How Dems Should Tame The Tech Bros In Order to Save Democracy

Jeff Bezos did not suddenly wake up, scan the horizon of American democracy, and decide that the great moral crisis of our time was newspaper endorsements. He did not look at Donald Trump — a man who had already tried to overturn one election, threatened enemies, attacked the press, raged against Amazon and The Washington Post during his first term, and made clear he intended to use government power as a personal weapon in his second — and conclude that the bravest thing he could do was to say nothing.

In the days leading up to the 2024 election, The Washington Post editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris, which is planned to run before Bezos, the newspaper’s owner, killed it. Publisher Will Lewis announced that the paper would no longer endorse presidential candidates, presenting the move as some high minded return to institutional restraint. This was, of course, not a detached philosophical reform carried out in a quiet off-year seminar on media ethics. It happened right before an election in which the newspaper’s own editorial board was prepared to warn readers against the return of a man openly hostile to constitutional democracy.

The context and the timing were both damning. Bezos’ Amazon and Blue Origin depend on federal contracts, regulators, and goodwill. Trump had spent years attacking Bezos, Amazon and the Post. He had already shown that he viewed the machinery of government not as a public trust, but as a cudgel to be swung at enemies and a reward system to be handed to loyalists.

It is no surprise that Bezos punted. He understood that Trump would be much less restrained in a second term, so he preemptively caved. Maybe he had always been a covert right-wing extremist or maybe he just saw the writing on the wall. It doesn’t really matter. He used the newspaper of which he had once been declared a savior to help Trump before the election and then turned its editorial page into a full-fledged MAGA project as soon as Trump returned to the White House.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/how-dems-should-tame-the-tech-bros