Much as many people-who-ought-to-know-better have been
enjoying the disruptive antics of Donald Trump, surely other cohorts and
coteries have endured dark nights of the soul as they witness the 2016
election spin into a perfect storm of rebellion, corruption, and idiocy.
Imagine the scenes in Michael Bloomberg’s drawing room the past eight months,
the agonies of sensible people! And so after the close of business Friday
comes news that the former three-time mayor of New York City is laying
concrete plans to run for president on a third-party ticket. Extreme times
call for extreme moves by non-extremists.
The Trump phenomenon is pretty well-understood: a
politically paralyzed nation hostage to malign forces, mired in racketeering,
captive to PC witch-hunters, and pitching into bankruptcy, turns to a TV
clown with no filter on his angry brain and he acts out all the discontents
of our time. Does anybody doubt that the perfidies of the day beg to be
opposed? But those shadowy figures in Bloomberg’s drawing room must be
saying, “is this the best we can do?” And so an honorable man steps forward.
Someone had to.
Couple of gigantic problems. First, what about Bloomberg
being Wall Street’s pet politician? To many, I suppose, Bloomberg is exactly
that. I’m not so sure. While he made his multi-billion dollar fortune
building a computerized information service for Wall Street, with a news
service and some other apps pinned on, he was not a bankster. He consorted
with them all the livelong day, day in and day out, for decades. Maybe that
was bad enough. Maybe it also puts him at a very special advantage, since
other public figures can only pretend to understand the esoteric rackets
lately engineered in lower Manhattan.
For instance, Bloomberg must know what a CDO is, and how
outfits like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs used them to swindle the taxpayers.
I’m not convinced that Donald Trump could explain that to an audience if
given an hour of airtime. He rarely speaks in two consecutive coherent
sentences, for all his entertainment value. The next president will be on
duty during the gravest and most powerful financial unwind in history, and it
might be a good thing if he understood how it worked. He will probably be
blamed for it in any case, but at least he will be a true mariner in a storm,
not just a bigmouth passenger on the ship. Anyway, the salient question is
whether the voters could ever accept him as something besides a tool of the
banks?
The public that Bloomberg would have to appeal to has
become a weird amalgam of cultural mutants, zombies, and special pleaders —
Duck Dynasty and Straight Out of Compton meet The House of Wax. Worse, they
are inflamed, not exactly disposed to weigh political fine points. They’re
just out for blood against a system that has been bleeding them badly. Did I
leave out some big wad of voters between the extremes who retain a few shreds
of critical thought? I’m not sure they exist anymore. We’re about to find out
in the months ahead. The group in Bloomberg’s drawing room may be deluding
itself that there is any thread of clear thinking on the street outside. It
would be very sad, if so.
I think it is fair to say that Michael Bloomberg’s
success as the three-term mayor of New York City (2002 – 2013) was due almost
completely to the financialization of the economy. A Niagara of money flowed
into the city as banking ballooned from 5 percent to 40 percent of the US
economy. As all the formerly skeezy neighborhoods of New York — the Bowery,
the Meatpacking District, etc —got buffed up, the desolation in places like
Utica, Dayton, Gary, and Memphis got worse. You might say New York City
benefited hugely from all the assets stripped out of the flyover states. All
of which is to say that that recent revival of New York City was not
necessarily due to Michael Bloomberg’s genius. He presided over a very
special moment in history when money was flowing in a particular way, and he
went with flow.
For all that, it seems likely that he was also an able
administrator as this occurred. A lot of out-front elements of city life
improved visibly while he was around. Crime went down, the subways ran
better, public spaces were improved. What would he be able to do in the
compressive deflationary depression that I call the long emergency? Could he
restore faith in authority? Could he comfort a battered public on the
airwaves? Could he begin the awful task of politically deconstructing the
matrix of rackets that has made it impossible for this country to move where
history is taking us (smaller, finer, more local)?
Finally, on top of his Wall Street connection, Bloomberg
is Jewish. (As I am.) Is the country now crazed enough to see the emergence
of a Jewish Wall Streeter as the incarnation of all their hobgoblin-infested
nightmares? Very possibly so, since the old left wing Progressives have
adopted the Palestinians as their new pet oppressed minority du jour and have
been inveighing against Israel incessantly. Well, that would be a darn shame.
But that’s what you might get in a shameless land where anything goes and
nothing matters.
For now, anyway, the real disrupter is turning out to be
Michael Bloomberg. Finally a serious man enters the stage.
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page!
