I want to talk about the arrogance of Michael Bloomberg for a moment, but to make my point I need to talk about the big themes that have driven the left over the last twelve years. Before the election of Donald Trump, the left was defined by the #Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter movements. After the election of Trump the focus shifted to #TrumpRussia and #MeToo, but the prior concerns did not go away. The left has been criticized for focusing too much on identity politics and not enough on bread and butter issues. Likewise, they’re been accused of obsessing about Trump and the integrity of the last election and not putting enough emphasis on the things that concern people in their day-to-day lives. The truth is that there has always been a mix.
Irrespective of what Democratic leaders choose to highlight in any given week, the left is split between those who are focused most on economic and global issues like climate change, corporatism, trade and income inequality, and those who are focused most on civil rights and more fairness for women, minorities and people in the LGBTQ community.
Bloomberg has a good record on two major issues that are of major concern to the left: gun violence and climate change. As for the rest, he’s about the worst fit for the left that can be imagined. On the economic front, he sees Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and thinks a wealth tax would be unconstitutional. On the cultural front, the stop and frisk policy he championed as the mayor of New York was exactly the kind of thing that #BlackLivesMatter rails against, and his record with women makes him a prime target of the #MeToo movement.
It’s hard to exaggerate what an affront it is to ask women who are sickened by Trump to support Bloomberg, or to the ask the same of folks who have been fighting to end police brutality against minority communities. To see how offensive Bloomberg is to the economic populists, just look at the visceral reaction to him we saw from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Nevada and South Carolina debates.
Yet, Bloomberg somehow thinks he’s a good fit for this party and this time. Any objective observer would disabuse him of that notion, but he believes he can just overcome dissent with money. I don’t know what offends me the most, the idea that his ambition should cancel out the values of the Democratic Party or the idea that people are so suggestible that paid advertising can cause them to abandon their principles.
Bloomberg has always treated party affiliation (whether Republican, Democratic or independent) as a matter of strategy rather than principle. Now he appears to believe that he’s the only person who can beat Trump and that he can simply spend the other candidates out of contention and Trump out of office.
Virtually everything about his campaign is offensive, including that it’s even legal for him to use so much of his fortune to swamp the armies of small donors who have ponied up for other candidates. He’s succeeded in raising the cost of advertising and staff for his opponents who, as a result, have less of an opportunity to build their organizations or get their messages out.
It might have worked for Bloomberg if he didn’t have such a public record of being terrible on the things that matter to the left, but it was the height of arrogance for him to think that none of that would matter.
5
I feel there is lots of conflation between Democratic establishment and the left at the start of this piece.
The left, in the non-establishment activist sense, was never that concerned about Russia, and wanted at least as much if not more attention to be paid to the 1) naked grifting Trump & co participated in and 2) the abrogation of democratic norms that both Trump and the GOP were willing to engage in. What’s more, these folks generally do a very good job of grasping that economic and identity issues are two sides of the same coin.
The Democratic establishment, on the other hand, because they ultimately want to 1) serve their corporate donors and 2) preserve their position in the party, tend to focus on cultural/identity issues, and often explicitly set them against economic issues, because at the end of the day that is the only concession they are willing to make to win elections. Indeed, I would argue that many in the Democratic establishment would be happier to maintain their position in a non-governing minority party than to lose their position in a governing majority party. I suspect this last point explains the frantic panic that a Sanders candidacy induces in these people.
So while I will grant you that your framing is reasonable in terms of understanding the party and the group of folks who run it, I think most leftist voters are people who are interested in fairness and justice, and don’t really care if that is in the context of economic, racial, or other issues.
And they hate Bloomberg because he is pure garbage, along pretty much any metric that a person who cares about fairness would evaluate a candidate through. Your last 4 paragraphs are spot on.
Yes, the Democratic Party establishment is hardly very left. Right now one of the candidates most hoping to convince the establishment that “I’m your guy”–Pete Buttigieg–is openly red-baiting Bernie Sanders. Buttigieg has all along been a empty suit, his support seemingly coming from people who mistake his lofty sounding rhetoric for something meaningful. As for Bloomberg, he has bought the support and good-will of elected officials all over the US by his philanthropic efforts. This was covered very well by “The Daily” (New York Times podcast) last week. Many of the folks whose support he has won this way are African American mayors and civic officials.
I have never been particularly a Sanders supporter–I prefer Warren–but one needn’t be a Sanders supporter to recognize red-bating. At some point the Anyone But Sanders movement is going to coalesce around a single candidate, and it isn’t going to be the bumbler Klobuchar or the master of malapropisms Biden or the arrogant twit Buttigieg. It’s going to be Bloomberg.
This piece isn’t really focused on the Dem establishment except to the extent that it touches on criticisms that they’ve been too responsive to the cultural left.
5
5
The only nominee who I believe would really be a disaster for the party if he became the candidate is Bloomberg. The guy is not a Democrat in any meaningful sense and no one would do more to depress turnout and hand a win to Trump than him. The guy is in my opinion a much better fit for the Republican party, even though these days he’d be chewed up and spit out for his apostasy on guns, climate change and abortion.
The arrogance of Bloomberg extends to all the pundits and party functionaries who think he can be foisted upon us. I’m so glad he’s receiving zero traction. Hopefully it will stay that way. As much as I may not like some of our other candidates, I’d support any of them. If the candidate were Bloomberg, I’d still vote but with a mask over my nose and only because Trump is so fucking crazy and dangerous. I can guarantee most of my friends would not give money, not volunteer time and probably, in some cases, not even vote.
I’ll be at my 35th college reunion at Johns Hopkins in April. No doubt, same as at the 30th, we’ll hear all about Mike Bloomberg and his generous donations. Back then he had given half a billion dollars. As a result the campus paths which had been asphalt when I was a student were all paved with brick. I hear he’s since given more and is up to three billion. By now those paths are probably paved with gold. But here’s the thing. If I had that kind of money to donate, prestigious colleges would be way down on my list. So far down they’d never see the light of day. I’d be digging wells in Africa, eradicating disease, fighting global warming, etc. Buying up land to be saved from development. Things that really matter. Not giving gobs of money to a school that’s already among the elite.