It took one assassination to wake up America and the world to the fact that ideology and ideological opposition are, as revolutionary forces that impact society, possibly passé.
Luigi Mangione did not just put a couple of bullets through UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: he upended the very idea that ideological extremism was a necessary circumstance for insurrectionism. For Mangione was, by all reports, a pleasant, privately-schooled frat boy from a wealthy and powerful Sicilian American family that is, in the BBC’s words, “literally imprinted on Baltimore”. Not the sort who would go gunning down multimillionaire hyper-corporate honchos because, as a handwritten document he had when he was arrested said, “these parasites simply had it coming”.
That document was revelatory, for it had none of the phrases that are code for ideological extremism. Here was a young man no more than inordinately cheesed off with ‘the system’ of which UnitedHealthcare, a medical insurance company profiteering off the low citizenry’s ill health—like all the other 1,160 health insurance companies in the US—was the apex predator.
He certainly is no Andreas Baader, not a communist, not even someone who had radical thoughts, leave alone a revolutionary grounding. Aside from his well-offness, he is the American everyman—always frustrated by the omnipotence and inequitability of high finance, but willing to extend his opposition to it only up to corporate-adjacent unionism.
Except that Mangione went and killed an archetype of hyper-corporatism. Mangione’s focus is on a system primarily comprising health insurance companies that he described as “parasitic”. He is not anti-neolib or anti-neocon. He is not fundamentally anti-capitalist.
On X, he followed podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump’s nominee for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat. On Goodreads, he slotted a biography of Elon Musk in his favourites list, and gave Trump’s vice president-elect J D Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy three out of five stars. He also gave four stars to anarchist Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.
He is sceptical about the left’s “identity politics” and holds “wokeism” in disdain. The right is one with the federals charging him with “terrorism” (which he has not pled guilty to). The left cannot decide if he is “a center-right biohacking Thiel-loving tech bro” or “another far right MAGA Trumper terrorist”.
So, where does one place Mangione, and why is it important to place him in the sociopolitical spectrum? People sceptical of his millions of supporters say he is a member of the Grey Tribe—a loose, technocratic thought-congregation opposed and thinking itself superior to the Red Tribe (Republicans and conservatives) and the Blue Tribe (Democrats and progressive liberals).
The Grey Tribe does not exactly have the deep state in its sights, but it is suspicious of its intended or unintended manifestations in government and the private sector. Like Musk, he thinks of “effective accelerationism” as a force for near-future good. Unlike many wannabe revolutionaries, Mangione refused to “pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument”.
The crowdfunding for Mangione’s defence is skyrocketing: it was more than $200,000 a week ago, before the media pulled the plug on updates. So is his support base. A poll revealed that 41 percent of young voters found Mangione’s action “acceptable”; 22 percent of Democrats agreed with his action, as did 16 percent of independents, and only 2 percent of Republicans.
“It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play,” wrote Mangione in his ‘manifesto’ (as released on journalist Ken Klippenstein’s Substack, but not in the legacy media). There is no indication that Mangione has a deep understanding of the byzantine, ideology-mediated pedagogy of power.
“I am against the system!” has become an unideological but hardly powerless battlecry. We cannot now predict if it will become the title sequence of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. But the possibility has set the intelligentsia in the US and the world alike thinking: What if it is possible to topple the system without using ideology? Have we come to the point that mere “awareness” of “power games” is enough to fuel violent or far-reaching expressions of discontent?
UnitedHealthcare is only a cog in the system, but it’s a massive cog in the healthcare insurance system: in 2022, health insurers in the US earned about $1 trillion in total net earned premiums, with UnitedHealthcare accounting for $221 billion in premium writing. But popular grousing against the health insurance system has been increasing to encompass the System—the state. And the state often means the deep state, a shadowy hyperpower entity that is beyond ideology.
Donald Trump came to power posing as a defier of the system. Not six months will pass before ever more voters understand that he is the system, among other duplicitous strongmen: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, among others. Each of them is facing significant national opposition, often predicated not on ideology but on a broader, nebulous, and, therefore, also an all-encompassing antisystemism.
The anti-systemists are in the waiting room: Péter Magyar, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Ahmed al-Tantawi, Ilya Valeryevich Yashin, Mohammad al-Ghamdi. And most of them are liberals.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
