Bloomberg, Good Faith and the Sins of American Politics

It's been quite the few weeks for Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign. He hasn't even had time to get the last scandal swept under the rug before another is popping up.  

Amid attempts to scuttle criticisms of his policy regarding Stop and Frisk as mayor of NY, an audio clip of his explanation of the use of the policy was disseminated across social media. It serves to do nothing but provide support to the criticisms that Stop and Frisk, as a policy, and as it was implemented, was the very definition of systematic racism. This is not one of those situations where white people should be turning to one another to ask whether this is racist. There is an abundance of minority journalists, writers and other public figures to look to for the answer here. I could be wrong, but it seems the overwhelming number are in agreement that what Bloomberg said is racist, and that yes, it just gives more support to the criticisms of Stop and Frisk, and Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. 

Within a few days of that bombshell, the journalists who had been covering Occupy Wall Street, along with community activists and free speech advocates, started to publicly re-examine Bloomberg's handling of that protest, and it was an avalanche of criticism, calling Bloomberg everything from authoritarian to fascist. The law suits Occupy protesters brought against the city concerning the violation of rights and the unwarranted aggression of police do support the criticism that Bloomberg dictated an authoritarian response to protected free speech. Separate law suits awarded Occupy protesters $333,000 in one instance, $145,0000 in another instance, $50,000 in a third instance, $230,000 in a fourth suit,  in yet another suit, Occupy protesters were awarded $583,000. Combined, they are over $1.3 million, and there may have been other suits. This is just a quick list compiled from a single search. 

As if his campaign staff wasn't dealing with enough, women's rights advocates and prominent feminists have seen Bloomberg's campaign being rocked by loud and substantial criticism to once again ask why the former mayor is getting a pass for some deeply sexist comments made throughout his career. At GQ, Laura Bassett has a well written piece on the subject, and the fact that GQ is willing to print the piece suggests the days of Bloomberg getting a pass might be at an end. 

Within the last few weeks, he's also had to fend off criticism following the emergence of comments made about trans women being "... just a man wearing a dress," as he was rolling out his LGBT platform. 

It's clear there are plenty of good faith criticisms to be made of Mike Bloomberg, that have validity, and in some cases, pretty substantial evidence to back up those criticisms. That this evidence is being unearthed or revisited as Joe Biden tanks in the polls and many high profile Democratic centrists start pinning their hopes on Bloomberg is not shocking. The Democratic Party has been at war with itself intermittently for at least 40 years, and this latest battle for the power to decide the direction of the party's agenda has been going on continuously for at least 6 years now. That is American politics, and unfortunately, Democratic Party politics. 

In congruence with the problems of Democratic Party politics being numbingly disappointing as the nation itself faces what is quite possibly the moment it has most needed Democrats to be able to express an outlook and agenda that can inspire hope and imagination, because catering to the country's authoritarian and racist instincts for decades has now put it on the precipice of producing a political figure in Donald Trump and a political party in the Republican Party, that will end even the pretenses of the nation being willing to fight for beliefs that aren't racist or authoritarian, there is the reality that the national press and a good deal of the public have erred so far on the side of "hearing out the opposition," that we have essentially given racism and anti-Semitism an even more emboldened place in our politics than it had prior to the presidential candidacy and resulting administration of Barack Obama. 

That's a really long way of saying that now, as Mike Bloomberg begins to try his best to buy a presidential election, and there are a number of good faith criticisms he needs to face and bring substantial responses and answers for, the American public has also come to a place where it is going to have a very hard time being able to ferret out who among Bloomberg's critics are making them in good faith, and who would be opposed to Bloomberg, no matter what else may be or may have been true about him, because they're just closet Nazis and anti-Semites. These days, some of them are in the closet, but they've left the door open, so they're pretty easy to spot, but unfortunately there's a deep, deep discomfort in American media and politics to pointing out racists and anti-Semites who are standing in the closet, even if they've left the door open. I think we're a little worried about what it will mean for our elites and our political class. We might end up with a whole lot of job openings, and worse, a lot of us may be disqualified from filling them, and that's kind of scary. 

And in there, is a thing which is both morally horrible, but also one of the mostly unspoken horrors of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, really all of the forms of discrimination which are baked into our culture. It's one of the many other ways that these forms of discrimination that we are way too accepting and tolerant of, while also nearly constantly making proclamations about the beauty and power of the democracy it undermines. 

Let's be very clear, if Bloomberg were not a billionaire, and was instead a multi-millionaire, there would never have been a candidacy, and even if by some strange set of circumstances there were, it wouldn't even rate any press, unless he was making some of the more outrageous comments of his past the platform of his campaign, and then, it would be a bludgeoning in the press, especially because he is Jewish. No, Bloomberg has a candidacy and a history with governance because he is a billionaire, and what the anti-Semites will say is that he is a billionaire because he's Jewish. A lot of them will find a thousand ways not to say that too directly or even too indirectly, but they will hammer constantly at every possible thing that can be connected to the tropes of anti-Semitism. It's how our politics work, and more so since a young Black Senator from Illinois had the cojones to run for president, and win. Bloomberg being a billionaire has nothing to do with him being Jewish, and being Jewish has nothing to do with his ability to run for president. Being a billionaire has everything to do with how he can run for president, and why he's a terrible candidate who will never even have to worry about whether his campaign donations dry up. 

But we've spent what, eight or ten years now, with the majority of the "objective" media refusing to call anyone racist or an anti-Semite, and the conservative media somehow never finding anything racist until someone who is not conservative happens to have said or done it, at that point, it's apparently fine to read what's in someone's heart, because of course, if they're not conservative they already have demon infested hearts and minds. Now we have the flip side of one of the more common examples of why discrimination and racism are so terrible. Most of the time, we think of these things in terms of the great men who have been part of our history and who faced opposition which was immoral and horrific. Here, we have a problem where we have a public personality who is facing significant pushback, and a good deal of that pushback and opposition is genuinely well founded, but when they refer to there being anti-Semitic forces and messages in that opposition, they are going to be completely correct, and the American media is going to be completely unable to even attempt to navigate what is a good faith criticism and what is anti-Semitism. American media is so incapable of navigating it, they won't even going to attempt to have the conversation. 

That leaves those of us who believe that anti-Semites and their entire ilk should be fired into the sun, with a dilemma. Personally, in looking at Bloomberg's record, the idea of a presidential administration with the instincts and ability to disregard genuine and well founded attempts to have solutions to problems that are basically destroying hundreds of millions of lives, is no more inviting than another four years of Trump. It's exactly Bloomberg's experience being a billionaire in one of the world financial capitols that makes decisions like those he made as mayor of New York. Mike Bloomberg has spent the majority of his life being able to get what he wants, when he wants it, because he can buy it and because in a place like New York, being one of the nine richest people in the world makes you the equivalent of royalty. One of the most dangerous to threats to there being any kind of stable society moving forward is economic inequality, and there are few people in the country who have as directly benefitted from it as Mike Bloomberg. It's not that he's a monster, it's that his self preservation is predicated on the continuance of that economic inequality. We have very direct evidence of what Mike Bloomberg's ability to understand that danger is. We have very direct evidence of what his ability to understand the results of that inequality are. We have very direct evidence of just how it has even effected his behavior in regards to people he was supposed to have some kind of professional relationship. 

There is no conspiracy that put Bloomberg where he is, unless you believe the values and beliefs we have related to wealth and capitalism are in fact a conspiracy in themselves. Our entire culture would have to be one gigantic conspiracy, and that would involve way, way, way too many people for it to ever be kept secret enough to qualify as a conspiracy. Bloomberg is where he is because he is a billionaire, and it is that he has spent the majority of his adult life as one of the worlds richest people that creates the perspectives that allow him to make decisions that should be disqualifying for the presidency. I would genuinely love to see the first Jewish president, but not Bloomberg, because the worst thing about Bloomberg isn't that he's Jewish, it's that his penchant for acting like an unaccountable oligarch is going to play proof for so many of the tropes American anti-Semites have been gnawing on as long as the country has existed, and the lack of any kind of courage or will in the American media to confront that its not anything related to Jewishness that produces that outcome, but everything related to having elected the second unaccountable billionaire to the nation's highest office. Then we're going to be in the most odd position of having someone who has little to no regard for any of the mechanisms or traditions that we're going to have to rely on in the coming years to preserve some kind of representative democracy, and the next iteration of a movement of Americans attempting to prevent the country from being wholly and completely run by the wealthy, without even a nod toward the well being of the rest of us is going to get crushed, and we will have had the evidence to see that Bloomberg was one of the steps down that path, as Trump was before him, and whether they were Jewish or Christian or just a worshipper at the altar of power and attention, it was that they were billionaires given further power because we believed billionaires to somehow be more inherently capable of handling power, and what really should have disqualified them is what convinced tens of millions to vote for them. That will be when we realize how dangerous capitalism is to democracy or any kind of free society, when there isn't anything remotely like consent of the governed any longer. 

We'll get there because of the refusal to talk about the fact that billionaires, by their very existence are demonstrating their ability to think of anything like a common good, and we'll have let anti-Semites pollute our political culture even further, because we, as citizens are too uncomfortable to deal with where those discussions might go. There isn't an easy answer to any of these dilemmas. There's no solution, in full or even partial, if we don't even attempt to find one.