All we want is to believe

Hello there! I know it’s been a minute. A planned week off for Thanksgiving turned into much more when I came down with COVID and an ensuing weeks-long bout of post-viral fatigue. This thing is still with us, and no joke. Get your vax and mask up.

There’s a lot I’ve wanted to write about in the time I’ve been gone including the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, the drone hysteria, the Trump transition, and Israel’s still (how?) ongoing slaughter in Gaza. But taking a step back, I realized there is a thread that weaves through all of them. Join me in the attempt.

Let’s start with Signor Mangione. As you’ve doubtlessly heard about by now, on December 4 the CEO of UnitedHealthcare¹ , one the largest and most hated health insurance companies, was gunned down in the back on his way to an investor conference in Midtown Manhattan. A shooting in America hardly rates as news, but the brazen killing of an under-CEO of a $474 billion company — on one of safest and richest blocks of the media capital of America no less — was bound to get attention. And it did. The multi-state manhunt for the killer combined with an early leak of a photo revealing the suspected killer to be a young Timothée Chalamet lookalike in Assassin’s Creed by way of a Carhartt catalog² sealed the deal. This was now an Event, and the alleged figure at its center was a Main Character. On December 9, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, a data engineer and alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, was arrested on a tip from a McDonald’s worker in Altoona. This week, Mangione was charged in New York with first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism.

The question of what kind of character Mangione was going to be was answered immediately online. Even before he was arrested and charged, an internet fandom arose around the photo of the smiling handsome killer and the identity of the victim as an executive of one of the most despised companies of perhaps the most pernicious industry in American capitalism. This was key: Tech oligarchs have fans. Even defense contractors sometimes make things that the masses, at least those who don’t have to live under the shadow of the drones and bombs (more on that below), think are necessary or cool. But no one likes health insurance — not medical professionals, not patients, and apparently not a lot of the health insurance industry’s employees themselves. It’s an industry whose sole job is to stand between you and the medical care you and your loved ones need to live and thrive; its profit motive to collect as many premiums as possible while providing as little care as it can get away with. The slain CEO, Brian Thompson, was a generic executive that few outside of his company and its close competitors had heard of before his death. Immediate reports that the killer had written “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” — sardonic references to insurance companies’ policy of refusing services to their clients — seemed to confirm that the killing was, at some level at least, a form of protest.

A few nicknames were floated; one that stuck was “the Claims Adjuster.” Once the suspect’s identity was established, songs were written, memes drafted, thirst-traps and flirty love letters proliferated on the apps, centered on his chiseled jaw, his hirsute browline, and whatever politics the viewer wanted to impose:

Attempts at turning Mangione into a pariah — the terrorism charge, a hilariously cinematic perp walk from a helicopter on a pier featuring the (also federally indicted!) mayor of New York — simply succeeded in making him look even cooler to his growing legions of online fans.

This set off alarm bells in several sectors, mainly those of CEOs, oligarchs, and the politicians and media figures whose default setting is to defend them. Online leftists tried to claim Mangione as their own; there was much talk of French Revolutions and guillotines, the performance of the revolutionary taunt song Ça Ira by a French heavy metal band and a chorus of headless Maries Antoninette at the opening ceremony of this summer’s Olympic games in Paris got a second life. The fact that right-wing populists and some anarcho-capitalist MAGA types also seemed to be Luigi-pilled just added to the sense of excitement in some would-be revolutionary sectors. Perhaps, some thought, this was the long-awaited stirring of a working-class consciousness among America’s stubbornly eternal temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

But Mangione’s own politics and background — what we know about them anyway — have turned out to be more Kill Tony than Karl Marx. The scion of one of Baltimore County, Maryland’s richest families, Mangione’s X account was filled with fanboying of reactionary billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. His reading list on Goodreads includes a four-star review of the manifesto of reactionary anti-technology killer Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. (In his review Mangione quoted an anonymous Reddit poster’s on the r/climate subreddit’s take on the book, saying, “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it's not terrorism, it's war and revolution.”) His favorites were full of self-help books (The 4-Hour Work Week, Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body) and a hagiography of Musk. His “to-read” list included Mein Kampf and Atlas Shrugged. His alleged explanation of the killing, published by Ken Klippenstein (at 261 words it seems a bit much to call it a manifesto), opened with words of praise for “the Feds,” brief references to the corruption and greed of the healthcare system, and most infamously a statement that “these parasites simply had it coming.” It made much of the fact that he worked alone, and ended with a self-aggrandizing — Kaczynski-esque, you might say — boast: “It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

More may come out at trial, but none of this points to a cadre who came up through a revolutionary reading group or in the organizational ranks of the anti-corporate or antifascist left. It sounds more like what one might have expected from the M.O.: a young white man of privilege disillusioned not just with society but with his lack of prominence in it, who saw as the only solution to his and the world’s problems to grab (or in his case allegedly 3D print) a gun, and train it on a symbol of his angst.³ Nor was it lost on everyone that this supposed anti-capitalist avenger was photographed at a Starbucks and arrested at a McDonald’s of all places. This is the profile not of a harbinger of a Second French or Haitian Revolution but of a lone wolf, of the kind that you’re more apt to find in school shooters or on the accelerationist right.

There’s nothing new about this though, nor about someone who is not a true revolutionary becoming a folk hero among the discontented masses. Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, dubbed such figures “social bandits.” In 1969’s Bandits, he posited that such figures had existed throughout the history of peasants around the world: from Robin Hood to the Sicilian brigand Salvatore Giuliano, an outlaw, smuggler, and Mafia-connected brigand who became a symbol of resistance to the corruption that marked life under the post-Fascist Allied occupation of Sicily at the end of World War II.

As Hobsbawm defined them:

This is key. Jesse James, another famous American social bandit, was a leveler of social boundaries in some sense (his famous crimes were to rob banks, stagecoaches, and lucre-loaded trains, reputedly sparing the passengers, and were harassed by the union-busting Pinkertons), but in a way that defended the ideal pre-existing social hierarchy preferred by most of his fans: He was an ex-Confederate guerrilla whose James-Younger Gang’s political goal, if any, was to oppose federal Reconstruction and its elevation and further liberation of the formerly enslaved. (During at least one train robbery, in Iowa, the gang wore Klan hoods.) The specter of a Musk-and-Thiel-worshiping, Ivy League-educated data engineer wiping out a “parasite” to make way for the “good” kind of capitalist exploitation would fit very cleanly with the Hobsbawmian model.

Americans today aren’t living through Reconstruction or a postwar occupation. In fact, we remain the occupiers and exploiters of much of the world — the “New Jersey drone” scare, which by all investigative accounts seems most likely be an epidemic of mass hysteria, may in part be a kind of psychological reaction to years of seeing American drones and American-made bombs terrorizing subject peoples from Iraq to Gaza. But there is a general sense of unease. Corruption and corporate greed rule our lives. We are less equal economically and, indeed, less healthy than we used to be: after a century of gains life expectancy began falling during the pandemic and, unlike in our peer nations, has not recovered since. We are literally cooking our habitable biome to death. Yet those most salient facts did not even register as an issue in the most recent presidential election, crowded out by fearmongering about immigrants and endless cant about the post-pandemic price of groceries, as if bringing down the cost of a eggs by a few dollars would narrow the yawning gap between the soon-to-be-trillionaire class and workers and consumers they prey on.

In fact, the most corrupt president in U.S. history is about to return to power, pushed over the top by voters’ inchoate anger over high prices and resentment of “elites,” only to partner with the world’s literal richest man and surround himself the most egregiously wealthy cabinet since before the Depression. Is it any mystery, then, why so many people from so many corners might be hungry for a handsome folk hero — or perhaps orb-piloting visitors from above — to swoop in at the last moment, remove our tormenters, and take us all away? Something to think about over the holidays at least, as the interregnum comes to a close.

1  Not to be confused with Thompson’s boss, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate of conglomerates that combines health insurance, “healthcare services,” pharmacy services and whatever else exists under its Optum brand into the largest for-profit healthcare company by revenue in the world.

2  Yes I know it was a Levi’s jacket, but this is funnier.

3  The choice of the specific target also remains something of a mystery: Mangione apparently had back pain and brain fog serious enough to need surgery, but there is no indication that his claims were denied, that his (very wealthy) family could not cover his expenses, nor that UnitedHealthcare was even his insurer.