Luigi Mangione, CEO oligarchs, and America’s hidden majority party

In a nation that’s long bragged about its supposed exceptionalism while ignoring its baked-in contradictions, America’s penchant for political violence has long demanded explanations — and defied them. No icon of U.S. freedom was more bedeviled by this problem than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In the mid-1960s, in what proved to be the last three years of his life before he, too, would be murdered in cold blood, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate was constantly pressed by journalists like Mike Wallace to explain why what was supposed to be a nonviolent movement for Black civil rights was now boiling into deadly urban uprisings from Watts to Newark to Detroit.

King patiently explained to his interlocutors that, while he condemned snipers, arson, and looting, as any man of peace would, the failure of the U.S. political system to pay attention to issues like police brutality, poverty, and housing discrimination would almost inevitably make frustrated citizens finally embrace violence.

“A riot,” King said, “is the language of the unheard.”

Today, in the aftermath of an interminably long election season in which candidates spent some $16 billion to send their messages to voters, what’s most remarkable is how much of the U.S. electorate still managed to feel completely unheard. None more so than millions of Americans reeling financially and utterly frustrated by their encounters with the uniquely privatized U.S. health-care system.

Despite the nonstop barrage of ads in swing states like Pennsylvania and 24/7 news coverage, neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump nor their political parties ever channeled the rage that one could so easily find on the internet behind GoFundMe campaigns for soaring medical debt, or to pay for lifesaving procedures rejected by insurance companies.

Trump — who pretended he was a kind of MLK for aggrieved white rural and Rust Belt Americans whom he once told, “I am your voice” — has no real clue about how to fix this broken system, famously admitting that after 10 years in politics, he only had “concepts of a plan” for fixing health care. And even that was arguably a lie.

Harris — so tied into knots around her relationship with President Joe Biden and her flirtations with the left in a failed 2020 White House bid — did, to her credit, offer a few well-crafted, targeted health-care policies. But they were wrapped inside her tepid, don’t-offend-Wall-Street-donors campaign that never felt the pain of everyday people that was still unheeded when America voted on Nov. 5.

The two major political parties and their standard-bearers — who, not coincidentally, took in more than $15 million from health-care or Big Pharma political action committees in 2024 — completely ignored America’s rage against the medical machine.

Instead, it took a clearly disturbed 26-year-old loner with a ghost gun to finally trigger a national conversation about denied insurance claims, computers powered by AI overruling your family doctor, or only-in-America medical debt and bankruptcies. Much like the “burn, baby, burn” arsonists of the 1960s, Luigi Mangione committed a reprehensible act of lethal violence while speaking the language of the unheard.

The reaction from a sizable swath of the public to Mangione’s shocking Dec. 4 assassination of the CEO of America’s largest medical insurer — UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson — has been sometimes over-the-top (wanted posters for other CEOs on the streets of Lower Manhattan), but mostly an outpouring of stories from middle-class Americans about their routine struggles in paying for drugs or medications that their family needs. That’s important, but I think it also speaks to the much bigger moment of crisis for the entire American system.

Trump’s success in gaining a plurality of the vote — albeit a narrow one — for the first time in three tries despite a campaign that defied every norm, cherished or otherwise, of U.S. democracy has sparked an endless, circular, contradictory, and frequently maddening debate among the 50.2% who voted for someone else about what went wrong.

Bizarre as it sounds, the public reaction to the immoral act of assassinating Thompson feels also like a moment of clarity. The Nov. 5 results and the anger against not just Big Insurance but the state of American capitalism writ large reveal the true majority. Not a “silent majority” — that 1969 cliché no longer works in an era of Elon Musk’s X or Bluesky — but a hidden majority of citizens who see a nation on the wrong track and want radical changes that neither Trump’s MAGA movement nor a Democratic gerontocracy, which stands for little beyond self-preservation, can deliver.

It’s not surprising, in hindsight, that Trump won. In his own bat-guano crazy way, he presented himself as “the change candidate” in yet another change election, while Harris’ implicit promise was to mostly keep the status quo of a now 82-year-old Biden. That added a lot of low-info, low-propensity voters to his base of MAGA extremists. But think also about the more than six million or so 2020 Biden voters who vanished in 2024, many in alienated big cities. Then think even bigger — to the estimated 89 million adults who didn’t even bother to vote last month.

It’s possible that a landslide victory could have been fashioned from a candidate who could both give a voice to the anger and emotion, but also offer real solutions. Trump — whose hate-based campaigns targeted both the wrong people and also some of the right ones for the wrong reasons (his Fifth-Avenue-bred vanity and narcissism) — had emotion but nothing to offer. Harris’ proposed solutions were too cautious or bloodless to tap into the real zeitgeist.

But there is no Trump mandate. Instead, there is a mandate that’s waiting to be tapped over anger and frustration over a broken society that was met with radio silence in our $16 billion election. The horror stories about UnitedHealthcare and insurance denials are just the tip of the iceberg. No other nation has a $1.7 trillion mountain of college debt. No other nation puts out reams of rosy economic statistics when millions can’t find an affordable apartment or even a used car.

Unfortunately, there’s a tall mountain standing in the way of fixing these: the hopelessly entrenched duopoly of the MAGA Republican and Democratic Parties standing atop the twin peaks of billions of dollars in campaign contributions from billionaires and their corporations that have arisen over the last 50-plus years. It’s what the recent, brilliant podcast from the Lever has shown was a master plan to put profits over people.

Of course, the massive dislocations of the last half-century have tapped into a range of sentiments, including the worst of the human condition. Trump is too willing to take the easy, demagogic path of tapping into racism or punching down against immigrants instead of the wealth grab by his fellow billionaires. There’s a whole separate column that could have been written about the similarities — and contrasts — around any folk-hero worship for Mangione and that for Daniel Penny, the New Yorker who killed a homeless man with his bare hands and won a luxury pass to watch the Army-Navy game with Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

That said, Trump and the $277 million leveraged buyout of his campaign by the richest person in the history of the world, Elon Musk, should have been an easy target for the Democrats. Team Harris instead decided to go out and raise a billion dollars of their own, which meant being nice to crypto con men or listening to the candidate’s Uber executive brother-in-law, instead of asking why companies like Cigna can reject thousands of patients’ insurance claims without really looking at them.

America has been here before, albeit with tragic consequences. In the 1850s, the inhumanity of slavery and that era’s broken economic system eventually awakened many to the fact that no political party was speaking for them. Some 170 years later, it’s the Democrats who carry the stench of a failed Whig Party. The New York Times' Jamelle Bouie, a rare remaining voice of sanity in this tortured moment, wrote this week of a desperate need for a true Opposition Party.

This is the challenge of the next four years: to create a grassroots movement and also elevate leaders who can figure out ways to both navigate within the broken shell of the Democratic Party and also find ways to work outside of it — to tap into the hidden majority party that was unheard before a tragedy played out on a Manhattan sidewalk. And now it needs to be done under a repressive, authoritarian government willing to use any tool to put down its political opponents and a free press.

After the blood is wiped from the streets of New York, it never should have come this far. But things will only get worse until an Opposition Party begins the work that never should have been left for a ghost gun in the first place.

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