If We Make It Through December: 2024 in Review

For the most part, it’s about death. It always is.

Unseasonal as the thought may be – though Dickens might dissent – we are either fortunate or blinkered if we can reflect on any year and not find mortality our primary measure. 2024 was no exception.

The people of Gaza require no education in this; the ranks of their dead are now so staggering, the United States House of Representatives passed an amendment in June barring the State Department from citing the most reliable source for enumerating them. Those who remain alive – for now – are reminded every day that to Israel, death is the point, and further deaths are non-negotiable. Genocide is not just a reality, but a promise.

Throughout 2024, many powerful or prominent voices repeatedly reminded us that they considered the devastation of Gaza – to which we may add Lebanon and, as of this past week, expansionist assaults on Syria – either perfectly acceptable or regrettable but necessary. It is interesting then, in the last weeks of the year, to discover what kind of death apparently is worthy of outrage.

Just before dawn on December 4, a masked gunman walked out of the shadows and into legend. The assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare – the health insurance giant which, in a country where half of all adults could not afford an unexpected $500 medical bill, has seen its profits go from $12 billion to $16 billion since 2021 – became immediate global news.

After several days of the NYPD valiantly poking through bushes in Central Park and proving that the spirit of the Keystone Cops lives on, 26-year-old suspect Luigi Mangione was eventually apprehended at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s after another patron snitched, proving once and for all that you should always order to go.

Even before his capture, Mangione was well on his way to becoming a folk hero, not least among the countless Americans who have faced bankruptcy and lifelong debt for being injudicious enough to get sick or injured, or watched loved ones die thanks to UnitedHealthcare’s habit of denying claims at twice the industry average. The question “what does it mean for Americans to welcome the murder of Brian Thompson?” hardly requires a think-piece to untangle: the riddle of the Sphinx this is not.

Since his identification, the media has obsessively sought evidence of Mangione’s deranged radicalism, but the best it has come up with so far is a mildly complimentary Goodreads review of the Unabomber Manifesto (though nobody ever takes the right lesson from the Unabomber, which is that STEM graduates are weird). Otherwise, what little can be garnered of Mangione’s ideological leanings appears muddled, but basically median.

And if a regular, ‘normal’ American – that cryptozoological entity upon which elections are said to hinge – could become so enraged by the American healthcare system as to pursue such extreme measures, that points to certain conclusions some would rather not face.

***

Predictably, Mangione’s widespread lionisation triggered great pearl-clutching within the pundit-industrial complex, no small part of which has spent the past decade explaining why, in the richest nation on Earth, socialised medicine is an impossible and undesirable pipe dream. The cry went out, and the cry was: “Stop enjoying this so much.”

“In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this: he is no hero,” Pennsylvania governor Jeff Shapiro sternly instructed following Mangione’s capture. “In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint.”

Respectfully, Governor: who the fuck are you kidding?

The day before Mangione was arrested while eating his hash brown, Daniel Penny walked out of court a free man. In May 2023, Penny, a 26-year-old former United States marine, placed Jordan Neely – an unhoused New Yorker suffering from mental illness – in a six-minute chokehold, following Neely’s alleged intimidation of Penny’s fellow subway passengers. The result was Neely’s death.

One might naïvely assume that killing someone on video could only yield one verdict. Nevertheless, following a massive right-wing campaign on his behalf, Penny was acquitted on all charges. Shortly thereafter, in between bar-hopping, Penny expressed no regrets over his actions.

Reflecting on Neely’s murder, Lyle Jeremy Rubin wrote last year: “The killer and his legal team believe the world is meant to be policed by a certain type of hero, whether in uniform or not, in Baghdad or New York. And it is that hero’s worldview, shot through with erratic, racist instincts and an equally erratic class contempt, that helps resolve any ostensible ambiguities. To be this kind of hero no longer requires being white or rich… It doesn’t even require being disciplined or law-abiding. But it does require an unflinching commitment to the racial and class order the law upholds.”

The death at Daniel Penny’s hands demonstrated in the clearest terms his commitment to that order; the one carried out by Mangione, however, posed a threat to it. People like Brian Thompson are supposed to be protected by this order, whereas people like Jordan Neely are – at best – invisible to it, but more often end up as its victims.

***

Since Donald Trump’s victory in last month’s presidential election, a narrative emerged within the embattled bunkers of American centrism, explaining that the ignominious defeat of Kamala Harris should be ascribed to her failure to adequately distance herself from the progressive signifiers she supposedly embraced during her ill-fated 2019 primary run.

One of those usually mentioned is the Black Lives Matter movement, the voter-repelling excesses of which must, they warn, never be repeated. After all, these sensible pundits shrugged in the days before Daniel Penny walked free after killing an unarmed person of colour with his bare hands, was Black Lives Matter even relevant anymore?

The ease with which centrism – moderates, mainstream liberalism, take your pick of what we’re calling the creed this week – abandoned or denounced Black Lives Matter (a movement they were never especially comfortable with, key aims of which they actively opposed) has echoes in the scandalised reaction of its norms-devoted adherents to Luigi Mangione’s incipient fanbase.

Whatever injustices the world may contain, and however many may suffer and die as a result, we are supposed to trust in them. And if their solutions fail, then we should trust that they will succeed eventually. Any other response, whether rhetorical or direct, is out of the question.

Three pivotal elections in 2024 encapsulated this worldview, and each in their own way revealed how dysfunctional and doomed it has proven to be. In the US, it lost about as definitively and comprehensively as was possible; in the UK, it won, but no matter the size of Keir Starmer’s majority, it was not a victory to be envied; and in France, it hangs on, for now, but at the expense of the long-standing fiction that centrism’s very nature renders it impervious to the extreme ‘fringes’ of the Left or Right.

When the centre shifts, so the argument goes, centrists shift with it, or – if feeling especially confident – attempt to aim where the centre is going to be, as if politics were a particularly high-stakes game of Space Invaders. For some obscure reason, this almost always means moving to the right. It never seems to bother them much.

***

As illustrated by a recent report from the Electoral Reform Society, the 2024 general election was the most disproportional in British history; the ‘landslide’ that delivered Keir Starmer to power belied the fact that Labour and the Conservatives “recorded their lowest combined vote share (57.4%) in the era of universal suffrage”, with turnout plummeting to 59.9%. A victory achieved through the combination of the UK’s tragicomic electoral system and Not Being Rishi Sunak falls somewhat short of being a mandate.

Nevertheless, as presaged by the slashing of winter fuel payment – which the one million pensioners now skipping meals in the depths of December will need no reminding – the UK’s new government quickly decided that its evident unpopularity was the perfect excuse to do some very unpopular things. “Things will get worse before they get better,” Starmer promised, and quickly set about proving it.

It is arguably no coincidence that it was Britain which led Friedrich Engels to formulate the idea of ‘social murder’. Writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels noted:

“When society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death… when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live… knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”

Much like the American healthcare system, the UK Government is intensely relaxed about social murder. No other conclusion can be drawn from Starmer’s pledge last month to “get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society”.

A benefits ‘crackdown’ has been a favourite pastime of every UK Government within living memory; invariably, they are predicated on the idea that if an elusive and largely mythical underclass of benefits ‘cheats’ can be located and expunged, they will, like a leprechaun, yield a pot of gold.

As a side-effect – one successive governments have shown they can live with, even if others do not – benefits crackdowns kill people. Despite the Department for Work and Pensions doing everything in its power to obscure this, Universal Credit is such an elegant means of social murder, one could almost be forgiven for thinking it was designed with that aim in mind.

The spectacle of the government which replaced the Tories acting exactly like the Tories on the UK’s already parlous society safety net could perhaps be explained, if not excused, by its desperation to plug the infamous £22 billion “black hole” with which it claims to have been saddled. No such justification can be offered for this week’s confirmation that the UK’s ban on puberty blockers for under-18s will be made indefinite.

Speaking in the Commons, Wes Streeting – an anthropomorphised big toe with a Hitler Youth haircut who doubles as the UK’s health secretary – took the time to directly address the young trans people he had just collectively fucked over.

“I know it won’t feel like it based on the decisions I’m taking today,” he said, redefining the art of understatement, “but I really do care about this and so does this government. I am determined to improve the quality of care and access to healthcare for all trans people.” I’m sure that will be a great comfort to them.

The tragic and likely consequences of policies such as this should be well understood at this point, and perhaps would be, had this government – headed by a prime minister who once boasted of his disdain for ‘culture wars’ – not taken great pains to suppress and ignore them in their bid to move the ostensible centre ever closer to the Trumpian Right. But, as Engels said, murder it remains.

***

For a time in 2024, one could be forgiven for looking to France with hope. The surprise emergence of the left-wing coalition the New Popular Front as the biggest winner of a snap parliamentary election many had feared might favour Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally led many to do so, or even dare to dream that the NFP might enter government. “The president has the duty,” declared Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the aftermath, “to call on the New Popular Front to govern.”

This outcome would, however, depend upon Emmanuel Macron, erstwhile sun-king of liberal centrism turned lame canard president, to swallow the prospect of left-wing premiership as the price for repelling National Rally. You can guess what happened next.

I commented to a friend not so long ago, only half-joking, that there are many valid critiques that can be made of the French Left – you just don’t get to make them if you’re from Britain. It’s like criticising the beef bourguignon as insufficiently tender whilst savouring the mushy peas at your local Wetherspoons.

None of what followed, however, could be laid at the feet of the NFP; Macron’s refusal to accept their candidate for prime minister on grounds of “institutional stability” – please, there’s only so much irony we can take – led directly to the fall of Michel Barnier’s government last week. It is unclear how his recently announced replacement, the veteran centrist François Bayrou, will avoid the same fate.

Macron’s intransigence and Barnier’s final days in office spent fruitlessly trying to win the tacit support of Le Pen and her party proved once again the cardinal sin of centrism in 2024 – given the choice, it will always, always pander to or work with the Right over the Left, even if the result is its own destruction.

National Rally and its sympathisers are fond of their carefully cultivated myth that the elites of France have conspired to erect an institutional barrier against them; this is mostly bullshit. As the murder of Nahel Merzourk demonstrated last year, far from being some existential or subversive threat to the French establishment, the party and the crude neofascist instincts it so poorly masks have long been entrenched within the country’s institutions.

If the events of 2024 lead one day soon to that power being made explicit and official, it will be because Macron and the political creed he represents held open the door.

***

Among other things, 2024 may have been the year when we finally – at least for the immediate future – gave up on the quaint notion that political developments flow downstream from the Discourse. As someone who has precisely no practical skills in this world beyond typing words and making spaghetti bolognese, I acknowledge this with mixed feelings.

It would be easy – and, indeed, fun – to dunk upon the countless wonkish dweebs and superannuated commentators who were taken aback by the developments of 2024, and now find themselves set adrift in a world which not only refuses to abide by the rules they believed to be immutable, but over which they have little to no influence.

For proof, witness Matt Yglesias, the pundit whose work was once “widely read” within the Biden administration, now churning out Substack manifestoes explaining why the answer to American centrism’s humiliating defenestration is to become more centrist. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

Though it will be of little succour to those in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration, this reality has also afflicted the Right; having finally achieved near-total domination of X/Twitter, thanks to the assistance of a neo-Nazi blobfish with more money than Scrooge McDuck, they are now beginning to discover this does not magically bestow unimaginable power, and are left with little to do but snipe at each other as the ship they’ve commandeered steadily sinks.

Unfortunately, the lessons of 2024 for the Left are all the more grim; it has been brutally reacquainted with just how far its enemies will go, and how closely they will align, in order to frustrate the Left’s advancement and maximise the suffering of the oppressed.

Spending the year watching thousands in Paris stand and sing ‘The Internationale’, or millions across the world march against genocide in Gaza, I can only think of the words of Kurt Vonnegut:

“During the Vietnam War… every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

Reflect on this, and consider once again the case of Luigi Mangione. With a gun, Mangione did more to provoke a genuine discussion about the state of healthcare in the US than Kamala Harris did with a billion dollar war-chest, not to mention the vice-presidency (granted, that may be unfair – it’s not like she actually tried to do so). However, America has seen such discussions before, as have we all – we’ve seen them happen, we’ve seen them suffocated, and we’ve seen them expire without consequence.

Which leaves the question: how many will conclude, in light of that experience, that more discussion is far from sufficient?