Fascism is Inconvenient
A few weeks ago (a lifetime ago), a plutocrat newspaper owner killed an endorsement, and it became clear that he did so in order to curry favor with the criminal that nearly everyone at the newspaper agreed was a threat to the republic. In response, a wave of the newspaper’s subscribers cancelled their subscriptions.
In recent months, a different plutocrat funded that criminal’s campaign — and according to his own AI was one of the worst sources of disinformation on his social media platform — buttering the criminal’s bread all the way into a likely appointment to a new advisory panel. In recent weeks, a tsunami of his platform’s longtime users migrated to a new social media platform.
What these facts share, of course, is another wave: the revulsion that so many of us feel in response to seeing these men bow down to a criminal who has openly admired Hitler and made it clear that he intends to trammel on basic rights, gut the nation’s expertise infrastructure, foul its ecosystems, and generally treat a country that was once, for all its many faults, a beacon to many, as if it were his personal schoolyard to rule like the bully that he is, as well as a candy store to ransack.
It horrifies us, and it should.
It’s not clear exactly why Bezos didn’t want the Washington Post to endorse Harris. Did he want to play it safe, since the paper’s critical coverage has made Trump threaten him in the past? Was it the Blue Origin and Amazon contracts he hopes to have with the federal government? Was it his allergy to paying taxes? Or is he a true MAGA believer? It doesn’t really matter — if someone is willing to act as a collaborator to (and even worse, to obey in advance) someone whose agenda is as destructive as Trump’s, someone who will weaken the nation in nearly every way…then that person is no longer operating normal businesses.
But there’s a much better target than the Post, which has a long history of speaking truth to power at important moments — and which has more utilized than created its owner’s wealth: Amazon, which is the source of his wealth.
For some people (especially the disabled, the rural, and the very busy), deleting their Amazon accounts might be unduly burdensome; Amazon really does make it convenient to buy stuff. But for many of us, that’s precisely the problem, and it’s a bad habit — one that we’ve felt uncomfortable about for some time: churn-and-burn labor practices, shattered climate pledges, grotesque stories of the company burning customer returns. These things add up to an ugly picture of capitalism doing its worst while putting on a sunny face of convenience and customer-friendliness.
For me — again, belatedly — it comes down to this: it’s not that losing my business will matter to him (though a wave of similar deletions would certainly attract notice), it’s simply that I can’t bear putting another nickel in his pocket, and thereby prioritizing convenience over my values. His decision to pull the endorsement is symbolic of so much that’s wrong with our unequal society, because at best it’s a sign that he views his interests as more important than those of the nation, and at worst it’s a sign that like Trump, he desires the destruction of the nation’s better angels: pluralism, tolerance, care for the environment, bodily autonomy, and much more.
So next week, the week of Black Friday, I’ll be deleting my Amazon account. I ask you to join me. Many businesses are problematic in one way or another…but not all of them have as their executive chairman someone who has kissed the ring of our would-be dictator.
If we don’t draw the line there, where will we?
