This is more Paul’s territory than mine, but I think that some consideration needs to be given to how the Democratic coalition is planning to handle “woo.” I am fond of saying that if you do not hold fierce, burning hatred in your heart for the other end of your political coalition, then your coalition probably isn’t big enough to consistently win elections in the United States. For me personally the objects of that hatred have been a certain set of foreign policy leftists and the “woo community,” broadly conceived. If the last sixteen months have taught us anything it is that “woo” kills; indulging woo means undertaking a set of policies that make Americans actively less healthy. RFK Jr. may or may not end up being the most murderous of Trump’s cabinet picks (the destruction of USAID will end up being worse), but he certainly doesn’t lack for effort.
a critical difference between woke 1 and woke 2 is the understanding that woo is something to be fought tooth and nail
What I am less certain about is how we go about doing this. Of the many stories of the 2024 election the idea that Kennedy’s defection was consequential to the outcome seems plausible to me, if not absolutely ironclad. However disappointed “MAHA Moms” may be in Trump administration policy, they have certainly demonstrated an interest in electoral influence. Even if it could be done, purging “woo” from the coalition would require some narrative about how the votes (and the not insignificant money) would be replaced, especially in context of a GOP that is giddy about courting the constituency.
But I also doubt that it can be done. To the extent that there is a “woo constituency” that can be courted or purged it is that there is a group of voters who care more about this issue than other coalitional commitments and are willing to condition their votes on it. But “woo” is a very broad concept and it is woven into a very broad set of communities than make up the Democratic coalition. To start with, it should be obvious that anti-woo can very quickly deteriorate into misogyny if conducted without care, notwithstanding the fact that much modern “woo” is associated with young men’s health and wellness. Furthermore, the coalition contains a significant number of groups that are skeptical of the modern health care industrial complex, some for better reasons and some for worse. Trying to isolate and tear out the “woo” could be… rough, and alienating.
So… I would love to punch these hippies, but I’m not sure that there’s a good way for these hippies to get punched without causing serious coalition management problems. To be clear I don’t think that the Democrats should relax sensible, science-based positions on vaccines and other health care, but I’m unclear on how much more confrontational and assertive Democrats could get on this issue.
But this should be read mainly as “thinking out load” rather than a proposal to do anything specific. I’m curious about y’all’s thoughts; how do Democrats repair the damage that RFK Jr. is inflicting while containing the electoral fallout?
Having spent a great deal of my life around "woo" people, my current - and only - response to them is contemptuous ridicule. "Have fun killing your kids!" is a solid rejoinder.
(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos: Shutterstock)
1. We’ve Got Spirit
Last week on Receipts Live with Catherine Rampell I said I was glad that Spirit Airlines was dead.
Let me clarify.
I don’t like it when people lose their jobs, so I’m sorry that the people employed by Spirit are out of work. But I’m happy that the corporate entity that was Spirit is gone.
Because Spirit sucked balls. And when a terrible company goes out of business, it’s a sign that the marketplace determined it wouldn’t tolerate their suckiness.
And I find that . . . hopeful? For America?
Today we’re going to have a high-concept conversation about business and airlines and tech companies and entropy and liberal democracy. It’s going to be a journey. I hope you’ll take the ride with me.
In Bezos's original plan, the company called “Amazon” was called “Relentless,” due to its ambition to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Today, Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality. . . .
Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads. One of them is an ad for a dog carrier, which Amazon itself manufactures and sells, competing with the other sellers who bought that placement.
Scroll down one screen and you get some “organic” results – that is, results that represent Amazon’s best guess at the best products for your query. Scroll once more and yup, another entire screen of ads, these ones labeled “Highly rated.” One more scroll, and another screenful of ads, one for a dog product.
Keep scrolling, you’ll keep seeing ads, including ads you’ve already scrolled past. “On these first five screens, more than 50 percent of the space was dedicated to ads and Amazon touting its own products.”1 . . .
How did we get here?
The answer, Doctorow proposed, was that Amazon had built a $31 billion ad business inside its own retail platform. The incentives for Amazon went from “give customers the most helpful results so they’ll buy the most stuff” to “sell as many ads against products as customers will tolerate so that:
[ad sales profits] > [retail sales losses from abandoned searches]
Amazon got shitty because it got so big that it achieved both monopoly and monopsony powers: It had control over both buyers and sellers. Which allowed it to start extracting rents from each.
Which made Amazon worse, but also made it lots more money. When a platform is no longer beholden to either side of the transaction, the incentives change. Instead of aiming high to deliver better products, the platform aims low to find the worst pain threshold users will tolerate.
Doctorow expanded his thesis to describe how enshittification was eating the entire tech world and would go on to eat the rest of the world, too. Here he is in the Financial Times in 2024 inching toward a Grand Theory of Enshittification:
We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying. . . .
It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.
Spirit Airlines was not a tech company and it did not have a monopoly. But it was a company driven by the ethos of enshittification. Spirit’s business model was:
How much crap can we force customers to put up with before they are so annoyed that they pay us more money?
I am a fan of no-frills, discount air carriers. Southwest has been, for decades, one of the best airlines in the business. But Southwest’s strategy has always been:
How do we deliver the best-possible service for the lowest-possible price?
Spirit went out of its way to make the customer experience worse, hoping to inconvenience customers so much that they could upsell remedies—hiding the true cost of a ticket. Spirit’s secret sauce was disguising rotten apples as oranges to confuse shoppers.
This was an attempt to enshittify air travel. So yeah, I’m glad Spirit is gone. Because it’s a signal to other companies that, at least in the air-travel market, consumers still have the power to reject—and defeat—enshittification.
I want to unpack that three-step enshittification process Doctorow talked about. In his FTpiece, Doctorow uses Facebook as an example.
Step 1: Good for Users
As a startup, Facebook wasn’t first, so it competed on differentiation. As Doctorow explained:
When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.
That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users. Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook.
Facebook achieved hockey-stick growth during this period.
Step 2: Good for Businesses
After a company establishes a dominant user base by leveraging investor cash to sustain unprofitability, it pivots to monetizing its audience. Which is what Facebook did.
To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.
Suddenly Facebook got bad for users, but at least it delivered value for its paying clients.
The problem is, once Facebook had its hooks into businesses, it pivoted again.
Step 3: Good for Facebook
Here’s Doctorow:
Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.
For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.
Enshittification is not new. Once upon a time, everyone in America hated the phone company.2 In the 1970s, everyone hated General Motors.3 In the 1990s, everyone hated the cable company. We all recognize the pattern of legacy companies maturing to the point where they deliberately antagonize customers/users because there’s money to be made that way.
You might even say that this cycle is baked into capitalism. That it is part of why we get creative destruction and the progress that emanates from it. We take one step backward so that eventually we can take two steps forward.
And I’m open to that. Truly.
But I want to shift lenses here and ask a different question: Could the enshittification process apply to a democracy?
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Let me tell you a highly stylized version of the American story.
In the beginning, there was a startup called the United States, which we’ll refer to by its stock-ticker symbol, USA. It was young, scrappy, and hungry and needed to figure out how to deliver value to its citizens users.
So it did a bunch of things: It created a central bank. It expanded its territory. It established mass communications (the postal service) and roads and public education. Eventually, it took the painful step of expunging slavery.
This startup grew in size and productivity and market cap. Its user base became enormous. After about 160 years, USA became the biggest company on the planet, at which point it achieved a bunch of important network effects. Because USA benefited from free trade, it developed a military that could enforce a globalized system of free trade. Capital—both human and financial—flowed into USA. People—both users and clients4—loved USA. And for another 70 years it delivered good results for both. Its stock couldn’t have been higher.
But then USA went down the road toward enshittification.
No one is quite sure when it started, but at some point people realized that USA was no longer interested in making users’ lives better. Instead, it had decided to see just how much pain the user base would tolerate before it abandoned the platform. USA had become half Spirit Airlines, half Facebook, and half cable company.
And USA’s business clients—the other countries who had bent over backwards to get access to USA’s platform and user base—resented it and began looking for alternatives as they were also abused.
As a result, USA saw its position in the market decline.
Let’s not get too bogged down with this metaphor, though, because what I want to focus on are two questions about the United States as a platform.
Let’s stipulate that there was never a true golden age for our company, USA. Every era is filled with hardship, tragedy, and corruption. When you look at the long sweep of history, sure, the line has moved up and to the right. But when you zoom in to any one time period, it always looks like we’re just muddling through.
Even with that in mind, though, doesn’t it seem like our company, our platform, our country has been . . . getting worse, on balance, for coming on a quarter of a century?
It hasn’t been universally worse. We’ve shipped some new features that were nice. But net-net?
Does it seem to you like USA is trying to improve the user experience? Or has it become the cable company, or Facebook: You’ll put up with this shit because what are you going to do? Leave?
It’s at the systems level that things have gotten really enshittified. The federal government has been losing functionality for a long time. Why? Lots of reasons:
Increasing partisanship
Ideological sorting of the parties
The Supreme Court drastically expanding executive power while diminishing executive accountability
The legislature surrendering institutional prerogatives
Hyperscaled gerrymandering
Creation of an oligarch class
Breakdown of the rule of law and the hyperscaling of corruption
This is an partial list and yes, some of these shifts have been incremental. But others have been large-scale step changes. You can add your own favorite reason.
Here is a test for whether or not a system has been enshittified.
Identify a problem with a clear solution.5 For instance, you could craft an immigration-reform package that gets to sustained 60 percent public support pretty easily. Now ask yourself: Is it politically possible to enact that solution?
Or take gerrymandering. Everyone knows that gerrymandering is a net negative. There are good (though not perfect) solutions to prevent it. But we’re actually moving backwards on gerrymandering because one party unilaterally disarmed, the Supreme Court has become a partisan entity, and the other party has become anti-democratic. So we know how to fix gerrymandering, most people want to fix gerrymandering, but not only can we not fix it, but it’s getting worse.
Or take the Supreme Court. There are a host of sensible reforms for the high court, such as term limits and set appointment schedules. But these are politically impossible to achieve. The only achievable reform is court expansion, which is a suboptimal solution that carries its own risks of even further enshittifying everything.
Even incremental reforms, like ranked-choice voting, are impossible to achieve at scale because of our system’s deep sclerosis.
I do not think it is possible to deny that America is a declining empire. But it is important to understand why. We are not losing control of our colonies, like England in the 1930s. We are not threatened by belligerent neighbors. There are no exogenous hardships. Everything we need to fix America is right here.
And yet we are incapable of doing so. Partly because of the will of the people—decline is a choice. But also because of structural barriers that have developed in the American system.
Among other complaints against GM, the company was a pioneer in “planned obsolescence,” a kind of enshittification that consumers became clued into starting in the 1960s through the writings of Vance Packard.
This is harder than it sounds. Some problems don’t have clear solutions. Racism or poverty, for instance, are complicated, persistent, and hard to address in all times and places.
Everyone associated with the Trump administration is the scum of the earth:
The Trump administration has abruptly canceled an $11 million contract with Catholic Charities to shelter and care for migrant children who enter the U.S. alone, ending a relationship between the Catholic Church and the U.S. government dating back to the first arrivals of Cuban exiles in South Florida. The development comes amid rising tensions between the administration and American Catholics over President Donald Trump’s heated criticism of the Vatican’s first American pope, Leo XIV. The pontiff has made opposition to the U.S. war with Iran, as well as concern for the welfare of migrants, a cornerstone of his ministry.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, has paid Catholic Charities in Miami for several years to house immigrant children who enter the U.S. without parents or adult supervision. The non-profit operates the equivalent of a federally funded foster care system, separate and apart from state agencies that have custody of abused and neglected children. The federal government reached out to the charity in late March about the cancellation of the funding. The Archdiocese of Miami said late Tuesday that Archbishop Thomas Wenski was not immediately available to discuss the contract’s cancellation or the Trump Administration’s rift with the church. But it shared a statement that Wenski, a longtime immigrant-rights advocate, wrote for the Miami Herald’s editorial board. “The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Wenkski wrote. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.” Wenski added: “Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months.” . . .
Robert Latham, associate director of the University of Miami Law School’s Children and Youth Law Clinic, said any relocation to a new foster home or shelter likely would be traumatic for children who already have suffered uncertainty and loss. “It’s incredibly psychologically harmful to be moved,” sometimes as stressful as serious illness or a death in the family, Latham said. “For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community. They don’t know who they are and where they will be” from day to day. “This should only be done with a lot of emotional support that you normally would find within a family. Unfortunately, that is not there in a group home setting,” Latham added. The children who are uprooted “will lose the friends and connections and the community they have formed here.”
One day, and may that day come soon, Donald Trump will be out of power permanently. Everyone who supported him should never be forgiven, and that goes double for two-faced traitors like Fetterman, and every pundit who both sided the atrocities of this criminal regime.
Once more for the folks in the back. Calibri is easier than Times New Roman for folks with certain visual disabilities to read. That’s why the Biden Administration chose Calibri for their digital communications: to include more people and make life just a wee bit easier for the disabled. And who in their right mind could object to that?
You know who, and they’re not in their right mind—unless you’re talking far-right.
See, to these buffoons, with their narrow zero-sum minds, choosing to meet the needs of the largest number of Americans is the same as withholding special privileges from “real” Americans—straight white men who voted for Trump. That’s what they mean by “woke.” And that’s why, last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed diplomats to bring back Times New Roman as their official typeface.
Of course it’s petty bullshit, but it’s also deliberately disempowering to the disabled, which is Eugenics at work, which is Nazi stuff—barbaric and cruel. Prove me wrong.
Oh, wait. Let’s ask an expert. Axios quotes Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities:
Ending the State Department’s use of accessible, sans-serif fonts like Calibri is more than a shift in design preferences—it is a direct step backward for millions of people with low vision who rely on digital accessibility features to read vital information.
At a time when families across the country are struggling to afford the basic necessities of life, eliminating accessibility features should be the very last thing our government is concerned with.
So you’d think, if you believe the government exists to help the people. Which, before this presidency, was a reasonable belief, even if previous government services were distributed inequitably and plenty of past administrations had blood on their hands.
But never before has a U.S. administration existed to illegally enrich the president while keeping his convicted felonious ass out of lockup, punishing all but the richest Americans, spurning America’s allies, turning our backs on those around the world who most need our help, and engaging in round-the-clock performative nonsense to satisfy MAGA voters’ thirst for cruelty.
Why write about a font change? After all, this government gets up to many worse things every day. Murder. Kidnapping. Brutality. It’s all too true.
But this one small detail—a typographic change intended to make digital communications just a bit harder for the disabled to read—encapsulates the moronic sadism of this hateful administration.
As Joni told us long ago, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
McDowell County, North Carolina, loves Donald Trump, and showed it by voting for him 74-25% in 2024. As The News and Observer noted, “The county of about 45,000 in the mountains of western North Carolina is still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Helene a year ago. Its difficulties have been made worse by a low level of federal relief funding and bungling by the Federal Emergency Management Agency under Trump and his Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem.”
As we’ve discussed, MAGA-loving states are poor and depend heavily on the federal government, which means they’re funded disproportionately by blue states and urban America. So when they vote for a Republican Party that holds nothing but disdain for poor Americans, they are voting for a government that systematically wreaks havoc on them. And they’re too ignorant to even realize it.
“Here in the western part of the state, which is a red area, I’ve actually enrolled people in the ACA who are so excited to have coverage,” Amy Stevens, who helps people get health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act, told The News and Observer. “But then they say, ‘You didn’t enroll me in that Obamacare, did you? I don’t want any of that.’”
Well, they got some of that—and in the process, they got health care.
“I have so many stories of people who got insurance for the first time and were able to get to the doctor and find out they had chronic health issues they knew nothing about,” Stevens added.
It wasn’t their beloved Republican Party that made that care possible. It was us—liberals who actually believe that the U.S. government can and should make people’s lives better. We believe health care isn’t a privilege for the wealthy, but a basic right for everyone.
A young attendee listens to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speak during a rally on Nov. 3, 2024, in Kinston, North Carolina.
We believe no one should lose their home because they got sick, that children shouldn’t go without medicine because their parents can’t afford it, and that our collective strength comes from lifting each other up—not pretending everyone can fend for themselves in this capitalist hellscape.
We pay our taxes—never complaining that much of those taxes get siphoned to rural America—because we believe in building a country where everyone has a fair shot, not just those who live in cities or in wealthy coastal enclaves. We build the systems that keep rural hospitals open, send disaster aid to small towns, fund the postal service despite its inefficiencies, expand broadband opportunities, and make sure a kid in McDowell County can see a doctor just like a kid in Manhattan.
But those conservative voters, benefiting from Democratic policies and liberal America’s tax dollars, spat in our faces and doubled down on division, hatred, and bigotry by voting for Trump. Such ingratitude!
They got what they wanted and elected him back into office. And the result? Over 1 million people in North Carolina are now set to lose their health care. McDowell County, already overly reliant on the charity of blue-state taxpayers, will bear a particularly heavy brunt.
That sounds tragic for them. But there’s a silver lining: They're finally getting the day they voted for.
"So when they vote for a Republican Party that holds nothing but disdain for poor Americans, they are voting for a government that systematically wreaks havoc on them."
I'm optimistic that somebody in the D party might get their messaging shit together.
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