Mark Malvasi
The resort to violence has become the characteristic American response to a world that seems to many to lie beyond their control. Almost from the beginning, violence wrote itself into the American story. Violence seems now to be inscribing itself onto the American soul.
Although the story has disappeared from the news cycle, Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care, and the public response to the killing, have exposed the increasingly barbarous character of American society. A disciple of Ted Kaczynski, Mangione, like Kaczynski, believes that human beings are animals who have forgotten their bestial nature and abandoned the law of the jungle.[i] Violence, Mangione thinks, is always justified because it is necessary for survival. Protest and reform, by implication, are useless; the nonviolent engagement with power is a waste of time. Such a sense impotence, which regards the enemy as almighty and unassailable, is a psychological condition. It is not, and has never been, a political reality.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to explain the predominance, obtained by consent rather than by force, of one class over all others. The dominant vision of reality permeates society and is accepted virtually without question. Those who are subordinate willingly acknowledge the prestige of their superiors and acquiesce in what they are convinced is the proper social, political, and moral order. They become the very models of public rectitude. In Gramsci’s analysis, hegemony depended on consciousness, what he called “ideological-cultural relations,” to a far greater extent than it did on political affiliations or economic interests. The institutions of government and civil society, Gramsci argued, obscured or suppressed potential conflicts by deflecting anger, by making dissent seem either misguided or futile, and, finally, by engendering resignation. He identified
two major superstructural ‘levels’, the one that can be called `civil society’, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/02/luigi-mangione-america-mark-malvasi.html
