – two broken parties – enabling this industry’s theft and, yes, murder.

And now the press is calling me to ask, “Why are people angry, Mike? Do you condemn murder, Mike?”

Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry.

. . . But don’t get me wrong. No one needs to die. In fact, that’s my point. No one needs to die – no one should die because they don’t “have” health insurance. Not one single person should die because their “health insurance” denies their health care in order to make a buck or Thirty Two Billion Bucks.

– Michael Moore
Excerpted from “A Manifesto Against
For-Profit Health Insurance Companies”
MichaelMoore.com
December 13, 2024

Re. Luigi, the issue isn’t about “should” or “shouldn’t.” Obviously no one should commit murder.

The issue is about what IS. As JFK said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

The soullessness of crony capitalism is going to be held accountable. Its sociopathic careless disregard for the safety, health, wellbeing – even lives – of many millions of people is an unsustainable assault on nature itself. And it will not stand, regardless what any of us think.

Any politician or business leader refusing to heed the rage of the people right now is an irresponsible, at best a naive conspirator in the dawning of a very dark chapter in American history.

We can choose wisdom instead. We can choose ethics. We can choose love.

– Marianne Williamson
via social media
December 13, 2024

The outpouring of gleeful public support for Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been as striking as it has been polarizing – but not along the familiar left/right fault lines. Rather, it’s highlighted a divide between those perceived as cultural insiders – politicians, media figures, and pundits – and the rest of the public.

As politicians and commentators across the political spectrum moved to condemn the shooting and chastised those celebrating it, the response has been equally ferocious, directed not only at mainstream Democrats but also at conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, who found themselves skewered by their own audiences for failing to read the room.

. . . The bipartisan outrage reveals a deeper truth: what has often been framed as a backlash to the ‘radical left’ – and ruthlessly exploited by figures like Shapiro and Walsh – is, in reality, a much broader rejection of the status quo. The reason this anger appears partisan is not because it targets left-wing ideology, but because Democrats appear to be the only party still rhetorically committed to defending the existing social (and political) order. This perception endures even in the face of real policy differences between the two parties on issues like health care. In the public imagination, the symbolic fight against the status quo matters more than the substance of governance.

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party in 2016 severed its rhetorical ties to establishment politics, allowing Republicans to position themselves as the party of populist rage. From the moment he descended the gilded escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, Trump positioned himself as a wrecking ball aimed at the system.

His appeal wasn’t rooted in ideology, but in rage – rage at institutions that, in the eyes of a significant portion of the electorate, promised hope and prosperity but seemed to deliver only corruption and dysfunction. His campaign wasn’t about conservatism. It was about contempt for everything Washington represents. And this anti-establishment stance, more than any policy position, is what resonated with millions of Americans across traditional party lines.

This scorched-earth approach to politics forced Democrats into an uneasy defensive crouch – and a rhetorical trap. By shielding the system from Trump’s onslaught, they unwittingly cast themselves as its champions, tethering their credibility to institutions many Americans had long since deemed hopelessly broken and corrupt.

The credibility gap was on full display in the 2024 election, as the party rallied around its familiar “save democracy” pitch. But for millions of voters, the notion that there’s even a functioning democracy worth saving was laughable. In a country where the preferences of the bottom 90 percent of Americans have a near-zero impact on public policy, until Democrats shake their image as defenders of the status quo, they risk becoming a marginalized political force.

The tragic irony, of course, is that Trump’s movement offers no solutions to the problems it claims to address. His administration will not alleviate the struggles of ordinary Americans. It will only further entrench the plutocratic status quo. Similarly, nothing is likely to come of the morbid fandom surrounding Luigi Mangione. He is a meme, not a movement.

But both Trump’s re-election, then, and public’s reaction to Mangione’s actions reveal a harsh truth about the political moment we are living through: Americans are increasingly fueled by rage at society’s failure to address the everyday problems they face, but are not seeking solutions. The public’s contempt for the establishment is not a controlled fire, it is a consuming blaze; what they want, above all, are personalities who can channel that.

And in harnessing that rage, both Trump and Mangione reveal a culture willing to tolerate – and even celebrate – vile acts, so long as they are inflicted on those who symbolize what we have come to collectively despise.

– Jason Chukwuma
Excerpted from “Donald Trump, Luigi Mangione and
the Political Power of Raging Against the Machine”
Daily Beast
December 17, 2024

Following is Hard Lens Media’s December 14 interview with Jason Chukwuma, a law student at Harvard Law School and a graduate of Harvard College. Chukwuma runs the @truthispeaking account across TikTok, X, and Instagram, where he discusses politics and culture.

In this 40-minute segment, Chukwuma and Hard Lens Media host Kit Cabello discuss the ongoing outpouring of anger against the health insurance industry in the U.S. They also talk about the role the Democratic Party can and should play in recapturing from the right the political discourse on this and other important issues. As Chukwuma says in both this interview and in his article highlighted above, the right in the U.S. has become an extreme political movement.

The first 15 minutes of this interview in particular provides an excellent analysis of not only what where witnessing in this moment of rising class consciousness, but how the Democratic establishment has failed in offering any kind of meaningful response.





Related Off-site Links:
Exclusive: Luigi’s Manifesto – KenKlippenstein.com, December 10, 2024).
Luigi Mangione Charged With Murder as “An Act of Terrorism” for Killing of Insurance CEO – Eloise Goldsmith (Common Dreams, December 17, 2024).
Luigi Mangione, CEO Oligarchs, and America’s Hidden Majority Party – Will Bunch (The Philidelphia Inquirer, December 19, 2024).
A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies – Michael Moore (MichaelMoore.com, December 13, 2024).
What Luigi Mangione and Daniel Penny Are Telling Us About America – Caleb Brennan (The Nation, December 13, 2024).

UPDATE: UnitedHealthcare’s Decades-Long Fight to Block Reform – Branko Marcetic (Jacobin, December 21, 2024).