Once again, I am left to wonder: When will the Democratic Party get the message?
The chief executive of a major corporation is murdered in cold blood in New York—and people from across the political spectrum, both the left and the right, are … kinda cheering?
From columnist Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times:
But this was something different. The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic. It was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters.
I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated. …
The concentration of extreme wealth in the United States has recently surpassed that of the Gilded Age. And the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished. I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest. Corporate executives are already reportedly beefing up their security. I expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns. Calls for a higher degree of public surveillance or for integrating facial recognition algorithms into policing may well follow. Almost certainly, armed security entourages and private jets will become an even more common element of executive compensation packages, further removing routine contact between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us, except when employed to serve them.
We still don’t know who killed Brian Thompson or what his motive was. Whatever facts eventually emerge, the anger it has laid bare will still be real, and what we glimpsed should ring all the alarm bells.
Well: We now have a suspect, and Luigi Mangione, a rich kid with two Ivy League degrees, is suddenly a social media folk hero. He’s an alleged murderer, and all over the Internet, people are taking about him as if he’d done a great thing for society.
Stop and think about it.
When Bill Clinton was president, and he took on health-care reform and put his wife Hillary in charge, the idea of a Medicare for all system was never on the table. When Barack Obama was president and Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, the idea that private for-profit insurance companies would continue to control the health-care system was taken as a given.
And yet, we know that approach hasn’t worked, and doesn’t work, and now the anger has exploded. The leadership of the Democratic Party is so scared of offending the big insurance companies that nobody is willing to pay attention.
Vice President Kamala Harris barely mentioned health care in her campaign. Gov. Gavin Newsom ran the first time on a promise of bringing single-payer to California, winning the strong support of the nurses’ union—and almost immediately stopped talking about it.
Paul Krugman wrote his final New York Times column today. He’s been a voice of reason, in general, on economic issues (although he was terribly wrong about rent control and a few other things), but this one shows the same sort of cluelessness. He talks about when he first started the gig in 2000:
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. … Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest. … Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.
So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.
No, Paul: It comes down to the profound, radical rush toward economic inequality and the destruction of the middle class and working class that began about 20 years before you started at the Times but has accelerated to the point that it’s now causing massive social instability, violence, and causing the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.
It’s a deep, structural problem—but it’s also one that can be fixed relatively easily. Impose a 3 percent annual wealth tax on great fortunes, restore the marginal income tax rate to what it was before Reagan, and we’ve got the money for national health care, free higher education, secure retirements, subsidies for people displaced by closing coal mines and oil fields … you don’t need a Nobel prize or a PhD to figure that out.
You do, apparently, have to be outside the mainstream of Democratic Party thinking.
We are descending into violence that was entirely predictable. And the Democrats want to move more to the right. The Big Tech and Real Estate astroturf operations have created a San Francisco where neoliberal policies, which have created all of these problems, will control the day for at least the next two years. There is so little news media left to challenge that narrative.
I suspect Luigi will have little trouble finding free legal defense.
