What Do Luigi Mangione, the Toppling of the Syrian Government, and Keir Starmer All Have in Common? They Embody the Passive Politics of Our Time.
December 19 2024
The American people have a new hero, one that the media simply cannot wrap their heads around. This hero brazenly gunned down a private healthcare CEO in the street. That the shooter killed efficiently, caused no collateral damage, that it took a week to catch him, and he’s the best-looking assassin we’ve ever had, help in building his myth (contrast the Trump shooter, who was ugly, instantly executed by the security services, and failed to kill Trump, but did kill members of the crowd, and thus is admired by no one). But fundamentally there is one reason the shooter is admired, and that is who he killed. As it turns out the American problem with rage shooters is not that they shoot, but purely who they hit.
The executed CEO led ‘UnitedHealthcare’, the insurance branch of the world’s largest private healthcare company. For those who don’t know, health insurance is the system into which Americans pay during good times so that in times of ill-health they can make an application to a company that refuses to do anything. This CEO had heroically made profits for his shareholders by tripling the rate of refusal of treatment for the elderly and disabled, and generally achieving a rate of denial twice that of the national average. That this system is despised by many Americans is well known, but the depth of feeling was only made apparent after this killing. Right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro tried to portray the celebration as a product of the ‘sicko left’, only to be roundly informed by their own fans that actually, they thought it was great too.
The reaction is almost incomprehensible to a media that was recalibrating toward a soft center-right right after the American people elected Trump. But this shooting has demonstrated the immense gap between what is on offer and what Americans actually want. For such a shocking slaying, surveys conducted over the past few weeks since the killing have shown that surprisingly large portions of the population, and up to 41% of young people, viewed it as acceptable. The Democrat-Republicans offer tax credits and tariffs, and what a lot of the American people want, apparently, is revenge on healthcare executives.
The problem is, of course, what exactly are Americans going to do to make their desires manifest, in whatever form that might take? It seems the answer is: nothing at all. If this shooting is the first major blow in the struggle for healthcare in the United States since the crushing of the movement in favor of Bernie Sanders, then all the worst for that struggle. Even if the shooting led to a series of copycat shootings, it's not clear what difference this would make—apart from a hardening security apparatus among the American ruling class. The shooting would matter if it jump-started a resurgent popular movement, but there is no sign at all that this is the case.
In fact, admiration of the shooting and the shooter acted as a perfect spectacle, a passive population drawn into fantasy. Now that the suspect has been identified, some of the superhero mystique may fade away. However, for days all that was known was the shooter’s winning smile and three words he engraved onto his shell casings–the stuff of fantasies. Everything was projected upon him; his vendetta could have been personal, or purely ideological, and then more or less any ideology could be filled in. Still, this hardly changed once the alleged shooter was arrested, and his social media revealed no real ideological commitment and a mix of personal and impersonal issues with the US healthcare system. What it also confirmed was that he was very good-looking. This means that whatever might have guided him, the admiration for his deed precedes him and can allow for almost any motive or ideal to be projected onto him.
If this counts as politics, it is its lowest form. However, it fits perfectly with our moment, a moment in which so many despise the present order of things, but are also entirely disorganized and demoralized in any effort to change it. We wait around, and often welcome events that seem like they could bring a close to the present moment, regardless of their character. This is the inclination that led to the celebration of the New York Shooter and, while they may seem unrelated, the election of Keir Starmer, and HTS overrunning most of Syria in a fortnight.
It might seem like a digression, but I think the sentiments are connected and worth relating. In Syria, HTS, a former branch of Al Qaeda, has rebranded and moderated in order to present itself as the only viable opposition, with its main rival the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) falling into open banditry. In late November they launched what was meant to be a minor offensive to disrupt Syrian government artillery shelling. Straining beneath the pressure of a kleptocratic regime, years of economic sanctions, salary cuts, demobilization, and their allies distracted or weakened, the Syrian Army simply ceased to exist in the face of the assault. HTS walked into Damascus.
What is remarkable here is what the civilian population did–or rather, did not do. An essential part of the government’s military strategy was the formation of militias from Syria’s various minorities. Deployed locally, these forces provided hardpoints of fighters who would not run away, which gave Russian airpower and Iranian ground forces something to work with. By late 2024, a large number of these militias had been demobilized as the Syrian government attempted to transition back to how things operated before the war. This is one of the reasons behind the government’s rapid collapse. But notably, this collapse did not happen so fast that these former militiamen could not have rushed to the armories and demanded their weapons back. It did not happen so fast, and at first did not seem so hopeless, as to make this endeavor pointless. But there seemed to be very little interest in this proposition.
HTS hammered home the point that they would not commit sectarian massacres. When they appeared to keep their word during their offensive, this proved enough for Syria’s minorities to accept the oncoming advance passively. But HTS were also not really welcomed as liberators. When they knocked over a statue of Hafez al-Assad in Hama only a few dozen people even turned up to witness the event. The only day that saw people thronging the streets was the day after Assad was toppled and everything was already decided by the military factions. It was to celebrate a future that had been imposed on them, rather than one they had decided for themselves.
Only one place filled with people during this offensive, and that was the Kurdish neighborhoods of Aleppo. The people came out en masse to support their fighters, the YPG, who are the armed wing of the leftist PYD that governs much of North Eastern Syria (Rojava). The PYD administration allied with the West in their victorious war on the Islamic State, while also maintaining relationships with the Syrian government and Russia. With its secular, feminist, and communalist politics, it is a genuine positive alternative to Islamism, and far less incompatible with ‘Western Values’. However, due to inheriting these politics from the global left, and more specifically the Kurdish Freedom Movement, it is entangled in a conflict with NATO's second-largest military. This is an army that has for years engaged in slow-motion depopulation of Rojava through a brutal drone war on civilian objects, having launched two large-scale military operations prior to this, and seem to now be launching a third. Long fought-
for sanction relief from the United States saw 0$ invested in Rojava, and even USAID projects are bombed by the Turkish State. Turkey has also prevented regional elections in Rojava, threatening to invade this year if they were held, forcing the local administration to suspend them under American pressure.
These events make it starkly clear what happens when genuine popular movements do emerge–forces of reaction line up to smash them. We got the shooter because they smashed Bernie, and finally, we got Keir Starmer because they smashed Corbyn.
If Al-Jolani wants to see his future he should look no further than Keir Starmer. Gifted a supermajority by the British people with just a third of the vote due to the Tories doing even worse, only a few months later he was third in the polls with a -40% approval rating. Starmer seems committed to charting a middle passage, while Britain desperately needs radical change.
His government has neither committed to the austerity needed to finally sink his benighted and decaying Island beneath the sea nor the investment required to save it. Public-private partnerships with entities like BlackRock abound, however. That the cuts to winter fuel allowance were dwarfed by spending on an asylum system that pleases no one seems emblematic of his short political reign. The system seems neither to offer anyone asylum nor deport them, instead banning them from work and then dispatching them to hotels in working-class communities. Here they are paid a pauper's penny of £8.86 a week while the hotel owners make more money than they ever could from the locals. Labour and Starmer inherited this system, but there seems no inclination to radically change it.
However, despite the depths to which the unpopularity of the Labour Party has sunk, they will still reach the end of their term. Anything else would require mass politics on a level that has become impossible in Britain. The rage that bubbled over in the asylum riots rolled back to a simmer after a week. The farmers that promised to block every road in Britain in fact stood around in Central London for a bit before disappearing back to the countryside. The most exciting thing that could happen in British politics is Farage’s mob coming into power next time around instead of the Tories. If you want anything more, you’ll be disappointed. Brief bacchanals where the populace comes out into the streets, like during the BLM protests, will continue to happen. Until they are led by an organized association of working people, they will never be anything more than bacchanals.
In the US, outrage at the private healthcare system is expressed as applause for a violent but directionless act. In Syria, years of war have meant the population is too fatigued to resist the encroachment of HTS, even as its rule exchanges one form of authoritarianism for another. In Britain, the death of politics is made manifest in a quiet acceptance of a party that does little more than the bare minimum to maintain its rule. In each case, no one likes what’s happening. There’s nothing to celebrate. But the response varies between a brief murmur of triumph, a momentary rush to the streets, or sighs of disdain. These reactions were also evident in the responses to Trump’s victory in 2016 versus 2024: first an aimless rush then a sigh that signalled the abandonment of hope in institutions that might deliver us.
Even these flawed alternatives–a shooting, deliverance from Tory rule, Syrian ‘liberation’–will one day become subject to the same passive cynicism. Just as the public celebrated, however meekly, these events, they will turn on Thompson’s assassin, HTS, and Starmer’s Labour Party. Cynical passivity spares no one.
Unfortunately, we must accept that things can always get worse, and as long as our rulers are alien to the people, we should not expect things to change in our favor. There is only one solution to the doldrums ordinary people have found themselves in, and it is the same solution that has been available for a century and a half: a communist party. Mass politics in the West, and most of the rest of the world, may seem entirely implausible in our present moment, but it's our only chance.
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