Cyprus is home to 1 million or so free-roaming cats that wander its streets, parks, and even luxury resorts. They are about as numerous as people. So when a deadly cat outbreak began sweeping across the Mediterranean island this year, the humans quickly noticed something was terribly wrong.

Stray and feral cats died by the thousands. Pet cats died, too. Their bellies became swollen like bowling balls, a symptom characteristic of the disease feline infectious peritonitis, or FIP, that is almost 100 percent fatal left untreated. FIP is caused by a coronavirus that infects cats but not humans. (It is related to but distinct from SARS-CoV-2.) The disease can fester in small, indoor outbreaks, but it had never raced across an entire island, leaving thousands of dead outdoor cats in its path. In early 2023, lab-confirmed FIP cases in Cyprus shot up 20-fold. The unusualness of this outbreak frightened cat owners on the island and confounded veterinarians around the world.

It seemed like something about FIP must have changed, but what? Had a new strain appeared? Or, experts wondered, could the outbreak have something to do with the spread of COVID, also caused by a coronavirus and also known to infect cats?

Either way, the pandemic came with a silver lining for FIP: It made treating the cat disease a lot easier. The two coronaviruses share enough similarities that COVID antivirals are also effective against FIP—in fact, they are downright miracle cures. “It’s like bringing these cats back from the dead,” says Gary Whittaker, a virologist at Cornell who studies FIP.

The first FIP cure appeared a couple years before the pandemic, but for a long time cat owners’ could only buy black-market versions online. The response to COVID supercharged research into antivirals against coronaviruses, expanding the arsenal of drugs and making them more widely available. So Cyprus was oddly prepared for this new viral scourge. This summer, the government began releasing leftover stockpiles of the COVID antiviral molnupiravir for cats with FIP. If this outbreak had happened even a few years earlier, Cyprus would have had to watch helplessly as its cats died one by one.

In January, veterinarians on Cyprus began noticing an unusual number of FIP cases. Demetris Epaminondas, the vice president of the Pancyprian Veterinary Association, told me that his wife, also a veterinarian, hadn’t seen any cases of FIP the year before. This year, she’s seen more than 50. The earliest cases clustered in the capital city of Nicosia, but they soon began radiating outward, reaching the most rural, remote regions of Cyprus last—as if a novel pathogen was spreading from an initial epicenter.

The feline coronavirus is a perplexing virus that strikes different cats in radically different ways. In most cats, it infects the gut, causing only temporary diarrhea, if any symptoms at all. But in a small minority—perhaps those already under stress or with a genetic predisposition—the virus mutates into a new and unique strain inside the cat, infecting white blood cells that travel throughout the body causing inflammation. Notably, these mutated strains rarely spread to other cats. When the virus gains the ability to cause severe disease, it seems to lose the ability to infect new hosts. It keeps running smack into an evolutionary trade-off.

But in rare cases, the virus turns into a “hot strain,” says Danielle Gunn-Moore, a feline medicine specialist at the University of Edinburgh. These strains have just the right mutations to sicken cats with FIP and spread to new ones. Scientists closely documented one such outbreak in a shelter in Taiwan, where the same strain of FIP appeared to kill eight cats. Gunn-Moore and her colleagues in Edinburgh—including Charalampos Attipa, a vet originally from Cyprus who gathered some of the initial outbreak data—are now sequencing viruses to see if a particularly hot strain has developed the ability to spread on a massive scale. Piecing the genomes together has been technically challenging, she told me, because unlike with COVID, researchers have few fully sequenced feline coronaviruses to use as reference. They hope to analyze the results from about 100 samples soon. An unusual “hot strain”—perhaps combined with some genetic disposition in Cyprus’s cats—is the team’s top hypothesis.

It didn’t escape their attention, though, that this unusual outbreak comes on the heels of an outbreak of another coronavirus: SARS-CoV-2, of course. The team wondered if the feline coronavirus could have recombined with SARS-CoV-2 to create a virulent new coronavirus, though the two are divergent enough that this scenario would be unusual. Or might SARS-CoV-2 be involved but indirectly? FIP exhibits an unusual pattern where previous immunity from a vaccine can perversely make the disease even worse, Gunn-Moore told me. (This has foiled FIP vaccines for cats, though the pattern doesn’t show up with COVID vaccines for humans.) COVID has likely infected some of these cats recently, and she wonders if having had COVID might worsen FIP in a similar way—an unexpected consequence of the global pandemic.

Until quite recently, vets had no way to treat FIP. The turning point came in 2018, when a researcher at UC Davis tested a new drug chemically similar to the antiviral drug remdesivir in 10 cats with FIP. All 10 were cured. This was unheard of. News of the miracle cure began spreading by word of mouth, but because the company that patented the drug refused to license it, Chinese manufacturers began making very successful black-market versions. Remdesivir, which also works against FIP, has since become available through various means too.

In late 2020, as new COVID antivirals such as molnupiravir began generating buzz, Chinese manufacturers once again saw the potential for FIP. A company began selling unlicensed molnupiravir to overseas cat owners, touting an unpublished study in which 286 cats were all fully cured. Who knows how much stock to take in this, but remarkably, peer-reviewed research has since validated the effectiveness of the drug. In five years time, FIP has gone from the “worst diagnosis you could get” for cats to a disease fully curable with not one but three different drugs, says Nicole Jacque, a cat-rescue volunteer who has helped conduct research on molnupiravir. The interest that the pandemic spurred in coronavirus antivirals has been a boon for FIP. (Vets told me that Paxlovid could be a promising antiviral for FIP too, though no one seems to have tested it yet.)

When the FIP outbreak hit Cyprus, people there also began buying black-market drugs. The cost is incredibly high, running into thousands of U.S. dollars per cat depending on the exact drug. And there’s no guarantee that the products really contain the drug at the purity and the doses claimed. “We cannot rely on the black market,” Epaminondas says. Vets in Cyprus began asking the government for help earlier this year. By then, molnupiravir had been falling out of favor globally as a human drug, as Paxlovid had proved more effective. The Cypriot government had plenty of molnupiravir left over, and it agreed to release the first doses to veterinarians this summer.

Although molnupiravir can certainly treat FIP, it may not be the “best” drug for it. In lab studies, it seems toxic at lower amounts than the other options, so it could be easier to accidentally overdose. And because molnupiravir works by inducing lots of mutations in the virus—to the point where it should stop working—experts have wondered if it could speed up the emergence of new variants, a concern that previously dogged its human use.

But molnupiravir has big practical advantages too: It is the cheapest of the FIP drugs. And in the U.S., it is the most likely to be readily available, says Drew Weigner, a former president of the EveryCat Health Foundation, which has funded several FIP drug studies under his tenure. The drug is currently authorized for emergency use for COVID, but if it’s officially approved, vets could also prescribe it off-label to cats. And then America, too, might finally have a legal drug to treat FIP—in case the outbreak spreads globally, and even if not, for the many cats that still routinely get FIP every year.

This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled The Origins of Woke, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of identity politics. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.” The Origins of Woke offers a plausible defense of this claim, and it features a smattering of interesting observations about the historical relationship between the legal system, corporate and education policy, and identity politics.

Yet these fleeting virtues are an insufficient counterbalance to the fatal flaw at the heart of Hanania’s book: It is a racist, sexist fever dream, the product of an author whose not-inconsiderable intellect has been warped and distorted—like many young conservatives’—by a noxious mixture of racist pseudoscience and the casual misogyny of the extremely online right.

That his book marries brief flashes of scholarly acumen with casual, 4chan-style bigotry will not surprise anyone who has followed Richard Hanania closely. A bombshell HuffPost exposé published last month revealed that he had previously written for white-supremacist outlets under a pseudonym, where he expressed enthusiasm for eugenics and other racist ideas. For his part, Hanania—who holds a pair of advanced degrees and has been published in a number of prestigious outlets, including this one—maintains that his days of anonymous white-supremacist proselytizing are long in the past.

In an autobiographical essay entitled “My Journey Out of Extremism” that he wrote in response to the HuffPost exposé, Hanania professes that those earlier writings were a relic of a time when he “used to suck.” But any optimism that Hanania has changed for the better should be swiftly put to bed with the publication of The Origins of Woke.

Throughout the book, Hanania slips seamlessly from legitimate intellectual history and sober legal analysis to blog-post-style grousing that is peppered with invocations of race science and winks at the “Great Replacement” theory. He frequently expresses frat-boy nostalgia for a world where offensive jokes and ass-pinching are part of office life. He asserts that “the workplace has been cleansed of heterosexual relationships” by policies that discourage office romance, laments that hiring and firing women on the basis of hotness is no longer legal, suggests that the idea that bosses cannot solicit sexual favors from their employees rests on a “badly reasoned” interpretation of the law, and heavily implies that sexual harassment should count as free speech. Underlying all this vitriol is Hanania’s assumption—which he takes no trouble to conceal—that Black people and women are less competent, capable, and intelligent than white men.

Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one. He is also intelligent and rhetorically savvy. Some progressive readers will no doubt be of the opinion that I should not “platform” The Origins of Woke by reviewing it in a mainstream outlet. Yet such an objection leaves us ill-equipped to confront the danger posed by figures like Hanania, who apes the posture of a serious scholar—he holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA—and uses his credentials, fluency in legalese, and disarming “reasonable white guy” demeanor to lend a sheen of rigor to regressive politics.

[Graeme Wood: What happens when a carnival barker writes intellectual history]

In other words, Hanania’s smart-guy aesthetic—his adeptness at presenting himself as a dispassionate, fair-minded researcher who is merely “following the facts”—is best understood as a key part of his game plan. The Origins of Woke is a gateway drug, one that smuggles virulent, pseudoscientific racism into the mainstream by dressing up its poison with occasional moments of serious argumentation. His apparent strategy is part of a broader far-right trend that we might call “Trojan-horsing”: using the trappings of scholarship to lure college-educated readers who are put off by the excesses of “woke” culture down a reactionary or racist rabbit hole. In the same way that figures such as Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan use sensible ideas—that men should clean their rooms, and people should have conversations with those they disagree with—to lend an air of intellectual legitimacy to sexism or the anti-vax movement, Hanania uses a few sophisticated observations about the impact of civil-rights law to get buy-in for his racist agenda.

Both conservative and liberal critics of “wokeness” have tended to argue that identity politics grew out of postmodern philosophies that are often umbrellaed under the catch-all term—and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory—“cultural Marxism.” These critics argue that the work of philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault brought about an ideological paradigm shift on the left by mounting an assault on truth and objective reason, and by encouraging the view that identities are “socially constructed.” Hanania’s primary intervention in the woke wars is to argue that this narrative—that identity politics began in the humanities departments of elite universities before metastasizing into the mainstream—is little more than a fairy tale, one that accords far too much influence and power to eccentric academics and their jargon-filled theories.

Instead, he insists that wokeness originated with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the policy changes that emerged downstream from it. Many of the schools that are now considered “woke” had to be forced by the federal government to consider race and sex in their hiring practices. As Hanania notes, the case of Columbia University is especially illustrative. “The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was threatening to cut off federal funding unless the university provided employment data based on race and sex and timetables for hiring minorities,” Hanania recounts. Though Columbia’s president wrote an open letter in 1971 blasting the impact of affirmative action on the university’s mission, he was forced to relent to federal demands not because he was persuaded by ideology but because there was no prudent alternative: “‘If we wish to continue to have federal resources, that is what we must do.’” Hanania observes that Title IX, which requires equal treatment for men and women in education, was also initially resisted by universities, which again had to be cudgeled into compliance: “Eventually, after losing in a series of court cases in the 1990s, as with affirmative action decades before, higher education came to identify with and support the costly regulations it once rallied against.”

In Hanania’s telling, the transformation of elite institutions into hotbeds of identity politics was largely occasioned by the need to comply with new laws around hiring, “disparate impacts,” and “hostile work environments.” These institutions were motivated not by obscure French philosophies or the carrot of moral progress but by the stick of withheld federal funding. Hanania attempts to show that government-mandated changes to hiring and admissions practices—changes that required corporations and universities to consider and keep track of the race and gender of their employees and applicants—made elite American institutions obsessed with identity because their funding and/or legal compliance depended on it.

Yet compliance wasn’t straightforward. Hanania maintains that the complexity and bean-counting necessitated by the new laws resulted in “bureaucratic bloat.” Universities such as Columbia “simply did not have the administrative capabilities to comply with new mandates coming from Washington, which required painstaking record keeping to prove that the institution was not discriminating against women and minorities.” The complexity of the new legislation and the regimes of data gathering it demanded meant that institutions would need to create human-resource teams devoted to the task: These new “diversity bureaucrats” existed not only to ensure compliance with civil-rights law, but also to justify it within their institutions.

“Woke” ideas were invented not proactively but retroactively, in Hanania’s account, in order to intellectually legitimate a series of federally dictated bureaucratic overhauls made necessary by laws such as Title IX and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991. The rise of identity politics is not a tale of moral or philosophical progress, but of policy changes that generated new ways of thinking after the fact.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define woke]

This specific argument has some substance and explanatory power even if the story it tells—that nearly all the blame for identity politics rests with federal law—is far too tidy and discounts other historical factors, such as the role of progressive activism. That being said, I find Hanania’s description of the historical causes of wokeness more persuasive than other right-wing screeds or even the Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk’s forthcoming book on the topic. Almost all such books blame identity politics on postmodern philosophy and critical race theory, with some pinch-hitting by Tumblr. Although strong overlaps certainly exist between the ideologies found in American humanities departments and contemporary “wokeness,” critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation. What Hanania proposes is a clear causal mechanism: Changes in federal law necessitated the creation of new HR bureaucracies, which in turn produced “woke” true believers who began peddling ideologies that justify their jobs.

If Hanania had stuck to this specific argument—“the government mandates came first, and the ideology later”—it would be possible to take The Origins of Woke seriously as a contribution to the generally vacuous culture-war debates over identity politics and its causes. Black social critics such as Adolph Reed, the Fields sisters, and others have long argued that anti-racism is corporate doublespeak that exists to preserve the status quo. I’ve made similar arguments in this outlet and elsewhere. Ironically, Hanania’s legal history lends support to Black leftists like me who are critical of DEI but care profoundly about social justice: It exposes the fact that the kind of identity politics practiced by universities and corporations aren’t a social-justice sea change; they’re CYA (organization-speak for cover-your-ass). Hanania’s alternative history of “wokeness” adds further support to the idea that today’s left cultural politics are only superficially radical: The real substance of “wokeness” is legal compliance and public relations that serve the elites rather than the Black, brown, and poor.

However, although the narrow history Hanania sketches has some merit, the book does not content itself with mere history. Hanania’s handful of genuine insights are marred by a slow drip of especially stupid bigotry that suffuses the book. This combination—fragments of defensible historical argument that are welded to indefensible conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and incel-culture misogyny—is what makes Hanania’s book so insidious.

A. J. Bauer, an expert on conservative news and media at the University of Alabama, told me that figures like Hanania often communicate through a dizzying collage of academic research and conspiratorial assertions. One moment he’s picking apart the legalese of an executive order, the next he’s blaming civil-rights law for declining birth rates. Bauer explains that this isn’t just house style; it’s a matter of economic prudence. Far-right intellectuals rarely hold traditional university posts and are typically reliant on two revenue streams: billionaire donors who fund conservative scholarship and “an audience cobbled together through Substack and Twitter trolling.” The Origins of Woke features a perverse blend of academese and alt-right shitposting not because Hanania is a moron who can’t tell the difference between the two, but because he is trying to appeal to—and profit off of—both normie conservative elites and angry online mobs: He runs a Substack, receives funding from Silicon Valley, and has floated between temporary academic gigs at institutions such as Columbia and the University of Texas at Austin.

Hanania has a habit of punctuating dense, judiciously footnoted paragraphs—which cite academic books, law reviews, and government documents—with racist or sexist claims that aren’t backed up with evidence. For example, a section on the paradoxes of “disparate impact” laws provides several pages of properly cited legal history before arriving at this claim: “An employer who wants to use intelligence tests to hire is potentially barred from doing so because whites could do too well.” This claim, that white candidates would be likely to outscore Black candidates on intelligence tests, is not footnoted or otherwise supported with evidence. Another well-footnoted paragraph about the increasing prominence of equity discourse in university admissions, government institutions, and grant-awarding organizations ends with an unsupported, sexist assertion. “While there may be some women able to meet the same standards as men,” Hanania declares, “it strains credulity to believe that, given the gender gap in math and science proficiency, a meritocratic system would produce a perfect equality of outcomes.” Again, a paragraph full of footnotes and well-supported claims ends with a piece of bigotry unsupported by evidence.

This pattern repeats throughout the book: Evidence-free racist and sexist claims are nestled amidst properly cited history and legal analysis, providing the former with the veneer of scholarly respectability. In the cases where Hanania does go through the motions of tacking on a footnote to one of his racist musings, the source cited tends to be another white supremacist. That Hanania is perfectly capable of following scholarly conventions and evidentiary standards when it suits him shows that he knows exactly what he is doing: Trojan-horsing white supremacy by glazing his arguments with the signals, but not the substance, of academic sobriety. That HarperCollins published this book without requiring Hanania to back up its most incendiary assumptions is both an intellectual and a moral failure.

The idea of superior white intelligence that he implicitly and explicitly refers to throughout the book rests on bad studies and bad science that have long been refuted. The white-Black “IQ gap” that racists such as Hanania latch onto has likewise been explained by environmental factors. Craig Venter, one of the scientists who helped map the human genome, summarizes the state of race-IQ debates: “There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin color will be predictive of intelligence.” Philosophers such as Mary Midgley and social theorists like Karen and Barbara Fields have demonstrated that notions of measurable abstract intelligence or fixed racial identity are shot through with mythmaking. Yarden Katz and Adolph Reed have likewise shown that these myths are time-honored capitalist propaganda that naturalize inequality by suggesting that poverty is a consequence of racial difference rather than economic exploitation. Hanania makes no efforts to engage with the trove of scientific, social-scientific, and humanistic research that would trouble his assumptions about intelligence, competence, and racial difference.

[Adam Serwer: Richard Hanania and the allure of racist pseudoscience]

Similarly, Hanania’s naked obsession with office romance is both unsettling and revealing of his mindset. He ends the book by fantasizing of a future where “woke” anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws have been repealed, and “some corporations start encouraging dating” through “Christian matchmaking” or “a party-like atmosphere.” Such moments are creepy and juvenile.

In this sense, Hanania is employing the mirror image of the rhetorical tactic championed by Steve Bannon. Trump’s infamous political strategist advised conservatives to pump out a constant stream of disinformation—as Bannon put it, “flood the zone with shit”—in order to keep the media in a state of near-constant hysteria, teetering from outrage to outrage while the public grows ever more confused about the truth. But whereas Bannon whipped up a frenzy through a tornado of untruths and fake news, Hanania lulls his audience into a sense of complacent stupor: Dangerous lies are hidden amidst bland scholarship.

Pushing back against figures such as Hanania requires understanding that the hodgepodge of high-brow theorizing, low-brow racism, and frat-bro misogyny that characterizes their discourse is not a paradox but a precise strategy designed to sneak white supremacy into the mainstream by obscuring the difference between scholarship and its simulacrum. And these tactics aren’t just confined to Hanania; the phenomenon is pervasive.

Until recently, Nate Hochman was another young conservative intellectual cast as a measured thinker. (“He looks like the kind of kid who would offer you granola at a trailhead,” a largely positive profile observed.) Yet just a week before the publication of the HuffPost article that outed Hanania as a former anonymous eugenics enthusiast, Hochman was fired from the racist-scandal-riddled Ron DeSantis campaign. Axios reported that he’d created a video that prominently featured Nazi iconography. Like Hanania, the now-exiled former wunderkind weaponized sober speech to zhuzh up the kind of radical conservatism that is ascendant on the right.

Understanding this strategy matters, because it has proved effective: Jordan Peterson has become one of the most popular right-wing figures on the planet by using Jungian psychobabble and professorial tweed to give the impression of Socratic wisdom, when what he really offers is retrograde sexism to lost men. If Hanania has so far managed to escape being sent to Siberia—unlike Hochman—it is because he has followed in Peterson’s footsteps: not “flooding the zone with shit,” but rather hiding the shit in pseudo-erudition.

The morning after a wedding in Vermont this summer, my friends were recovering in a hot tub while I battled a garbage disposal. And scrubbed the kitchen counter. And stripped the bed. And took out the recycling. Everyone was blissed-out at a hotel before braving the six-hour drive back to New York—except my boyfriend and I, who made the mistake of staying at an Airbnb. Despite the $95 cleaning fee, we were stuck completing a baffling list of pre-checkout chores.

Something feels a bit off with Airbnb these days. Those searching for a quaint and homey place to stay now often have to brave high prices, inconsistent fees, laborious checkout demands, and untrustworthy photos and descriptions. You risk ending up, like I did in Vermont, in one of multiple cookie-cutter units listed by the same host, units that lean less “cozy ski lodge” and more “IKEA display room that has never known human touch.” Not only are customers mad, expressing their outrage across social media, but cities have also been cracking down. Earlier this month, New York City instituted a drastic new law that effectively bans most short-term rentals, resulting in the disappearance of 15,000 Airbnb listings.

The company’s woes are tied to just how big it has become. Airbnb was launched in 2008, a year after beginning as three air mattresses on the floor of its founders’ living room, but it is no longer a scrappy, community-minded platform powered by the gig economy. It’s an industry in itself, full of endless hosts and large property companies that manage dozens or hundreds of listings at a time. The relentless increase in quantity has stretched the quality thin. Like any tech company, Airbnb has pursued growth. Along the way, it may have gotten more than it bargained for.

The promise of Airbnb seems so simple and obvious now, but it was at first a revelation: What if you could make money off that guest room no one uses, or the empty apartment sitting over your garage? In turn, travelers could get a cheap stay with an on-call host who could provide a uniquely personalized travel experience. That’s not to say a one-night stay on a stranger’s couch was ever what dominated Airbnb; entire homes instead of shared units have made up the majority of listings since the year it was founded, an Airbnb spokesperson told me. But that Airbnb felt more casual than a hotel was always part of the draw. By 2011, an app first headquartered in the founders’ apartment had reached 1 million nights booked.

Soon, Airbnb got so big that everyone wanted in. At first, people with vacation homes in coveted areas such as Lake Tahoe and the Hudson Valley noticed Airbnb’s success and saw an opening, says Jamie Lane, a senior economist at AirDNA, a data-analytics firm that specializes in Airbnb and other short-term-rental platforms. Hosts renting out vacation homes or properties they don’t themselves inhabit means, however, that unlike in Airbnb’s original concept, the hosts aren’t one room away to give recommendations, or just around the corner if something goes wrong with check-in. Instead, the keys go in a lockbox, and the recommendations are typed up and put in a binder that sits on a kitchen table. It’s now very common for Airbnb hosts to never see or interact with their guests at all.

The moment people began buying new properties for the express purpose of turning them into Airbnbs, it was clear: Airbnb had turned corporate. Since 2015, the number of Airbnb listings in the United States has jumped from roughly 150,000 to almost 1.5 million, Lane told me. There are now Airbnbs that have been precisely engineered for specific kinds of travelers. “You have properties that are fully dedicated to bachelorette parties,” says Neal Carpenter, who runs a Nashville-based rental-property-management and consulting service called The Air Butler. “It’s like, ‘Here’s the 12 chairs and the full-length mirror where all your friends can get ready together. Here’s the neon cowboy hat and the greenery wall in the living room for your Instagram posts.’” There are multiple Lord of the Rings–style hobbit-house Airbnbs, a spaceship Airbnb, and an Airbnb located inside a freestanding harbor crane.

In other words, the difference between Airbnb and hotels has become smaller and smaller. The standard Airbnb host still has an average of just 1.5 listings, Lane said, but “mega-hosts”—larger companies or wealthy individuals with 21 or more properties that throw their significantly more substantial resources behind them—now make up 30 percent of active listings. Some hotels even took a if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them attitude in 2018, when Airbnb began allowing boutique hotels and B&Bs to list their rooms on the platform. The mere existence of a company like AirDNA is another indicator of Airbnb’s dominance—as are the Airbnb consultants who make a living helping hosts maintain their properties, and the number of online ads from these consultants about how to earn my first $100,000 on Airbnb that have followed me since I first started reporting this article.

At this point, Airbnb hardly looks like the gig economy at all. Carpenter is currently in charge of 18 different properties, including one of his own, and handles tasks such as photographing and building the listings on Airbnb, stocking the houses, and communicating with guests during their stay. Then there’s stocking the fridge, working with cleaning companies, managing the finances to make sure payments are properly dispersed, and on and on: The work that running a competitive listing can require is no longer a side hustle, but a full-time job.

These mega-hosts with major resources and hosts attempting to bring in extra cash with their vacation home are left to battle it out on the same platform, one that’s still set up for the gig economy it no longer really embodies. Take those much-hated cleaning fees. Each host is in charge of setting their own cleaning fee, but the numbers seem to vary wildly from listing to listing, and can tack on an extra $100 or more to what previously seemed like an affordable daily rate—one that itself has surged 36 percent in recent years. For hosts, however, these cleaning fees can feel necessary for reasons that have nothing to do with the upkeep of the unit. When potential guests search for an Airbnb, many toggle the search criteria to return a certain daily rate—which does not include cleaning fees. To show up higher in the search results, some hosts have taken to lowering the listing’s daily rate and increasing the cleaning fee to cover the difference. “One of the homeowners described it to me as a race to the bottom,” Sally French, a travel expert at NerdWallet, told me. “It’s not really a great experience, but that’s the only way they said they feel they can get booked.”

That’s how you end up with situations like what happened to the software engineer Tracy Chou, who said that she and her friends paid $160 in cleaning fees for a recent Airbnb in Vaucluse, France, only to be angrily confronted by the host over WhatsApp for not showing a “bare minimum of respect” when they left garbage bags and empty wine bottles in the kitchen—things, Chou says, the host had never provided clear instructions for. She felt betrayed by the listing’s reviews, which had her expecting a five-star experience. Sharing your true thoughts in a negative review can feel tough, she said, if hosts seem like people just getting by, rather than extensions of a management company.

Airbnb’s boom has resulted in not just disputes between hosts and guests, but also broader regulatory challenges. Airbnbs are now functionally more similar to hotels, but they are not subject to the same licensing and legal requirements that dictate everything from cleanliness to coffee machines. Apart from New York City’s crackdown, Washington, D.C., implemented its own restrictions last year, requiring a short-term rental license and forbidding licenses for second homes. Los Angeles and San Francisco also require registration, and other cities have imposed other kinds of restrictions, such as prohibiting hosts from listing multiple properties or limiting the number of days per year a property can be rented. “We feel good about where we stand with cities and jurisdictions around the world,” the Airbnb spokesperson said, adding that New York City’s rules “are an outlier and a contrast to the approach [taken by] other cities around the country.”

Airbnb is not broken. You can still find a spot that’s cheaper and better than a hotel room—especially for families and larger groups. The average Airbnb costs $60 a person, French said, compared with $89 a person for a hotel. But the company does seem to understand that something has changed. In May, Airbnb introduced a toggle that allows users to set their search to show a listing’s total price, including fees before taxes, so they can get a clearer picture. And it has also launched Airbnb Rooms, an update to the original “rent a room” model that emphasizes affordability and relationships with hosts. “We’re focused on building out new tools that ensure our platform offers competitively priced stays,” the spokesperson said.

What happened between where Airbnb started and where it might land is a familiar story. It’s the same one that prompted Etsy sellers to go on strike last year and Uber drivers to do so in January. “Whenever there’s a sector that is potentially profitable, any entity with bigger resources can say, ‘Aha, I can capitalize on this,’” Erin Hatton, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo who has studied the gig economy, told me. These events are all signs of a gig economy that might just be falling apart, not because of any one CEO decision but because companies that find success by framing themselves as a DIY alternative to an established industry can only grow in the same direction as the very thing they wanted to replace. The original sin, it seems, is when they try to be both.

Like many women activists of my generation, I came of age politically by joining in the fight over reproductive rights. In 1986, I boarded a bus packed with other college students and rode from New Haven to Washington, clutching a handwritten cardboard sign that urged the Supreme Court to preserve Roe v. Wade. Later, in law school, I came to believe two things about the American legal system. First, its crowning achievement was the expansion of constitutional rights during the postwar New Deal era. In the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional, protected the rights of criminal defendants, and put teeth on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, among other landmark decisions. And, of course, there was Roe.

The second thing my classmates and I learned was that this achievement was under assault by a conservative backlash. The same forces that powered Ronald Reagan into office in 1980 were seeking to curtail many of the constitutional rights secured by the courts in the postwar era. That’s why, early in my career, I took a job as the legal director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Later, I spent 11 years running the American Constitution Society—the liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society—where I helped vet and promote judges. In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed me to his Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. All along, I was focused on preserving and enlarging civil rights.

Given my background, the reversal of Roe last year felt like a crushing blow. But as I reflect on my career in the law, my greatest regrets lie elsewhere. The progressive advances of mid-20th-century America weren’t, after all, only about civil rights and social justice. Equally important was the political-economic arrangement established during and after the World War II era. It featured a powerful regulatory state, aggressive antitrust enforcement, and strong labor unions. These policies kept corporate power in check and helped drive the fastest, most widely shared advance in living standards in American history.

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I recognized the importance of this legacy—my first job practicing law was at a union-side labor-law firm—but it was not top of mind for liberals of my generation. It was for the other side. The conservative legal movement was just as intent on dismantling the political-economic achievements of the New Deal era as it was on reversing the rights revolution. And its leaders understood that they could leverage each goal to help achieve the other. To culturally conservative voters, they vowed to appoint judges who would overturn Roe. At the same time, much more quietly, they assured large corporations and economically conservative billionaires that these same judges would also be hostile to unions, business regulation, class-action lawsuits, and antitrust enforcement. The strategy brought huge numbers of culturally conservative voters into the Republican column while helping ensure a steady stream of campaign contributions from libertarian-leaning mega-donors such as Barre Seid, who recently gave $1.6 billion to the Federalist Society, and the Koch brothers. These patrons may be indifferent to abortion and supportive of other civil liberties, but they are above all convinced of the evil of business regulation.

That two-pronged approach has been highly successful, helping entrench a Supreme Court majority hostile to the social-justice and civil-rights agendas I spent my whole career fighting for. It pains me to recognize the extent to which progressives like me ignored it.

Nothing encapsulates liberals’ tunnel vision more than the acrimonious confirmation hearings for Robert Bork, whom President Reagan nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987. Top Democrats at the time, led by Senators Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy and backed by liberal activist groups, attacked Bork for his reactionary views on civil rights and free speech. In a famous opening statement, Kennedy described “Robert Bork’s America” as “a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions” and “Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.”

The strategy worked; the Senate voted against Bork, and the seat eventually went to the more moderate Anthony Kennedy. In hindsight, however, what’s remarkable is what the campaign against Bork left out. Bork was an antitrust professor and a key figure in the laissez-faire economic revolution based at the University of Chicago. His most important work, by far, was his 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox, which argued that America’s long tradition of aggressive enforcement was based on a false premise. The antitrust laws weren’t designed to curtail corporate power, he argued. They were meant only to promote economic efficiency, or “consumer welfare,” as he called it. Monopolies were generally benign, in his view, because they would be more efficient than smaller firms.

Bork’s writing on this subject was massively influential, especially where it mattered most: the federal judiciary. In a 1979 decision, the Court endorsed Bork’s claim that “Congress designed the Sherman Act as a ‘consumer welfare prescription.’” Bork’s ideas also became a keystone of the Reagan administration’s economic policy. In 1980, two of Bork’s ideological allies from the University of Chicago (one of whom, Richard Posner, became a prominent federal judge himself) wrote a detailed memo to the Reagan transition team urging the administration “to prune an area of luxuriant and pernicious federal regulation: the overexpansion of antitrust law enforcement.” Reagan followed this advice closely. His antitrust chief wrote new prosecutorial guidelines that sharply cut back on antitrust enforcement, enabling the endless rounds of mergers and acquisitions that fueled the explosive growth of both Wall Street and inequality.

During Bork’s 30 hours of testimony during his confirmation hearings, antitrust wasn’t a major area of emphasis. On the very last day, however, in a sparsely attended session, Charles Brown, the attorney general of West Virginia, warned that Bork’s position on antitrust law, though unlikely to make a “10-second spot on the evening news,” was by far the most worrisome part of his record. “I submit to this committee that in no other area will the effect of a Bork appointment be so completely felt,” Brown said. “The short-run effect would be the squeezing of American pocketbooks and the draining of America’s entrepreneurial spirit. The long-run impact would be to impede those principles of business freedom which Americans so deeply cherish.”

These words proved prophetic, even though Bork wasn’t confirmed—because on economic issues, he had already won. Even Democrats had gotten on board with parts of the deregulatory agenda. In fact, Ted Kennedy had spearheaded airline deregulation in the 1970s. In the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, many liberals worried more about government overreach than about corporate power. Bork had explicitly compared New Deal antitrust to New Deal civil-rights jurisprudence. The Warren Court, he wrote, “wrecked many fields of law in its reckless and primitive egalitarianism. Antitrust was one such field.” Liberals, however, didn’t make the connection.

Reagan had made a point of packing the federal judiciary with pro-corporate, anti-regulation judges. And yet, after Democrats regained the White House in 1992, there was no push to appoint jurists who would break with the Chicago-style agenda. Indeed, in 1994, Clinton nominated Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court. Earlier in his career, Breyer had been Ted Kennedy’s top aide on airline deregulation. As a justice, he would combine a committed defense of abortion and voting rights with a business-friendly posture on antitrust and regulation.

In the assessment of the legal scholars Lee Epstein, William Landes, and Richard Posner—yes, the same guy who urged Reagan to “prune” antitrust enforcement—the right has captured even most liberal judges with regards to economic policy. In a 2017 paper titled “When It Comes to Business, the Right and Left Sides of the Court Agree,” they wrote that “the four Democratic appointees serving on the Roberts Court are far more business-friendly than Democratic appointees of any other Court era. Even more surprising, the Democrats vote in favor of business at significantly higher rates than Republican appointees in all the other chief justice periods since 1946.” The Democratic appointees are still more liberal on economics than their Republican-appointed colleagues, but they’re far to the right of their own liberal predecessors.

In a 2003 antitrust case, for example, all of the liberals joined an opinion by Antonin Scalia that declared, “The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system.” In 2017, Breyer wrote the majority opinion in a case upholding the right of debt-collection companies to go after people for money they no longer owed. The same year, Sonia Sotomayor wrote an opinion that limited the Securities and Exchange Commission’s power to force those found guilty of securities fraud to give up their stolen gains.

Liberal judges have issued opinions like these while simultaneously championing progressive positions on issues such as abortion and voting rights. By delivering measurable wins to business-side conservatives, they have helped fuel an engine designed precisely to unravel the civil rights they held so dear. The more the courts favor big business, the more powerful big business becomes, and the more powerful big business becomes, the more financial support it can lend to the right-wing legal movement.  

In my decade running the American Constitution Society, I never gave much thought to political-economic issues such as antitrust and competition policy—they were just not on our agenda. When we scrutinized the records of Bush and Trump judicial nominees, we probed their views on abortion, voting, and criminal justice, and, to a lesser extent, on labor. When we pushed the Obama administration on judicial candidates, we focused mostly on demographic diversity, while unsuccessfully pushing for more civil-rights lawyers and public defenders. When lawyers with backgrounds in antitrust or labor law made it to the bench, they typically came from the corporate-defense side. I’m proud of my work promoting judges from backgrounds that were woefully underrepresented in the judicial branch. But I regret that I mostly ignored where these judges stood on the question of corporate power.

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Now the Biden administration is repeating the same mistake. In many ways, Biden has broken from the modern trend of Democrats ignoring questions of economic power. His administration recently identified rigorous enforcement of antitrust and other competition policies as one the three main pillars of his economic plan, and he has appointed aggressive antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. The success of these antitrust officials, however, hinges on how their arguments are received in federal court—and on judicial nominations, Biden has mostly maintained the liberal status quo.

Biden has excelled in advancing diversity in the courts, including in the kind of law his nominees have practiced: Two-thirds of his judicial appointments have been women and two-thirds people of color. More than half worked at public-interest, civil-rights, or legal-aid organizations, according to an analysis done by Demand Justice, a progressive legal-advocacy organization. But Biden has advanced very few candidates to the federal bench with any background whatsoever in administrative law, union-side labor law, or antitrust. In July, a judge appointed by Biden to the United States District Court waved through the largest tech merger ever, between Microsoft and the giant video-game publisher Activision Blizzard, over the objections of the Federal Trade Commission and its Biden-appointed chair, Lina Khan.

In the past few years, members of both parties have begun to realize that unconstrained corporate power threatens some of their core values. The Biden administration is trying to do something about it, but that hasn’t generated much excitement from a liberal base that is still more focused on social issues. Progressives, especially, must recognize that preserving constitutional freedoms depends on winning the fight for economic liberties. Treating them as separate goals will ultimately mean losing out on both.