The Mac & Cheese Method is why politics keeps getting worse
You get what you pay for.
Politics runs on a communications trick that looks a lot like the grocery store aisle. I call it the Mac and Cheese Method.
Kraft has dominated the market for decades. They recently shrank the product amount and raised the price without changing the box. They also announced they were shortening the name. “Kraft Macaroni & Cheese” became “Kraft Mac & Cheese.” Few people noticed that the shorter name also came with less inside the box.
Consumers have noticed that the quality slipped, too. Kraft did not meaningfully fix the product. The company fixed the language, emphasizing the removal of artificial dyes and leaning heavily on nostalgia, and then aggressively marketed a “new and improved” product.
Loyalty did the work. People kept buying less of a worse product.
Modern political communication works the same way. Campaigns, interest groups, nonprofits, and political action committees hire consultants to test language, not to persuade skeptics, but to lock in consumers. The goal is not improvement or resolution. The goal is loyalty and retention.
That is the Mac and Cheese Method of political communications.
The incentive structure
This system exists because it pays well.
Campaigns need votes, but they need money first. Interest groups need outrage to justify fundraising. Political PACs need clear villains and simple frames to keep donors engaged. None of these actors is rewarded for solving problems. They are rewarded for keeping the fight alive.
Winning an argument does not pay. Maintaining one does. The system is not broken. It is functioning exactly as designed.
Consultants get paid to produce language that travels, not language that works. Nonprofits receive grants to fight the same battles year after year. Political PACs raise money by promising to stop the other side, not by delivering outcomes. Politicians benefit from permanent conflict that keeps donors engaged and activists mobilized.
Voters are the only people in this ecosystem who are not paid. They are the consumers. They buy the box and never look at the receipt to see the cost.
Language became the battlefield because it is cheaper than policy and easier than governing. It’s quicker to test a phrase than to fix a system.
Once language becomes the product, persuasion becomes unnecessary. Loyalty is all that matters. The goal is to keep people from wandering down the aisle.
How this plays out in real life
Liberals and conservatives argue past each other because they are reacting to language instead of substance. Each side has been trained to reject the other’s phrasing on instinct. Meaning becomes secondary to branding. Conflict replaces clarity.
Transgender rights provide a clear example.
After marriage equality stopped working as a reliable fundraising issue, the religious right needed a new target. They found one in trans people.
The right says, “Jane is biologically male.” The left hears a denial of autonomy. The left says, “Jane was assigned male at birth.” The right hears ideological manipulation and an attempt to impose language they did not choose.
The right’s framing asserts that biology overrides choice, and it calls that common sense. The left’s framing asserts that identity cannot be dictated, and it also calls that common sense. Both sides describe their position as liberty. Both sides accuse the other of denying it.
They start from the same fact, but the framing sends the argument in opposite directions. A savvy marketer knows how to gin up conflict. They appeal to our values, which we naively consider priceless.
The disagreement centers on freedom, a value Americans see as their second most important after family. One side frames freedom as the right to self-determination. The other frames freedom as the right to refuse coercion. The words trigger emotional responses before the question of autonomy can even be examined.
Once you ask, “Whose autonomy is being protected here, and whose is being limited?” you move out of slogans and into consequences. That is what the Mac and Cheese Method avoids: the consumer might not want to buy what you’re selling.
The payoff
Consultants understand this dynamic and exploit it deliberately.
On the right, think tanks frame freedom-based arguments as elitist language games. Autonomy is portrayed as something invented by educated liberals to look down on ordinary people. Class resentment is activated but never named. Freedom is recast as snobbery disguised as morality.
Team Mac & Cheese packages familiarity as virtue and suspicion as wisdom.
On the left, consultants frame conservative resistance as opposition to freedom, drawing on a long history of denied rights ingrained into the partisan vocabulary: “freedom of choice, “freedom to marry,” etc. Power is named directly. Class conflict is acknowledged as real, even when it is uncomfortable. That framing trains activists to see compromise as betrayal and disagreement as moral failure.
Team Macaroni & Cheese sells moral urgency and identity as proof of righteousness.
Both sides are arguing about freedom. Both sides are being marketed to. Freedom is the moral language of the fight, and class is the structural reality underneath it. Autonomy becomes a cost of doing business.
Both sides stay loyal to their branding. Both sides keep buying the box.
While supporters preach, protest, litigate, and legislate, the money flows. Campaigns raise donations. Nonprofits keep staff employed. Political PACs rake in cash to pressure politicians and block rivals. The communications industry thrives.
The boxes get tweaked slightly, but the product inside keeps getting worse. Voters are left fighting over words instead of outcomes.
The enshittification continues. It’s the business model.