You Say You Want a Revolution
Luigi, Mamdani and Leo DiCaprio
Last night in Washington, Democrats capitulated in their effort to save affordable health insurance. After a precisely Biblical 40 days wandering in the Desert of Shutdown, eight of them crawled to the Party of Trump and tithed to the billionaires. A year from now, when millions of Americans are paying thousands more dollars to keep body and soul together, will anyone remember how this played out? As short-sighted as our greedy capitalist overlords are about profits versus humanity, American memories may be even shorter. How else to explain the rise of zombie Trumpism from the grave?
In his column today, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich predicted that between Mamdani’s win and Elon Musk’s trillion dollar pay package, the end of capitalism is nigh:
No other advanced capitalist nation subjects its working families to as much fear and uncertainty over jobs, wages, health, and retirement as does America. None tolerates nearly the same inequalities of income and wealth (although some are moving in our direction). Musk’s pay and Mamdani’s victory are exhibits A and B.
Harsh American capitalism has become unsustainable, politically and economically.
Reich has been observing exactly this for a while now. But like most Democrats, frustratingly, he’s left it up to someone else to figure out how its demise will come about.
The hand of God? Market correction? What about people rising up in sheer rage? What about revolution? The word enters English via the French révolte (noun), révolter (verb), from Italian rivoltare, which is based ultimately on the Latin revolvere – literally “to roll back.”
Revolution was already on my mind before last night’s Senate capitulation. I had just watched One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie, where Leo DiCaprio plays a burned out American revolutionary on the run from a domestic military force run by white Christian nationalists, some of whom have formed an occult club called the Christmas Adventurers.
Anderson started work on the film in early 2024, but has produced a movie that – especially in its scenes of militarized cities and immigrant cages – could have been sewn together from TikToks of the streets of Trump’s America today. The movie is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, about a group of aging hippie revolutionaries. It is imbued with a 1970s ethos: fierce Black female radicals lead a bank robbery that has a whiff of the Symbionese Liberation Army, eroticized violence, a conspiratorial corporate white-man killer cult, and a French Connection-style car chase filmed in a format that hasn’t been used for half a century.
You root for the bombers. As do a legion of fans of the young man who is accused of shooting the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in cold blood last December.
John H. Richardson’s Luigi: The Making and the Meaning is the first book out of the gate on that story. Richardson is a veteran journalist, but his approach is not Bob Woodward’s. No coveted money quote from someone with the key to the young man’s psyche. Instead, Richardson puts Luigi’s life story in context of his times: apocalyptic climate change, cataclysmic advances in technology, and deregulated, politically powerful greed.
Richardson explores the ways Luigi belongs in the tradition of the Unabomber and other lesser known eco-terrorists. The central question he tries to scratch at is profound: is violence ever acceptable to achieve good change?
A legion of fans his own age and older felt it was last December, if social media can be used as a gauge. When UHC posted a note about the murder, tens of thousands of people replied dismissively, with laughing emojis and comments like “Thoughts and prayers are out of network” and “Oh my god, y’all really raised the school shooter generation and now you’re asking us for sympathy? Welcome to a regular Tuesday at school in America.”
The “meaning” of Luigi is as a symbolic antagonist to the decades in which activists of his parents’ generation traded political revolution for Davos and DEI. For the center left, the success of their revolutionary movement would NOT be measured by national health care or cleaning money out of politics – deemed impossible dreams by our political leaders now – but by symbols such as a Black man and Bill Clinton’s pal Vernon Jordan as CEO of American Express or a trans woman running one of the most profitable biopharmaceutical companies in the world.
Meanwhile, homelessness explodes along with income inequality, the earth’s natural system has been whacked out of order by burning fossil fuels, and deaths of despair rise as Americans again face bankrupting themselves and paying medical bills through GoFundMe campaigns.
The right-wing revolutionaries behind Trump (and yes, that’s what the January 6ers are) won us more years of increasingly grotesque zombie late capitalism: a gold leaf crypto-grifting presidency with its fascists plotting domestic military campaigns, attended by the court of Mar-A-Lago faced femmes who exhibit what a DC plastic surgeon today in Axios called a local epidemic of “filler blindness,” a syndrome that he said occurs when “you add gallons of product to your face and are surrounded by people who do the same,” so that “you lose sight of anatomic normalcy.”
You say you want a revolution?
How about using Mahatma Gandhi to mascot “Think Different” iPhone upgrades? What was left for American Bolsheviks to sing about after Nike famously used the Beatles’ “Revolution” in its landmark 1987 ad campaign? Yoko Ono and the surviving Beatles sued, but the ad had run its course by the time it got pulled. It was regarded as one of the most successful campaigns in marketing history. Now the “move fast and break things” tech lords - the men standing around in math labs when the sum of all human knowledge birthed the digital age and now possessing more wealth than most nations - continue to cosplay as rebels.
Compare those corporate revolutionaries to John Brown, the anti-slavery warrior sentenced to death for raiding the Harpers Ferry arsenal and killing five pro-slavers in an ambush. Standing on the gallows looking over the Kansas landscape, he uttered his still-wrenching last words: “This is a beautiful country.”
Watching One Battle After Another, I thought about the Weathermen’s bombing campaigns. They’re frail and gray ex-cons, watching the gilded nightmare play out from proverbial rocking chairs. One of their sons grew up to be San Francisco’s district attorney.
To paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron: there is a revolution that can be televised.
It is happening in New York where oligarchs spent $55 million to defeat Zohran Mamdani, and lost. That and the howls of rage, boos and middle fingers directed at Trump by thousands of NFL fans at the Commanders game in Washington last night will have to tide us over, the light at the end of the tunnel, while we wait for our warriors.
Substack Live this Thursday 11/13 at 1 PM ET
Journalist and author John H. Richardson is the son of a CIA agent and author of four books, including Luigi: The Making and the Meaning. He was born in Washington D.C. in 1954 and grew up in Athens, Manila, Saigon, Washington, Seoul, Honolulu, and Los Angeles. He attended University of Southern California ’77, Columbia University ’82, worked at the Albuquerque Tribune, The Los Angeles Daily News, Premiere Magazine, New York Magazine, and spent 20 years writing for Esquire Magazine.
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Nina, you're on fire with this one! Outstanding!
I would also add that we've entered the Era of Equivocation. There seems to be a rush from the extreme elements to *not* accept the idea that something can be "unequivocal." You'd think it's unequivocal to say that Americans teamed with Communists to defeat Fascists eighty years ago, but in a world that birthed Nick Fuentes we're faced with the Upside Down where Anti-Fascist has become a toxic identifier. And speaking of the Fuentes ilk, it's alarming how hateful nonsense is packaged by smooth sinister talkers who hypnotize audiences into thinking, "Hey, that kinda makes sense!" The nonsensical should never make sense. Again, welcome to the Upside Down.