IS AWARENESS ENOUGH TO RATTLE THE SYSTEM?

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.

- KAJAL BASU

Luigi Mangione did not just put a couple of bullets through United Healthcare 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 antineolib or anti-neocon. He is not fundamentally anti-capitalist.