Elon Musk is the Right's Luigi
The cases are not the same but the psychology is
I’m fairly neutral, but leaning toward disapproval, of Luigi Mangione and I hope you’ll let me make my case before I lose too many of you.
I totally get why people approve. It’s the appeal of the vigilante superhero. Subtracting the part where he got caught, his was the same origin story as a hundred comic book characters: Previously law-abiding and upstanding member of the community suffers, or witnesses the suffering of people he loves, at the hands of unaccountable men who act with impunity, untouchable by the law. He therefore decides he must also act outside of the law to make sure justice is served, recognizing that the System will never change anything because the System is, at best, inefficient, and at worst, the enemy.
Mangione even had a superhero name before he was identified—people were calling him The Adjuster. That is, on one hand, brilliant, but on the other hand, evidence of how fucking Marvel-brained we are as a society now. It was almost as good when we found out his name was Luigi—not a superhero in the same sense that Mario is but superhero-adjacent enough to make some hay of it.
Put aside the type of person Luigi Mangione actually is—we don’t really know—and consider only what people project onto him: A symbol of the immense frustration that people feel over their suffering at the hands of a system, and the thrill of the prospect of something finally being done to tear down that system and all of its horrors. After years of futile effort to work within the system and see nothing change because the system is simply too robust to be thwarted by its own tools. There are laws and regulations and courts that protect the system’s integrity and prevent any dramatic change.
Finally somebody comes along and shoots it with a gun.
I don’t have any particular sympathy for the guy Luigi shot, I can’t even remember his name right now. I remember his face in the news but all that comes to mind is this guy.
Guy sounds like a piece of shit I guess. On the other hand, shooting him obviously hasn’t changed anything. Nobody expected the whole system to collapse around Hoggish Greedly. People just hoped it was the opening salvo of a revolution.
That didn’t happen, and the US for-profit health insurance vampire coven continues to feed unabated, but there still remains the fantasy of what might happen if Luigi were to attract followers. If they could start a trend, a cascade, that could bring down the whole corrupt establishment, ignoring laws, ignoring courts, just going door to door popping off CEOs left and right until they are forced into surrender.
Now consider that’s exactly the thrill that the right is getting from what Elon Musk is doing right now.
Don’t get me wrong, I think what Musk and Trump and the whole DOGE farce is doing is abominable and fascist and I don’t equate it with the frustrations that the left feels about the for-profit healthcare and health insurance matrix (a system that Musk and Trump love just the way that it is). That’s the thing, though, what I think doesn’t matter here. Step back from me and you and Luigi too and you’ll find that there are fundamental philosophical similarities. Musk and Mangione resemble each other in eerie ways even if they are inversions of each other.
In short: We have a Waluigi situation in the US Capitol.
So first of all: Distrust in the system or the establishment or the power structure is not something that is either left or right coded. The lines just aren’t drawn like that, it’s part of our human psyche. We are a species with a fundamentally libertarian mindset. We don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like our liberties being taken away by someone else who unilaterally decides they know better. The differences between the right and the left tend to be associated with the nature of the liberty and the need.
Someone who is told they can’t own a machine gun with radium coated bullets because of the harm it could cause has fundamentally the sane grievance as someone who is told they can’t use certain pronouns due to an appeal to some oblique notion of degeneracy. But even though, in both cases, someone is losing a freedom to a systemic regulation in the name of a perceived harm, you can still sort of see the difference.
On one side it’s more often a right to own or to do something that you want being restricted, rightly or wrongly, for utilitarian reasons. On the other side it’s more often a fundamental need or a core part of somebody’s identity being restricted in an appeal to some culture wars nonsense or a religious rule.
Everyone hates the System, but we can’t necessarily pin down what the system is.
The Luigi phenomenon is essentially about bringing down the system by directly targeting the elites in charge of it. That’s the exact same mission statement of the MAGA phenomenon. “Deny, defend, depose” is spiritually analogous to “Drain the swamp.” When direct action is taken in furtherance of that mission, it fires the same neurons. Picturing Elon Musk rapid-fire eliminating government workers releases the same chemicals in a Trump supporter’s brain that a Luigi supporter gets when imagining waves of CEOs being “Luigi’d.”
But the nature and identity of the “elites” is something else that the right and the left fundamentally disagree on. To the left, the elites are the plutocrats—those whose power over society derives from their wealth and capital. These are the guys who, if they paid taxes (and many don’t), would list their occupation as “CEO,” “financier,” “investor,” “venture capitalist,” “entrepreneur,” “co-trustee,” et cetera.
Their decision making power over our lives derives from their control of political power, which derives from capital, which is generated by feeding a lot of money into a money machine that spits out more money and is powered by working people. When they exert that power over you it’s because it either benefits them directly or else they’re trying to shape our society in a way that is more aesthetically pleasing to them.
To the right, however, the elites are the technocrats. And you mustn’t confuse that term with “tech oligarchs” or anything else associated with “big tech.” Technocrats are those whose power over society derives from their specialized expertise. These are your Anthony Faucis. As crazy as it sounds on the face of it for anyone to be opposed to decisions being made by people who know what they’re doing, it largely comes down to a rejection of the premise that anyone really is an expert, or at the very least, nobody can actually be an expert if what they say butts up too hard against common sense.
To make things still more complicated, I think technocracy—the complete deferral of all social governance to experts—is also a really bad thing. Call me cringe or naïve but I’m a really big, you know, democracy guy. Technocracy as a theoretical concept is actually closer to the type of shit that the right wing tech broligarchs want even if they don’t realise it, with their kooky “effective acceleration” cult. Technocracy is what Plato wanted, and I’ll refer you to the title of my publication if you’d like to know my opinion of Plato.
The right’s rejection of experts, though, doesn’t have much overlap with my rejection of technocracy. They are simply cynical about expertise especially if that expertise comes from some form of higher learning.
There is a very strong inclination on the right to preference the idea of innate talent over learned expertise. The idea that knowledge and skill isn’t obtained so much as it is passed down. It’s intimate. It’s familial. There’s a quasi-genetic component to it and I strongly suspect this ties in with why racism is so prevalent on the right.
Education, as a whole, is consistently one of the most aggressively attacked institutions by the right, and you’d correctly presume that authoritarians just prefer an uneducated populace because they’re easier to control. But left wing tyrants have also mercilessly attacked education for this reason. Why, then, does your everyday working class Trumpist cheer when Elon bulldozes the Department of Education? It’s because of this secondary, familial, view of learning that makes Higher Education and its associated experts innately suspect.
The right sees colleges and schools and universities and they don’t see education, they see indoctrination. They see people graduating with ideas and beliefs that run counter to the ideas and beliefs their own parents or people they came to trust taught them. Ideas and beliefs that come from unknown sources are innately suspicious, especially when they don’t align with your well-honed intuition.
The belief in inherent skill over obtained knowledge is why the right has been so insistent about installing a game show host who pop culture selected as king of the yuppies in the presidency, and in turn, why the people Donald Trump appoints to lead his agencies and departments are very specifically not experts in those specific departments. They are all people who are highly suspicious and cynical about their respective roles. Anti-vaccine activists, germ theory denialists, and homeopaths now run medicine and healthcare. A drunk talk show host now runs the Pentagon. An Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theorist now runs the FBI.
And as Elon Musk Waluigis his way through government—illegally, unconstitutionally, and extrajudicially, but immune to the law, as he himself is the ultimate plutocrat—this is the thrill that the right gets from his rampage. Beyond the thrill that a not-insignificant number of people get from the idea that he is racially cleansing the government, there is the greater thrill that people get from the idea that he is purging the government of the college educated smarty-pants assholes. Elon Musk has no specific knowledge about any of the programs or agencies or roles that he’s unilaterally eliminating, and that’s a good thing, because he has inherent skill. If he looks at a government department and doesn’t instantly know why it’s valuable, then it isn’t. This guy owns a company which builds reusable rockets, can the Postmaster General do that?
So I guess this is why I can’t entirely get on the Luigi Mangione bandwagon. As much as I don’t cry for his target I think of the ideology writ large and I can’t help seeing some other version of Elon Musk, unilaterally plowing through The Bad Guys.
But there’s still a difference, and the fact that Luigi might spend his life in prison for ending one plutocrat while Elon Musk will likely become the world’s first trillionire for destroying untold thousands of lives should tell you what that difference is.
We Are Exploiting Epstein's Victims For Our Own Politics
Can we all agree finally that we will never, ever see such a thing as an “Epstein List?”
I hate that I agree with this, but I think you hit the nail on the head. I just wish I had an answer for how we navigate these new dangerous time