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Strange Fruit

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13 days ago · 69 likes · 3 comments · Anthony M.

Anthony brings the past forward into the present by explaining the long restorative struggle of the Confederacy through anti-Black political movements and cultural signaling. We should not be surprised that the rollback of rights have moved at such a rapid pace when we dare to look at the unvarnished truth of white supremacy in American life and history.

I hope you read Anthony’s article and subscribe to his substack! Enjoy this conversation and have a great weekend!

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It used to invoke the full and final form of a system so inherently monstrous, so inhumane, that it eats itself after finally consuming every limited input – including people – that made it churn. Like Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” the phrase “late-stage capitalism” has migrated from its once marginal position and become such a handy description of everyday life, it’s now a cliche.

The language itself has been consumed for every last drop of meaning.

“Enshittification” is the new “late-stage capitalism.” Coined to describe the digital product lifecycle of diminishing quality, the term has been embraced and broadly applied as the new shorthand for anything that was once good but no longer is. Like the United States:

In the Enshittified States of America, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last laments that the country has gone slowly downhill since at least the turn of the century, as evidenced primarily by government ineptitude and the erosion of democracy. Once upon a time the United States functioned to serve its citizens, then operated in service of both its citizens and its international partners, eventually came to serve only the global system itself, and now finally – according to Last – serves no one and no thing.

In his conclusion, Last gestures to the will of the voters for partial responsibility for our national self-destruction. But the bulk of the blame (and the bulk of the essay) is devoted to “structural barriers” and a political system in which both parties share equivalent responsibility for its dysfunction.

Conspicuously absent is the particular impact of the Republican party.

Every problem is understood as an equivalent and balanced responsibility shared by Democrats and Republicans. Yet as far back as 2012, renowned independent political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann identified the GOP as “an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Ornstein and Mann said it plainly in 2012 – and it’s only compounded in the fourteen years since: the Republicans are the problem. They are disproportionately responsible for every crisis JVL listed above.

No serious thinker still believes the long-debunked both-sides fallacy, let alone publishes it to their million-subscriber Substack. So why is the typically clear-eyed JVL arguing that fixing immigration, the Supreme Court, and gerrymandering are all “impossible to achieve at scale because of our system’s deep sclerosis”?

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There is a real villain in this story. But acknowledging how we truly got here would require JVL to not only cite Ornstein and Mann in the Obama era when his Bulwark colleagues were professional GOP operatives, but also to indict the party’s wholesale assault on democratic norms as far back as the Gingrich revolution. So instead we get systemic issues with a passive voice.

Not to deny the Democrats’ role in our national decline. They deserve plenty of blame – but only insofar as the party has followed the Republicans’ lead hollowing out our economy, our environment, our public health, and our constitutional rights. This forty-year project of pulling the country steadily to the authoritarian right recontextualizes Trump as the logical end product of everything the Bulwark staff were committed to before they left the party in 2016.

The Bulwark can never confront or reckon with this central, deeply inconvenient fact. Individual members of the organization may have grappled extensively with their complicity in the party’s decades-long radicalization. But the personal mea culpa means little when the ideological worldview that guaranteed Trumpism’s rise remains intact. And so we get essays like this one from JVL. Clever. Articulate. Topical. And wildly discordant with the empirical realities of the politics it purports to address.

This essay can be summarized as: America was once decent, now it isn’t, the barriers to self-improvement are structural and systemic, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

Is JVL publishing rank nihilism? More than ten years into a Trump era in which the Bulwark Republicans just lose and lose and lose, what even is the point of the publication? They lost the GOP to Trump. They lost the 2024 election running precisely the campaign their worldview prescribed. They are losing the argument about the Democratic Party’s future to the insurgent left they spent years condescending to. At some point the people who are always wrong about everything don’t get to keep framing themselves as the savvy oracle of the pro-democracy movement.

If the novelty of the Bulwark has long worn off, and the collective wisdom of their political prognostications proves consistently antithetical to actual democratic outcomes, the only remaining value of the organization is the financial benefit of the founders and investors themselves. The purpose of the JVL piece is to feed the subscriber base and bring in new paid subs. It doesn’t have to make any sense. It’s just slop.

The Bulwark itself has become enshittified. Whatever value it once provided its subscribers has long dried up. Its only remaining purpose is to make money for its staff. Let’s not pretend it’s anything else.

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RCTB: Charlie Sykes

May 9, 2026 at 2 PM ET

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In this episode of Reality Checking the Bulwark, Steward Beckham and I examine tweets from Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller. First, Longwell reacts to a Mike Pence clip, arguing that Trump is a break from the Republican Party – no matter how much the GOP’s former Vice President and political history suggest otherwise.

Then Miller responds to Michigan Senate Democratic primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s tweet blaming AIPAC-aligned politicians for escalating gas prices in Michigan. Miller cries “misinformation,” but we wonder whether his own message is the actual misinformation.

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 8

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK – EPISODE 8

Sunday, April 12 at 2pm EST / 11am PST

LIVE Sunday April 12 at 2pm EST

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Sarah Longwell takes the opposite view, effectively arguing that Hasan should be pushed outside the Democratic tent while leaning on all too familiar right-wing critiques rather than engaging directly with his broader commentary. The backlash to her position has been swift and lopsided, especially as Hasan Piker responded in real time on his HasanReacts YouTube feed, reframing the exchange for an audience far beyond traditional political media.

Evan and I use this moment to explore what it reveals about the shifting centers of power inside the Democratic coalition, and who actually holds the audience now.

Talked about in the show:

• “Is Hasan Piker Toxic…or Gettable” -The Bulwark, April 3, 2026

• “Tim Miller SHUTS DOWN Sarah Longwell Defending Hasan” -HasanAbi Reacts, April 3, 2026

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A reader, sharp and unflinchingly, offered a stark thesis: in American politics, a party often feels forced to choose. Court the White vote and risk losing the Black vote, or anchor yourself with Black voters and accept erosion elsewhere. It sounds cynical, but the data gives it teeth. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Democrats have rarely won a majority of White voters, a realignment that still hums beneath everything we see today.

That tension sits at the edge of this piece, one of the final notes, not the opening chord.

Along the way, I move through a series of fault lines, such as the Supreme Court’s ruling against conversion therapy, the widening shadow of the Iran conflict, and the slow, uneasy erosion of American soft power. And threading through it all is a question the Democratic Party can’t keep dodging: why, in moments of crisis, it still turns back toward the architects of Reaganism and the inheritors of Trumpism, rather than the voters who have carried the party since its coalition was remade in the upheavals of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

It’s not just a strategy problem.

It’s a story about memory, power, and who a party believes it actually belongs to.

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Here is Wehner’s article in The Atlantic (I read a large portion of the article without the paywall in this episode).

Drawing from history, lived experience, and the long arc of racial politics in America, we explore how hierarchy, exclusion, and respectability have always been entangled, and how today’s political discourse still gives those dynamics cover by insisting that Trump is the exception rather than the exposure.

I also draw on my November 12, 2025, article, which asks whether the media’s obsession with debating “true conservatism” amounted to wasted time. Time that could have been spent directly naming the threats to our rights, no matter how uncomfortable that truth might be for those who helped shape this moment.

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Across Republican and Democratic administrations, American foreign policy has produced a sequence of disasters abroad. The anti-Trump conservative analysis attempts to reckon with these failed policies but often falls short of metabolizing the political impacts of neoconservative disasters past and present. The cardinal misstep – treating President Trump as a departure from American imperial tradition rather than another expression of it – continues to taint otherwise thoughtful review.

In a March 9 episode of the flagship Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell reveal some of the early political influences and cultural propaganda that shaped their worldviews – a self-examination we respect and admire. Credit where credit is due, yet Miller and Longwell still fail to appreciate some of the tectonic drivers of these policies – and more crucially, how unpopular policies have galvanized public opinion and redrawn the political landscape.

Steward Beckham and I took some time to dig deep into this episode, Sarah Longwell: No One Should Trust this Government, which exemplifies this anti-Trump conservative phenomenon when applied to the current war on Iran and Lebanon. Enjoy.

The next episode of Reality Checking The Bulwark will air today at 2 PM EST/11 PM PST on Substack Live!

Previously on Stew On This:

In this episode of Reality Checking the Bulwark, Evan and I take apart Tim Miller’s Bulwark Podcast interview with Jonathan Chait, “The World’s Worst People,” as a case study in the limits of establishment anti-Trump commentary. Even as the episode focuses on Trump’s corruption, his diversions, and the growing Epstein scandal, it also falls back into a familiar genre: treating the left as a perpetual object of correction while imagining moderation as the natural center of political sanity. We use that tension to explore how The Bulwark can sound clear-eyed about Trump yet still reproduce the reactionary centrist reflex of disciplining the very constituencies that any durable anti-authoritarian coalition will need.

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REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 5

March 15 at 2pm EST / 11am PST

Tune in on March 15 2pm EST

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In this week’s episode we discussed a February 16 installment of the Mona Charen Show: The Real Conflict is Between Decent and Indecent (w/ David French). At stake is a larger question running through this series: are reactionary centrists accurately diagnosing the scale and nature of democratic strain, or applying failed frameworks built for a different political era?

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 4

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 4

Saturday, February 28 at 1pm EST / 10pm PST

Saturday February 28 at 1PM

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In this week’s episode, we discussed:

• A January 7 episode of Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s Las Culturistas podcast, in which listeners were advised not to donate to Jasmine Crockett’s Senate primary campaign because “she can’t win,” according to Rogers. “Anytime a politician is making it about themselves, I’m already done,” Rogers said. “Don’t waste your money sending to Jasmine Crockett. Do not do it.”

• A January 13 episode of The Bulwark’s The Next Level Podcast – JD Vance Picked the Ugliest Fight on Purpose – in which Tim Miller led Jonathan V. Last and Sarah Longwell in an extreme critique of reactions to Rogers and Yang’s comments. Miller’s response to a cherry-picked (homophobic) response:

• Antifascist historian John Ganz

• Certain Thoughts roundtable post Jasmine Crockett: Everyone Weighs In

• American Nuremberg

Certain Thoughts

American Nuremberg

Nuremberg is a 434-person farming community split between Black Creek and North Union Townships, in the Pennsylvania counties of Schuylkill and Luzerne…

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7 months ago · 182 likes · 1 comment · Evan Stern

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 3

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 3

Saturday, February 21 at 4pm EST / 1pm PST

Saturday, February 21 at 4 PM EST

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In this week’s episode, we discussed:

• All about “reactionary centrism,” David Roberts’s January 30 conversation with Michael Hobbes

• How Big Is MAGA, Really?, Mona Charen’s February 5 Bulwark post

• David French: Our State of National Shame, the February 6 Bulwark podcast with Tim Miller

• Law Enforcement Says ICE & DHS Are Making Policing Worse, a January 30 focus group analysis with Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell

• It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens (2020)

• It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann (published 2012, revised 2016)

• While Democrats Do The Fascists’ Dirty Work, Attacks on the Left Continue: If beating back authoritarianism is so important, why do so many politicians and pundits work to undermine the very groups leading the fight?

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Reality Checking The Bulwark - Episode 2

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 2

Saturday, February 14 at 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST

Tune in live: 2PM EST on February 14

Reality Checking The Bulwark

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Author’s Note: The piece I had intended to publish tonight, on the subject of Minneapolis in the broader context of American statehood and civic infrastructure, will instead be published on Monday. I want to give myself some time to marinate on the ideas and perspectives that I’m weighing. Here are some brief thoughts, really just me trying to work through my own thinking on the subject.

I have to say, I’ve been responding pretty viscerally to the constant refrain that “this isn’t the country I grew up in.” Not because I don’t understand the sentiment behind that statement, but because I think there’s often a failure to account for state-sponsored violence in minority communities, as well as the austerity that can set in as a result of losing funding and tax bases in these communities that become starved of life. Sometimes, my reaction to this statement is just one of frustration, because, quite frankly, this country has been recognizable to many Americans for quite some time.

But I want to get into why I have that reaction, because, quite frankly, this isn’t just a political argument but a personal one, and one that’s also generational. I didn’t grow up in the Cold War. I was born into a culture of ironic cynicism about anything that was branded as America, and I’ve seen the rollback of civil rights that was my only real attachment to the idea that America was worth believing in, in spite of everything that I experienced as a Black male growing up in Baltimore.

Now, with this Trumpian rollback, I’ve come to see America more like a well-marketed empire rather than a land of ideals. And I don’t mean that the rollback has caused me to see America this way. I mean that it has clarified this way of seeing America. It has made it harder to pretend that this has all been the truth all along.

So when people say, “this isn’t the country I recognize,” what I hear beneath that is, “this isn’t the country I was taught to recognize. Or even, “this isn’t the country I needed to recognize.” Not because those people are bad, but because the marketing has been so good that it feels like reality. And so, for those people who have bought into the ideals, this is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because it may reveal something worse. That perhaps they’ve been dupes in a marketing scheme all along. Perhaps this has been a marketing scheme that has been manipulating people before them.

If you need a different way to say this, I think there’s a way to say this that doesn’t dismiss what other people have always had to deal with.

Maybe one can say: “I’m realizing I didn’t understand the country I grew up in.”

Or one can say: “I’m seeing what other people have been living with.”

Or even say: “I was protected from certain truths, and that protection is breaking down.”

That isn’t shame but the beginning of historical literacy.

The Vietnam Homecoming Parallel

A significant portion of my intellectual pursuits in my 20s (and now my early 30s) has been influenced by the study of media literacy, Cold War cultural production, the rise of the New Right politics, and the fall of New Deal and Great Society idealism. Naturally, this has led me to be interested in the rise of the Never Trump Republicans and the reactionary centrist liberals and how they have responded to this moment. Much of the time, this has led me to a place of disillusionment regarding the commentary of the former group in particular, not because I think they’re necessarily bad people, but because I think many of them can’t bring themselves to admit that maybe there never was a before that was particularly noble. That Trump is simply the next logical step in the progression of the excesses and blind spots that have long been part of the system.

Perhaps this has simply been the nation all along, and the legacies of racial segregation, the rise of wealth gaps, and the rise of capitalism need to be honed in on rather than the Cold War notion of a noble nation of good standing battling against the evil authoritarian regimes that have long been supported in the shadows by the power centers of the United States.

As I have been studying this group of Never Trump institutionalists (and, as a side note, I am also a part of this institutionalist tradition, and I also sadly believe in institutions), I think I have drawn some parallels with this group that are similar to the way I think Vietnam veterans who enlisted in the war felt as they came back to the United States from the disillusioning experience of the battlefield. An experience in which they realized that perhaps all of the late-40s through the early-60s anti-Soviet propaganda they had been sold on throughout their lives may have been, at least in part, propaganda.

Propaganda that was good enough to get people on board.

Propaganda that was good enough to leave people psychologically adrift, as the story they had been sold on had no way of surviving the test of reality.

Or perhaps the homesteaders of the late-19th century, who were sold on the idea of fertile rains and plentiful land, only to find a crusty, drought-ridden corner of the country, as the speculators had bought all of the good land, while the promise of the rains was merely a good piece of propaganda sold to the downtrodden and naive.

And thus, we have a group of people who grew up in a similar type of propaganda, which sold them Cold War triumphalism, sold them on the United States as a benevolent empire, and sold them on the idea of the pain of the American empire as something that occurred in some other place, rather than within the continental United States. And thus, we have this reaction, which I am working through, as perhaps this is all untrue, perhaps I am merely young, perhaps I merely never saw the blinding lights of the decades before I was born, or even within my single digits.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you all as I prepare this essay for Monday.

Is the American dream and democracy simply the result of good marketing for the age of mass media and industrial revolutions?

Are Americans simply marks of a really good story with policy and generational tales of imagined racial, gender, and religious hierarchies that keep the labor force divided and compliant?

I know it’s a dark picture, and it’s not the happiest place on earth (there’s a marketing machine for that if that’s what you’re looking for). I’m just being brutally honest about what shouldn’t be disillusioning, but clarifying times.

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In this video, I talk through a shift I didn’t expect to make: going from “vote blue no matter who” in 2020 (and grudgingly into 2024) to rejecting automatic loyalty now. I use the Greenland news cycle, and the wider slide from soft power to coercion, as a case study in how Trumpism isn’t an aberration so much as a mask-off sequel that reveals the machinery behind the monster. My argument is that a reactionary centrist/consultant class keeps demanding fear-based loyalty while punching left and reinforcing right-wing frames, leaving them incapable of naming the system that produces Trumpism, or stopping it from delegitimizing their own legacies. If Democrats want votes, they need to earn them with accountability and material commitments, not nostalgia for “normal.”

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After a deadly ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Democratic strategists are urging caution over calls to abolish ICE. But what does it say about our politics when the phrase itself sparks more debate than the violence that provoked it?

In this video, I break down the centrist logic behind the backlash to “Abolish ICE,” the recent polling that complicates that narrative, and the deeper failure of imagination plaguing a political class more afraid of bad optics than bad policy.

This isn’t just about slogans. It’s about whether we can name injustice when we see it, and whether a coalition that depends on marginalized voters is willing to center their voices, or just manage their rage.

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In this short video, I talk through what’s happening in Iran right now, and the uncomfortable conversation many of us in the U.S. are avoiding. Hundreds may have been killed amid mass protests, internet blackouts, and a collapsing economy. This isn’t abstract geopolitics; it’s people bleeding in the streets. I wrestle with how to hold two truths at once: America’s long history of foreign policy blowback, and the intellectual dishonesty of pretending U.S. pressure never matters simply because we don’t like who’s in office. This isn’t about praising or excusing anyone. It’s about refusing to flatten reality, resisting moral laziness, and remembering that acknowledging outcomes is not the same as worshiping power, especially when real lives are at stake.

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Thoughtful discussion from and on political violence. I appreciate how seriously they wrestle with the moral implications of normalization.

I left thinking the analysis gets stronger when marginalized perspectives and shared history are centered. Political violence in the U.S. isn’t new, and that history changes what feels shocking, and why.

You can watch here:

The Bulwark

Tim & JVL: America Used to Know This Was Wrong

Tim Miller and JVL give their takes on the shocking Minneapolis ICE killing of Renee Good, the federal government’s handling of state-sanctioned violence, and what it reveals about America’s culture of death…

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4 months ago · 901 likes · 408 comments · Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last

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This video is a clear-eyed, historically grounded meditation on how moments of political theater became templates for a broader centrist habit of disciplining dissent rather than confronting power. I move from the 1990s to the present to show how moral condemnation, when selectively deployed, has often served to reassure anxious majorities while leaving structural violence intact, and how that logic echoes in today’s debates over immigration, policing, and political “extremism.” The through-line is narrative: how America repeatedly chooses stability, tone policing, and symbolic order over an uncomfortable truth, even when the consequences grow more dangerous. It’s part history lesson, part warning flare, and part invitation to stop mistaking rhetorical balance for justice.

You can read the full article here:

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