On Anarchism, Past and Present
Last night I watched a documentary about the assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare. The 58-minute film spends a lot of time on the social-media response to Luigi Mangione’s act of terror. The reporters and commentators kept coming back to Bonnie and Clyde. The analogy is apt. Those Depression-era bank robbers garnered lots of media attention and lots of public adulation. But at the end of the day, they were just a couple of murderous crooks. They were no Robin Hood and Maid Marian. They had no charitable intentions nor political agenda. The public responses to them and now to Magione do bear comparison. However, the documentary completely missed the far more apt analogy: to the Anarchists of 1890-1914.
To refresh my own knowledge of those days of “The Idea and the Deed,” I turned to the chapter by that name in Historian Barbara Tuchman’s 1962 book about the era leading up World War I, The Proud Tower. The Anarchists about whom she writes arose during the Gilded Age. That was an era of ostentatious wealth, capitalism run riot, and abysmal poverty. The Anarchists, while they had literary leaders like Proudhon and Bakunin, more closely resembled the Lone Wolf terrorists of our own time than any organized group of revolutionaries, such as the Communists. These turn-of-the-last-century wolves. who engaged in their own version of what would much later be labeled “Leaderless Resistance”, racked up an impressive list of successes. They managed to kill six heads of state, including an American president (McKinley), a Russian Czar, a French president, two Spanish premiers, and the king of Italy. Last, and far from least, an anarchist was the immediate cause of WWI, when he assassinated the Austrian Archduke. Many millions died in the ensuing four years. Monarchs were toppled in Germany, Austria and Russia. And the Russian Revolution changed the course of international relations in ways with which we are still struggling today. I suspect many Anarchists heartily approved of this latter outcome.
To my eye, Luigi Magione fits in well with the Anarchists. In stark contrast to Bonnie and Clyde, but in close proximity to the Anarchists, he most definitely has a political agenda. He signaled this at the scene of the assassination with the words on his three cartridges: Delay, Deny, and (perhaps) Depose. These words apparently were inspired by a book title. Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It is a 2010 book by Rutgers Law professor Jay M. Feinman, and published by Portfolio Hardcover, an imprint of Penguin Group. Like any good Anarchist, Mangione had a manifesto in his backpack beside his gun. It reads:
“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. 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.”
Magione’s agenda, as outlined above, differs from that of the classic Anarchists. “Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is against all forms of authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. A historically left-wing movement, anarchism is usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement (libertarian socialism).” (Wikipedia) But he is their next of kin, where tactics are concerned. Like them, he felt driven by circumstance to perform “the Deed.”
Do the circumstances justify his Deed? Some will immediately respond that no set of circumstances justifies murder. There is a strong argument to be made for this position. However, the power of this holier-than-thou response is somewhat diluted by the very nature of American society and culture. H. Rap Brown said it best decades ago: “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Deny it, if you dare.
How does 21st-century America compare to the Gilded Age? “The Gilded Age was a period in the late 19th century in the United States marked by extreme wealth inequality…. The richest 4,000 families in the country held as much wealth as the other 11.6 million families combined. In 1890, the richest 9% of Americans held almost 75% of the nation's wealth.” (Google AI Overview;emphasis mine) “In 2022, the top 10% of American households controlled nearly 70% of the country's wealth, up from about 61% in 1989. The bottom 50% of households owned about 2.5% of the wealth in 2021.”(Ibid.)
It was not always so. As Robert Reich pointed out in his 1992 The Work of Nations, in the 1950s the average CEO of a major U.S. corporation took home —- after steep federal income taxes —- only 12 times more income than his average employee. But by the time Reich published his book, just after the Reagan presidency, the average CEO was realizing after-tax income 70 times greater than her/his typical employee.
According to the documentary I watched last night, Brian Thompson was pulling down $10 million a year. “In 2023, CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 6% over the previous year—to an average of $17.7 million in total compensation. The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 268-to-1 for S&P 500 Index companies in 2023.” (Google AI Overview; see also “AFL-CIO Executive Pay Watch”; again my emphasis) So Thompson was a little below average. But the kicker was that he symbolized the (for good reason) much-maligned and often despised healthcare industry, and in particular its insurance arm.
Far from being an Anarchist, or even a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, none-the-less I am hard pressed to endorse either the wealth disparity too many Americans appear willing to tolerate and, too often, even applaud. I might be more willing to turn a blind eye to our billionaires, if every U.S. citizen were guaranteed adequate food, clothing , shelter… and healthcare. As one of the talking heads in the documentary observed, ours is the only advanced, industrialized democracy in which its citizens dread losing their healthcare coverage and risk bankruptcy if they lose it and then get seriously ill or injured. The Affordable Care Act has gone a long way toward correcting this shameful state of affairs. And the Affordable Care Act is in constant jeopardy. (Just two weeks before the president who tried mightily to repeal it is back in office.)
The Internet outcry in favor of Magione persuades me that many, many Americans are in the same boat as me: I have my grievances against the healthcare system, one involving my dear wife Joanne, whose recent death is partially due to a change in medication driven purely by financial considerations. Do I blame the drug’s manufacturer for pricing it too high… or Medicare for refusing to pay the full amount… or her oncology practice for insisting on substituting a cheaper drug? Were I inclined to take up Magione’s tactics, I don’t know who would be my target. There seems to be plenty of blame to go around. The fundamental fault is with a system that enriches drug and insurance companies and their CEOs, as well as many physicians and their practice groups, at the expense of We the People.
The documentary also pointed out that the response of the insurance industry, by and large, to Magione’s Deed has been to beef up CEO security. That’s not the lesson Luigi wanted to teach them. Will it take more Deeds by more Magiones to compel meaningful reforms in the chronically ill American healthcare industry? As the guru says, “We’ll see.”
