“Late-stage capitalism” used to mean something.
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:
“I do not think it is possible to deny that America is a declining empire. But it is important to understand why. We are not losing control of our colonies, like England in the 1930s. We are not threatened by belligerent neighbors. There are no exogenous hardships. Everything we need to fix America is right here.
And yet we are incapable of doing so. Partly because of the will of the people—decline is a choice. But also because of structural barriers that have developed in the American system.
Isn’t that the definition of enshittification?”
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.
“The federal government has been losing functionality for a long time. Why? Lots of reasons:
Increasing partisanship
Ideological sorting of the parties
The Supreme Court expanding executive immunity while entrenching minoritarian political power
The legislature surrendering institutional prerogatives
Hyperscaled gerrymandering
Creation of an oligarch class
Breakdown of the rule of law and the institutionalization of corruption”
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”?
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.
Join us next time!
May 9, 2026 at 2 PM ET
Previously on Stew On This:
Thank you Natasha K., Barbara Baldwin, M Hope, Los Gatos Sin Madrid, Sam, and many others for tuning into my live video with Evan Stern! Join me for my next live video in the app.
