Don't Be So Quick To Assume It's Just Health Insurance...

I've been watching, and participating, in a lot of the response to Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealth CEO, being shot in broad daylight in NYC. The initial response demonstrating a deep, widespread anger and hostility toward the health insurance industry, and what it means, have been written about a good deal already. I angrily punched a response to the yattering, finger wagging scolds who were taking what seems to me to be a lazy moralistic stance. 

I think though, it's there's a thing missing from so much of what I'm reading, and from the discussion on social media. I think, because it's the death of a health insurance CEO, the discussion has been surrounding health care, but I also don't think this is just about the health insurance industry or health care more broadly. Health care is one of the most widespread, urgent and proximally close example, so it's easy for many millions of people in the US to reach for an example from their own experience, which gives it the appearance of simply being related to health care. 

It occurs to me I've spent ten years now, reading and hearing about the Trump phenomenon being an expression of "populist" anger, and that's never seemed quite right to me. The data, as much as we've been able to get of it and as imperfect as it is, seems to suggest the MAGA movement is overwhelmingly white, which to my mind, doesn't really meet the definition of populist. It is, in US terms, a right wing populism, based in white Christian identity, but to say so is to be branded a left wing, identity politics obsessed ideologue. There are small pockets of people who have identities other than this, but somehow, it seems to be constantly ignored that if the white Christian portion of the MAGA movement evaporated, it wouldn't be a movement anyone would be paying attention. It wouldn't have the numbers or the wealth to be worth taking very seriously in the calculus of "serious" US politics. 

By current standards of US political discourse, I am certainly a left wing ideologue, precisely because I believe a real populism would include the people whose populations show the highest concentrations among the working class and the poor. White people are among the working class and poor, for sure, and there are lots of us, but a populism which only accounts for or speaks to people whose sense of identity is drawn from whiteness and conservative Christian life experience is incomplete, stupid and reckless. If it doesn't include POC and queer people (including trans people, a majority of whom are working class), it's not a populist movement. It's an identitarian movement, with wealthy grifters and opportunists, preying on and manipulating the populist sentiment it contains. It's what racism has more or less always been in the US. Wealthy people, telling poorer people, some other group of poor people are coming to upset the extreme precarity of the balance that provides their sense of security.

I do think what we're seeing now, in response to Brian Thompson's murder, is authentically populist. I also think there is a combination of performative ignorance on the part of some, and a the short sightedness of the speed of digital communication to think it's limited the health insurance industry. One of the things social media has done is to give people the ability to communicate across barriers which are much harder, much less convenient to cross in physical reality. People have been connecting, relating to, identifying with each other across racial, ethnic and cultural boundaries, simply by sharing their experience and the perspective that life experience gives them. We've all been watching, relating, sharing in our pain and outrage, excitement, joy and interests to a degree that was previously impossible, for better than a decade now. It's also important we've been doing it in real time. This gives it an authenticity which was hard to gauge before. I also think this is why the columnist and commentator has become such a focus of fierce criticism. Many are still acting as if their job is to shape and create consensus, when the reality of the digital revolution has rendered that part of the job null. It's becoming clear how many of them have genuinely believed themselves, individually, above the rest of us, as opposed to being people who happen to have platforms which give them a wider access to express themselves to the public, and how few of them see themselves entitled to it, as opposed to recognizing it as a responsibility.  

The immediacy and urgency of it, can also obscure that the expression of rage against the power that wealth is able to wield has a sustained history over the more than a decade now.

One of the shared experiences our connectivity provided, has been the variety of lawlessness and amorality of so many of the wealthiest people in the nation, and the inability or refusal of our institutions and mechanisms for justice to treat them with anything like an equity, in comparison to our experiences. We watched an industry wide ponzi scheme on Wall Street crash the world economy, and even in the most egregious cases of major financial institutions engaging in behaviors like robo-signing, that amount to defrauding the legal system to steal people houses, none of the executive class faced criminal prosecution. It resulted in the largest transfer of wealth in US history, from the working and middle class to those who were already the wealthiest among us. 

You may remember the reaction to Occupy Wall Street, in both the mainstream/centrist press and from the right wing. Spoiled kids, layabouts and freaks who wanted something for nothing, essentially. At more or less the same time, there was a political battle happening over the ACA or Obamacare (a moniker which it turns out was disastrous in the long term). I find it curious now that the most devastating criticism from the left was that it was a movement predominantly made up of white people, when it was pitted to thoroughly against the Tea Party, which was the proto-MAGA movement. The Tea Party was the primary vector for the "death panels" claims against the ACA, and the idea of single payer health care. Occupy was seeking accountability, reform which would insure nothing like the '08 crash could happen again, and was broadly in favor of single payer healthcare, simultaneously. 

Consider, whether Occupy was made up predominantly of white people or not, the response to it was remarkably similar to the response to the BLM protests starting in 2012, and culminating in what was the largest set of sustained protests in US history in 2020. The impetus behind those protests may have been different and what sparked them was certainly different, but the response was the same. Occupy was the first time the "Soros paid protesters" line was dragged out to discredit them, and it was deployed against BLM organizers as well. "Professional protesters." Additionally, the illegal suppression of protests, evidenced in the number of arrests where charges were dropped, and in protesters winning large settlements from city and state governments in violating their rights, was the same. At the time, the Occupy settlements were the largest on record. The settlements paid out to BLM, which eclipsed those of Occupy, were paid because the state and police were engaging in the exact same tactics and strategies they levied against Occupy. 

We watched as the Sackler family was rendered immune from criminal prosecution when they added a sum that to most of us is impossible to imagine, to their already impossible to imagine wealth, after their company orchestrated a deadly and disastrous epidemic of addiction. Many of us have lost loved ones, whose addictions began here. Whether buried, cremated, lost to the chaos of addiction or the prison system, many of us have had people we loved essentially disappear. The machine the Sacklers created and tended, and who were compensated as if they were ultimately responsible for those windfall profits, killed in sums it's hard to contemplate. Somehow, they are beyond the reach of criminal accountability for this. There is civil, monetary accountability, but that's only added up to a fraction of the incredible wealth they've accumulated with this death machine. 

If you or I built something, say a vehicle of some kind, and some mechanical failure in the design or our inattentiveness in its operation killed one of the Sacklers children... we know we wouldn't be treated so magnanimously. 

Additionally, we've watched the sagas of Cosby, Weinstein, R. Kelly,  Diddy... all of whom were able to engage in decades long reigns of terror, because of their wealth. It enabled them at every step, including legally. Wealth created a de facto pay to play for monsters. As long as they can target people whose economic situations are precarious enough, they can pay them off through private negotiation or settlements to civil suits, and use an NDA to insure they can move on to the next victim. They were able to continue these monstrous actions for decades, simply because they could pay the ticket, essentially. 

Let's be real. If I had the opportunity and inclination, so decided to forcefully grab Vivek Ramaswamy or Sam Altman by the cock, trapped them in a hotel room while I masturbated in front of them or drugged and sexually assaulted them, it wouldn't just be because I broke the unspoken, unwritten laws of masculinity that I'd face immediate and severe consequences. Kevin Spacey and Brian Singer certainly got along fine for quite a while there, and it sounds now like Diddy had little interest in the gender of his victims, right? My point isn't that in the example I used, I shouldn't be subject to immediate and serious consequence, it's that we have all been treated to a parade of wealthy people whose wealth has prevented them from facing consequences, until the list of their previous crimes is so long and so shocking, there is no longer any way to create a reasonable excuse for them to escape accountability. Understand, I am in no way trying to dismiss or diminish the part gender has played in these dynamics and situation, but I am saying the part wealth and power plays has been downplayed by the "serious" media and press. The exclusivity of the spaces they move in help to insure the population amongst whom they move is small, which also helps insure the likelihood of coming across someone willing to make a public accusation is diminished too. That these conditions have so much more often lead to women being the victims cannot be ignored, and it's to everyone's benefit, including women, to be as specific in our recognition of the wealth plays as it is to recognize how it plays out in terms of gender. 

Consider what that means when we take into consideration the many proclamations that the presidential election was a backlash to #MeToo. I won't ignore, and it should never be ignored, that gender plays a specific role in this, but we are failing if we don't recognize that all of these have in common the connection to wealth. Gender, wealth and power, like race, wealth and power, are inextricable in our history Who, exactly, is benefitting from hordes of young men being radicalized via misogynist influencers? Apparently, if the "male loneliness epidemic" exists, it's not those young men. Interesting, as well, to not that the same people who've suddenly discovered a "male loneliness epidemic" are the same as those who've spent better than a decade ignoring or treating as not so urgent a problem, the misogyny in digital spaces that women have been talking about their experience with for better than a decade. 

The response to the murder of Brian Thompson is just the latest expression of a variety of populist anger we've been seeing for better than a decade, and to think and participate in any discussion about it as if it is limited to the health insurance industry is a mistake.