In an op-ed released this week, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos rejected speculation that his decision to block the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris was about preserving billions of dollars in government contracts for his space exploration company in the event that Trump is elected. Instead, he insisted, the decision to end the paper’s long tradition of presidential endorsements was made so as not to create a “perception of bias.”
More than 250,000 subscribers—about 10 percent of all paying readers—have now reportedly canceled their Washington Post subscription. Most of them presumably detest Trump. West Wing star Bradley Whitford and Liz Cheney were among those who broadcast their decision to cancel their subscriptions, with Cheney arguing that Bezos was “apparently afraid” to endorse “the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump.”
This is not the first time the public has been presented with evidence that Jeff Bezos sucks. It’s worth differentiating, though, between how egregious his meddling is from a journalistic ethics standpoint (very) and how much influence a Washington Post endorsement would have on the presidential election (not much).
The logic of canceling subscriptions for either reason is a little hard to comprehend. Bezos bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million. It lost $77 million in 2023, when its audience was half of what it was in 2020. Post management laid off 240 people a year ago, plus a quarter of its tech arm (Arc XP) just last month. Needless to say, the world’s richest man probably doesn’t see The Washington Post as a cash cow, and it won’t make much of a difference to him if a few hundred thousand anti-Trumpers cancel their subscriptions. Several Post employees tried to dissuade angry subscribers from doing so, in part because it could mean another painful round of layoffs.
Others suggested an alternative: canceling your Amazon Prime subscription. That might be a more righteous act—but probably still an ineffective one. The magic of Amazon’s fast, “free” shipping is that no one person can ever make that much of a difference to the sprawling global logistics empire that keeps it going. That’s not to say that it isn’t a good idea to cancel your Prime subscription so as to minimize the suffering that company causes to its workers, the environment, and untold numbers of local businesses. But it’s not an especially great way to get one over on Jeff Bezos.
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.
Defeating Donald Trump next week won’t magically remake the composition of the Supreme Court or abolish the Senate—two staggeringly antidemocratic institutions standing in the way of the United States looking something like a real democracy. But it might allow the Federal Trade Commission to keep challenging corporate power. It may also ensure the NLRB stays relatively receptive to unions taking on bosses like Bezos, who are building institutions for working people to exert more power not just in their workplaces but over how the economy and the country are governed. Defending and expanding democracy, that is, requires a lot more than registering your discontent every four years by spending two minutes in a voting booth. If you’re disgusted by Bezos’s meddling or the myriad threats Trump poses, don’t cancel a newspaper subscription: Turn your attention after Election Day to the people coming together as workers, tenants and debtors to make life easier and more democratic for all of us.
