Why Luigi Matters

Luigi Mangione is accused of shooting and killing Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in a brazen attack outside the Hilton Hotel in downtown Manhattan as the CEO was walking to an investor meeting. The image and the story, at least the “big picture” of the story, sparked an almost immediate sympathy for Luigi and not for the murdered CEO. Remarkably, the social media response and support for Luigi was not a Red or a Blue response, but across the board.  

 

That response has made me reevaluate the entire American political dynamic and, most importantly, the Red/Blue dynamic. What does the apparent support for murder, or at least the schadenfreude associated with Thompson’s murder, tell us about the current political and associated social situation in the United States today, and what does it portend for the future? 

 

The best summary is that we are in for a bumpy ride. Culture War is being redefined as Class War, no matter how hard the Oligarchy attempts to retain the current paradigm. 

 

Different vs Shared Values and Expectations 

 

The core of the culture war is a difference in values and expectations. The creation of an “other” that does not share the same experience or outcomes, and does not see the same things. As long as the focus could be kept on My Church vs Your Bathroom choice, the values expressed were fundamentally different. Render the two secondary to a shared (negative) experience, and the common cause based on shared values becomes clear. Luigi shocked the system and demonstrated that there is a far larger set of shared experiences and shared values.   

 

An Important Parenthesis 

 

From Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American, January 5, 2024, when discussing the reality of the US by the end of the Biden Administration:

 

“No U.S. troops are fighting in foreign wars, murders have plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply, undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office, stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing, real wages are rising, inflation has fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment is at near-historic lows, and energy production is at historic highs. The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020. " 

 

The problem is that, while all that was good news, it was too little, most of the gains were in the past two years, and were too late to sway the disaffected. 

 

How did we get here? 

 

To see how we got to today, we need to look back about forty years ago (and more), and consider the economic situation in the US in terms of workers' income and social expectations. The “American Dream”, that a family of four could live comfortably on a single income, buying a home and raising a family. The Reagan years with “trickle-down” economics, coupled with seismic shifts in production and trade (globalisation), and in technology and automation, spelled the of that dream. The bottom stayed low, while the middle moved lower.

 

Richardson points out that “between 1981 and 2021 $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Now the incoming president has openly tied himself to billionaires.” 

 

Demographers were already projecting a widening of future incomes between university-educated and those with (only) high school or less education. In University in the early 1980s, I remember a lecture in which the professor showed a projection that had lower educated and less skilled labour’s real income flat-lining, while university degreed and above, and the highly skilled professions would see a steadily rising income. 

 

The "System" lost legitimacy 

 

People can see the reality with their own eyes. They should be reading the papers but don’t need to. At every street corner, there's another beggar with another sign asking for change. Homeless are camped out in parks and under bridges across the country. And almost everyone who drives by them knows that with just one medical (mis)adventure, with one accident, with an unreasonable lawsuit, they too could be living under a bridge. 

  

They know this not because they read it and not because FOX News tells them; they know this because they know people to whom this has happened. 

  

And yet, the politicians on the left and the right do little concretely to make a difference. If anything, the people see their elected leaders getting richer and richer, voting perks for themselves, and generally ignoring the greater good of the country. They see that their elected officials are for sale, and know that they and their neighbours do not have the cash or power required to buy or rent their representatives. 

  

Meanwhile, homelessness increases. A recent report said that 770,000 people are homeless in the United States. The report also says that in the past year, the number of homeless people in the United States has grown by 18%, and a 33% growth in homeless children. That kind of growth and homelessness cannot be hidden. 

  

The system was supposed to protect people from this. But the system has failed. And it's obvious to the people that the system has failed and is no longer protecting people from the ravages of accidents, illness, or, more importantly, from outright corporate greed, which is quite happy to sacrifice humans for profit and executive bonuses. 

 

"Burn it down" became more appealing than "Incremental change" 

 

Until now, both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, have presented themselves as instruments of incremental change to the system for the benefit of their constituents. By the early 2000s, it became clear that neither of the traditional political parties could demonstrate that their form of incremental change would deliver benefits to the people. The only groups in society that continues to benefit, regardless of the political party, are the 1% and sub-1%, and the corporations.  

  

When the system demonstrates clearly that it will not help those at the bottom or even in the middle, then ultimately, those in the bottom and the middle give up on the system. The problem is that not only does the system not work for those at the bottom and the middle, but it has also been working less effectively for those in the upper part of the middle.  

  

In addition, when the system does fall apart as in the financial crisis of 2008, government bailouts were seen to go to Wall Street and the big banks and not to bail out the people on the street. Socialised pain, privatised gain. The use of bailout money to pay Bankers bonuses was an absolutely egregious use of government money, especially when those very Banks were pushing clients into bankruptcy, even to the extent of making them homeless. 

 

“The Great Recession had horrendous effects on the U.S. economy, notably on workers, homeowners, and banking institutions. Between 2008 and 2013 an estimated 8.8 million jobs were lost, 2.8 million mortgage loans went into foreclosure, and with assets of $686 billion 489 banks failed, draining the FDIC deposit insurance fund of $73 billion. The cumulative net cost was an estimated at $10-14 trillion. In addition, median household wealth dropped by 44 percent between 2007 and 2011.” 

 

Many never recovered. Fifteen years later, the system continues to be seen to prop up the rich while individual and family incomes remain stagnant. Although some will argue that real family income after inflation has finally begun to rise, that modest increase is too little, too late. 

 

It's the Economy, stupid 

 

Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign is famous for the expression, "It's the economy, stupid". That has always been the case. One of the key differences between the MAGA republican wing and the democratic party is the belief that incremental improvements in the economy will ultimately filter to everyone. MAGA Republicans have come to the conclusion that no matter what improvements occur in the economy, those benefits will accrue to the most wealthy only. Increasingly, democrats are coming to that conclusion as well, simply by observing what is occurring in their communities and their own paychecks.  

  

The last couple of years have seen significant improvements in the American economy, and improvements that actually have, for the first time in a long time, resulted in an increase in the real after-inflation income of most Americans. But that improvement has come after years of stagnant incomes or real incomes falling. Simply put,t the patience of the American people to accept a growing economy in which they receive zero or little benefit has run out. 

 

Corporations have the power, but no heart 

 

Another thing that the American people have observed is the lunacy of the concept of the corporation as a person. If a person commits murder, that person can be charged and incarcerated. When a corporation commits murder, as is occurring daily with health insurance companies, there are no penalties for the company as a person; in fact, there are significant benefits to those who own the companies and who lead the companies. Boeing as a company can be charged with manslaughter for allowing substandard quality in their airplanes and for allowing airplanes to crash because they did not include safety software as part of the cost of the airplanes. Yet Boeing pays a fine after committing the manslaughter of hundreds of people at a time and continues to profit and deliver wealth to shareholders. 

  

Corporate manslaughter is hardly the only example of the benefits accruing purely to companies and shareholders. The supply chain-induced inflation of 2020 through 2023 provides a beautiful example of how corporations can exploit a crisis and convert it into increased wealth for themselves and their shareholders. As input costs rise, these can and must be passed on to customers through increased prices of products or through shrinkflation, the reduction of the content or size of the product for the same price. Yet, at the end of the inflationary cycle, and as supply chains ease and the input cost of materials actually decreases, the savings are not passed on to the consumers. Inflated prices for consumers remain, and profits soar. 

  

For the past few years, corporate profits have been the highest they've been in history. 

 

People don't matter 

 

Employees have almost no rights and can be discarded at will in most states, and exploitation of people is a core element of the American labour market. I used “people” because “labour” decouples the concept of the individual from employers and companies, and from each other on the shop floor. 

 

Lower-skilled workers are expendable and are exploited. On the one hand, this depresses wages, while on the other, it increases the fear of losing a job. With low wages, it is more difficult to build enough buffer to survive being laid off or leaving a bad job. Flexible working hours and staff scheduling are also used to reduce the total hours worked in a given period, cutting down on overtime and, in many cases, reducing the number of hours to below a threshold at which benefits such as annual leave or healthcare would be required (and would add an additional cost to employers). 

 

 

This meme, accusing Amazon of denying leave to a worker injured in the Bourbon Street attack in New Orleans, spread quickly across social media. Was it true? Does it matter? Amazon had denied it, and Snopes had a good discussion, but people didn't read the details; they assumed that, based on expectations of corporate behaviour, that the corporation was evil.

 

Immigrants, legal and illegal 

 

At the other end of the labour market, skilled workers are actively threatened with replacement and displacement by foreign workers brought in under H1B visas, servicing to suppress wages through the too often actualised threat of simply replacing “expensive” American people with cheaper, skilled migrants, who are in their turn, equally exploited. Visa holders are forced to work excessive hours in full knowledge that if they do not, they can be fired, and if fired, they have ten days in which to find another employer willing to sponsor their H1B visa. This threat supports an unvirtuous circle of suppressed wages and displayed American workers (people). 

 

Disney used the H1B visa program to displace American workers, who were told that they would be laid off, and that they would need to train their replacements, the visa holders. “A particular sore point among those Disney employees who were replaced by the foreign workers was that they were required to train their replacements as a condition of receiving severance pay and bonuses. This seemed to them like having insult added to injury.”  

 

Meanwhile, in probably the most obvious and immediate sell-out of the MAGA base, Elon Musk publically supported the H1B visa program in the most obnoxious way, on his Xwitter account: 

 

 

 

This betrayal of MAGA will not go unanswered, and hasn’t, even though Trump himself has come out in favour of the program and an associated visa program (H2B) that he uses extensively to bring un- or under-skilled labour to work at his resorts. 

 

The focus on legal and illegal immigrants, which certainly has blatant racist undertones, is more a reflection of the need for a manufactured scapegoat. Most Americans know that their fruit and vegetables are picked by illegal migrants, that the kitchen of their favourite eatery is full of illegal Ecuadoreans or other Hispanics, and that houses could not be built without illegal migrants. They also know that they, the legal Americans, would not take those jobs. 

 

Illegal immigrants are a surrogate for the corporate exploitation of all Americans, and the underlying desire to deport them is not to take the now available jobs, but to harm in some way the corporations that control most of what the average American sees and does every day.  

 

Furthermore, the rejection of immigrants and the demand for their deportation is a stand against government agencies and programs that people see as supportive of corporations and oligarchs, to exploit the people. Rejection of immigrants is a rejection of government policies that the people feel they’ve had no say in devising, and that they are convinced have unfairly benefited the 1%. Even Trump’s use of H2B seasonal worker visas for his resorts proves that only the wealthy are benefiting from government policies. 

 

What did Trump offer? 

 

For all his many faults, and almost everyone will agree he has many, even his supporters, Trump won in 2016 and 2024 on a platform of “burn it down”. Those exact words might not have been used, but the spirit was there. And people voted for that. In 2016, the Great Recession was still real for many, and the sense that they had been betrayed was enough to vote for the disrupter over more of the same.  

 

In 2016, when asked by UK friends about the choice Americans had to make, I responded, "Okay, you have to pick a hand, right or left. If you pick the right hand, the puppy dies. If you pick the left hand, the kitten dies.” Hillary was seen as a perpetuation of the system that stuck it to the little guy while rewarding the corporations, and Pay to Play accusations against the Clinton Foundation only reinforced that perception. Trump was there to overthrow the status quo. He didn't; he blamed the "deep state", and got away with it.

 

In 2024, Trump ran on exactly the same platform, but this time surrounded by an even more virulent team. They reached out to the same, but now expanded, group of people who saw MAGA as their way to complete the rejection of the status quo, to overthrow their subjugation by corporations that occurred under each political party for a generation.  

 

And this time, enough of the “middle” had lost faith in the system, and they swung to Trump and MAGA. They demand the overthrow of the system that they see as holding them back. They demand a share in the economy that has boomed for the rich and oligarchs and by association, that has boomed for their political representatives and the “swamp”. 

 

What did Harris offer? 

 

Continuity, with incremental change. To those who were and are winning from the economy, Harris presented a picture of a future of unlimited winning, wrapped in a smile. The economy was strong, investment in infrastructure was taking place across the country, inflation was down or going down, and America was winning. Global trade was healthy. The pandemic was history. And she was smiling. 

 

She ran a good-news campaign when too much of America lives in fear. Fear of economic dislocation, healthcare induced bankruptcy, fear that the financial institutions will screw them again like they did in the Great Recession. They live in fear of a mass shooting at their child's school, at the mall, or in their office. They fear the traffic stop. She smiled. 

 

Not once did we see Kamala Harris angry. She did not attack the institutions and corporations, and certainly not the oligarchs. There was very little talk about taxing those who have benefited at the expense of workers. There certainly was never a "we will make them pay" speech. There was little about how the system would be reformed. 

 

Kamala Harris was, in effect, forced to run as the continuity candidate in a world in which continuity was (and is) being rejected as exploitative of the people. Oh, and did I mention, she smiled.

 

Values 

 

When we think about the “Right” vs “Left”, frequently it is in terms of the values of the individuals and groups that identify as right or left. Yet most Americans share some common values, which are interpreted differently. There are outlier values that are fundamentally different, but these have not, in the past, resulted in a societal fracture (slavery and racial equality excepted). 

 

Undermine those values, and it is not surprising that the “middle” shifts. The Democrats ran on a platform of strengthening those values, while in contrast, the Republicans ran on a platform that acknowledges that the values are broken and not being achieved for most Americans. All the Republicans needed to do was to convince enough in the middle that the current system would not deliver on their values, and that MAGA would “burn it down” and start again. And who better to upend a system than those familiar with it from the “victim” side, those for whom the system was not delivering on their shared values. 

 

So, what are these shared values? 

 

Patriotism. Defined differently, but both left and right share a (generally) deep personal association with the United States and the concept of the Constitution. Members of the US military are drawn from both the left and the right, and the middle. Appropriation of the symbols of patriotism by both right and left is part of the ongoing game of who owns or defines “America”. Patriotism is the common pride expressed in the nation, and why America is so much better than any other place in the world. And it is the common pride in those who are willing to serve to defend that nation. Here it becomes a bit murky, but beyond the scope of this article.  

 

Freedom. Both the left and the risk value “freedom” almost as much as they value patriotism. No one really knows what it means, other than it means different things to different constituencies. Freedom from police violence, freedom to own and carry a gun. Freedom to use national parks and freedom to stop others from threatening your community (be that through “imposing” Islam or the “Gay agenda”, or at the other extreme, attempting to stop same-sex marriages and adoptions by same-sex families). Freedom is the uninfringed right to be whoever we are, even if that infringes on other’s rights to be who they are. 

 

Freedom in America is the opposition to any imposed values. Freedom is rarely stated in the positive, and therefore it is easier to tell people what freedoms are being taken from them. To bastardise the Declaration of Independence, the "right to (my) Life, (my) Liberty and (my) pursuit of Happiness". 

 

Economic safety. As discussed above, the American economy is structured around access to cheap labour. And a market structured around cheap labour can only function if there is economic uncertainty for most workers. Economic safety means not living paycheck to paycheck, and not living in fear of medical bankruptcy, for example. It means the safety of government programs for old-age pensioners so that even if one does not become a multi-millionaire, at least in old age, they won’t be living under a bridge. Thus, the critical importance also of Social Security, to the point that ultra-conservative Congressional Representatives are sending emails to their constituents announcing that there is no way there will support any reduction in Social Security (though there is a carefully worded "out" to allow a raising of the age of entitlement), even though Social Security has been, and remains, a target for conservatives to cut. 

 

Opportunity. Closely linked to economic security is the value of opportunity; “anyone” in America can grow up to be President, or an oligarch. Both the right and the left perpetuate a value that hard work (and luck) can put anyone on a path that will deliver “success”. The right and the left look at the mechanics of opportunity slightly differently, with one side wanting to see obstacles such as regulation removed, while the other focuses on social barriers and systemic racism as barriers to success. 

 

Too many Americans have come to the conclusion that opportunity in America has been undermined by institutions and corporations, and that the “system” actively works to limit opportunity. It is the threat to, and apparent destruction of opportunity that is a fundamental uniting factor across right and left. While they see opportunity through slightly different lenses, both (all) have seen a fundamental erosion in opportunity in America, for themselves and their children.  

 

Disgust at the Oligarchy. While America celebrates and admires those who are wealthy and have gained wealth, there is shared disgust at the rule by oligarchs. This includes the ultra-wealthy as well as those in Congress and power who acquire wealth and power and then stay in power, forever. This, then, is the other side of the opportunity coin. When any opportunity for advancement is closed off, when those in power and wealth close the door to others, then this is viewed as the oligarchy oppressing the people, depriving them of that “pursuit of happiness”. 

 

The constant visible display of enormous wealth is juxtaposed against tent cities and a drumbeat of stories in the press, and from their neighbours, of a medical system rooted in “your money or your life”. Corporate distrust of consumers is proven every time they have to push a buzzer simply to look at and or select the most mundane of products in a large store.

 

Frustration at failing system. Most of all, this is rooted in a belief that the system is failing them. Illegal migrants are “taking their jobs” and healthcare insurance denying them or their loved ones or neighbours lifesaving or even rudimentary care. Systemic racism is rife, along with real fear of “law enforcement”. While “driving while black” is known to be dangerous, even non-blacks in America know that the police can kill them with impunity. The rich get richer, the sleazy gain power, the rich buy their way out of legal consequences, and the outright criminal is excused. There is no “justice”, and as such, there is little to bind the average American to the system. The system has failed them and those around them, and they have had enough. 

 

Conclusions 

 

We live in the new world today, with social media providing a strong indication of what issues and fashions are at the front of people’s minds. People, and corporations, communicate via social media with each other, with clients, stakeholders, and wider audiences.  

 

Not surprisingly, UnitedHealthcare posted a remembrance of their murdered CEO. Over 86,000 people responded with the laughing emoji. That was not 86,000 anonymous responses; that was 86,000 people who didn’t care if their name, profile, and, in most cases, photographs were seen. The number of those shedding a tear was under 4,000. The company had to re-release the remembrance with comments and turn off the response capability.  

 

It is unreasonable to assume that those 86,000 people disproportionately represent one or the other side of the political spectrum. In fact, they probably represent a reasonable cross-section of Americans (while acknowledging that a small percentage of respondents were from outside the US).  

 

It would also be unwise to assume that the murder of the CEO of many, if not most, larger US companies would result in a different response.  That level of hatred, coupled with common experiences across the political spectrum, should be seen for what it is, the harbinger of potential revolution.  

 

Luigi showed Americans, across the political and social divides, that they have common experiences, common fears, and a shared anger. The expression of that anger has been manipulated for decades to ensure a culture war. Luigi changed the discussion, and that should scare the politicians and oligarchs. 

 

As this new administration, like all before it for the past generation, fails to deliver tangible benefits to Americans, that common experience will transcend existing political labels. MAGA and Progressive will discover that they have more core values in common, even while there are still many they disagree on.  

 

That’s when the revolution begins.