Don’t Cancel Your Post Subscription—or Prime. Organize Your Workplace.
The episode offers a depressing window into how a certain kind of liberal conceives of collective action: essentially, as individuals. Boycotts have a rich history in social movements pushing for everything from ending segregation in the Jim Crow South to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Traditionally these sorts of boycotts have a goal and organizational structure backing them. In the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, civil rights organizers created car pools so that participants could still get around town, lowering the barrier to entering that movement and building solidarity along the way. Strikes (i.e., labor boycotts) aim to extract particular concessions from bosses, often as a part of contract negotiations.
It is notoriously difficult to challenge billionaires, who frequently meddle in politics in much more significant ways than withholding a newspaper’s endorsement of a presidential candidate. Elon Musk, for instance—who’s thrown in his lot with Trump—has been handing out $1 million a day to registered voters in Pennsylvania. Just about the only strategy that stands a chance against these sorts of people is to organize large numbers of people to exercise some sort of significant leverage over their bottom lines. Amazon, for instance, recently lost its bid in front of the National Labor Relations Board to nullify the Amazon Labor Union’s historic win to represent workers at its Staten Island fulfillment center. Will the existence of one unionized warehouse bring Amazon to its knees? Certainly not. But an upstart union’s uphill battle against the world’s second-largest employer might well inspire others to undertake similar efforts to democratize their own workplaces.
With a presidential election just a few days away, it might be worth extending this lesson to voting, as well. Bezos himself reportedly greenlit the Post’s cringy Trump-era tagline, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Whether in Amazon warehouses or in Congress, the reality is that democracy dies when billionaires are given carte blanche to pollute our politics. Performatively canceling a newspaper subscription is a silly, symbolic way to go about changing that. Voting matters much more, of course. Yet if the goal really is to “save democracy,” casting a ballot for Kamala Harris matters mainly insofar as it makes that task easier.
