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Suspected UnitedHealthcare shooter Luigi Mangione is led from the Blair County Courthouse after an extradition hearing on December 10, 2024, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. (Jeff Swensen / Getty Images)
America Will Be Obsessed With Luigi Mangione For A Long Time
The collective outpouring of love for a young alleged assassin points to a gaping void in American politics.
Suspected UnitedHealthcare shooter Luigi Mangione is led from the Blair County Courthouse after an extradition hearing on December 10, 2024, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. (Jeff Swensen / Getty Images)
The American people are falling hard for Luigi Mangione — so hard that it may become a crisis, in the minds of elites.
The outpouring of support for the young man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in broad daylight in New York City has been staggering. Women and men across the internet are declaring lust for him. There is widespread condemnation of whoever turned him in, with online reviews of the Altoona McDonald’s where he was apprehended warning that the outlet is infested with “rats.” In a clip that has to be seen to be believed, his fellow prisoners in jail yelled “Free Luigi!” live on the TV news.
The fandom continues to spread, to the extent that the New York Times won’t publish any more pictures of his face or physique — presumably he’s too good-looking — nor will they publish his alleged statement explaining his killing, an abdication of the basic journalistic responsibility to fully explain a major public event like this. The paper of record seems afraid that his hotness will inspire copycat killings. Other liberal gatekeepers have also registered distress at Luigimania, with Graeme Wood of the Atlantic intoning that it shows not that the health care system is broken but that “many people are.”
Beyond the confines of respectable opinion, the event has inspired many to tell their own tales of horrific abuse by the health insurance industry: parents recounting hair-raising stories of battling daily for relief for terminally ill children, adults recalling how their parents died because of delays in needed care, and many more describing constant anxiety about whether needed medications or procedures will be covered or denied.
Americans don’t, as a rule, condone political violence. Yet many people seem shockingly okay with this murder. One line in Mangione’s statement seemed to resonate especially: “Frankly, these parasites had it coming.” It sounds like a horrible statement to utter about another human being; given how much harm this industry causes, it’s also not particularly surprising. Medical debt is a leading cause of bankruptcy for Americans, and our life expectancy and other health indicators are horrifyingly low for such a rich country.
Mangione has tapped into something most Americans share: a deep hatred of our health insurance system and of the profiteers who seem so indifferent to our suffering and death. He has still not been mentioned by Donald Trump, who must realize that Mangione’s fandom has no political boundaries.
The issue Mangione apparently sought to highlight has a nonviolent political solution, of course: single-payer health care, or Medicare for All, a system that would abolish the health insurance industry and simply give everyone the medical care they require. Bernie Sanders’s socialist campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020 emphasized the need for socialized medicine in this country and the widespread suffering the for-profit health system causes.
Yet the rest of the political class has basically ignored the issue.
Joe Biden did not attempt to enact or even talk about Medicare for All while in office. Without Sanders in the race, there was little discussion of health care in this year’s presidential campaign. Trump’s debate admission that on health care he had “concepts of a plan” was widely and rightly mocked, yet the fragmentary nature of this work in progress did not stop him from being elected to serve a second term. Kamala Harris wasn’t much better: having supported Medicare for All in a competitive 2020 primary dominated by Bernie Sanders, she never revisited it in her walk-on role as the Democratic nominee this year.
Mangione has tapped into something most Americans share: a deep hatred of our health insurance system and of the profiteers who seem so indifferent to our suffering and death.
The widespread adoration for Luigi Mangione and his crime, then, is symptomatic of a criminal failing in our national politics. The Democrats have said almost nothing about the issue of health care for years and are now wondering why they just lost an election. Few — with some exceptions, including Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. Ro Khanna — have taken the moment as an opportune time to talk about health care reform. Coming just after Trump’s victory, it’s clear that ignoring the issue that should belong to the supposed party of the Left has been a massive own goal.
Asked in an interview with Jacobin whether Americans had resigned themselves to the status quo of our health care system, Sanders shouted, “NO! Is that clear enough?” He pointed out that, while we can’t solve this problem by killing more people, our health insurance system also kills — and the solution is political.
The field is wide open for campaigns for health care reform at the local and state levels, as well as Medicaid expansion and even single payer. In New York, the assassination has revived discussion of the New York Health Act; perhaps we’ll see similar discussion elsewhere, even with Trump about to take office. We need more Medicare for All champions in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.
All this enthusiasm suggests that there could be momentum on health care reform now, even without waiting for the next election. If we don’t want to see more political violence — and who does? — we need to seize this cultural moment, relish its clarity and focus, and push the political system in an entirely new direction.
At the same time, we cannot and should not ignore the libidinal dimension of this cultural event. When was the last time a criminal was so attractive that the New York Times refused to visually reproduce them? Culturally, liberalism has been lacking in anything that would satisfy people’s deepest drives; while people have been uniting around the Right in hatred — for liberals, for “wokeness,” and much more disturbingly for migrants and other minorities — the center left has offered dry policy half measures and tepid scolding. They have responded the same way to Luigimania. It won’t work.
Our solution — and the one Bernie Sanders recommends — is to change the system and abolish private health insurance. The collective outpouring of love for Mangione shows how much we as Americans hate this system.
But it behooves the Left, too, to pay close attention to the atavistic desires driving many to cheer him on. As Richard Seymour writes in his new book, Disaster Nationalism, “We do need bread and butter. We even like it. But we don’t love it.” Rather, he insists, it is passion that is a historical force.
A phenomenon of passion, Trumpism provides Americans with ecstatic experiences of collective love and hate. So does Luigi. And so does any effective form of populism. If we are to lead one another out of fascism and into something better, the Left needs to figure out how to do the same. Yes, we need a movement for Medicare for All, but to win, we also need the kind of eros, solidarity, and fury seen over these past eight days.
