On The Brink of Fascism, What Will We Do?
To my fellow Democrats, Progressives, and Independents:
Bear with me here. I want to bring you back for a moment to June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced that he was running for President. Remember all the vitriol of his speech that day: the sexism, the racism, the Islamophobia, the xenophobia — you know what i’m talking about. Remember the media craze that followed, how he had hijacked our attention span to the point that CNN spent an hour staring at his empty podium, and how you followed along with every nasty tweet (1). Remember the pain that you felt as the networks announced he had won the election. And remember the nightmares that have followed: kids in cages, tax cuts for the rich, the Muslim ban, the press as the enemy of the people, aspiration to authoritarianism, I could go on.
Now, look to the future. Imagine a President who’s been accused of sexual harassment by even more women than Trump. Imagine a President who is quantifiably more racist than Trump. Imagine a President who doesn’t just humiliate, but manufactures a police state to silence protesters and journalists. Imagine a President who’s even better at getting and keeping your attention. Imagine a President who’s aligned himself with authoritarians in our country and abroad. Finally, imagine a President who can muster the control of an entire political party without objection from its leaders. Wouldn’t this person be dangerous for our country?
The person I just described to you is Michael Bloomberg, and you better believe he’s a real threat. First, I want to outline the case against him as a social actor. Earlier this week, a clip went viral of him talking about the NYPD’s unjust concentration on young Black and Brown men at his direction, saying you could “Xerox” their description, send the police out to their neighborhoods, and take care of all the crime (2). Bloomberg also has a long history of sexism and predatory behavior, known for quotes like “I’d do that piece of meat in a second” and racking up 40 harassment cases from 64 different women (3). As Mayor, he enacted a policy that forced new mothers to breast-feed their children instead of letting hospitals offer formula (4). And as we watched the economy crash in 2008, Bloomberg blamed the end of redlining, the act of racially discriminating in residential zoning, for the collapse (5) and claimed that the same Wall Street bankers that, despite warning, unsustainably ripped off millions should be given a pass because they were “struggling to make ends meet” (6). And in 2012, he defended the NYPD cyber-security unit’s daily monitoring of Muslim student groups at universities around New York and at the Ivy Leagues (7). As recently as 2016, even, he referred to trans women as “(men) in a dress” and claimed that trans rights weren’t a “personal” issue (8). Bloomberg has shown himself time and time again to be racist, sexist, classist, Islamophobic and transphobic. We must believe him to be the person he has shown us to be.
My second concern over Michael Bloomberg’s candidacy, is the extent to which he has ignored the norms of governance as mayor of New York City and embraced authoritarian figures both at home and abroad. An authoritarian is defined as “favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.” Bloomberg has a weird obsession with taking fingerprints, especially those of poor people, proposing in 2011 that we connect fingerprints to social security to keep undocumented immigrants from getting jobs (9), and saying in 2013 that public housing residents have their fingerprints recorded to prove they live there (10). All of these extra layers of verification would mean that the government could not only wreak havoc on the lives of the disadvantaged, but making more hoops to jump through dehumanizes those that they target and amounts to pointless discrimination. The Mayor is also known for a history of being an adversary to the free press. In 2011, for example, as Occupy Wall Street protesters took over NYC to speak out against the abuses of the free market, Bloomberg’s NYPD arrested, shut out, and even attacked journalists who wanted to cover the event (11). And in 2015, Bloomberg got the Center for American Progress to omit a chapter about his Police Department’s wrongdoings in a larger report about Islamophobia in the US, but only after he donated 1.5 million dollars to their organization (12). This interference and intimidation of the free press is not so out in the open as Trump’s daily attacks, but the use of institutional structures instead of outright bullying to carry out attacks is even more dangerous for democracy.
Michael Bloomberg also has a history of openly aligning himself with authoritarian governments. In 2016, in an interview with Margaret Hoover, he said that China’s Xi Jinping is “not a dictator,” explaining that “no government survives without the will of the majority,” (13) even as China is cracking down hard on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and creating a social credit system that punishes citizens for not conforming to subjective social norms (14). Here in the US, too, Bloomberg has raised and spent money for Michigan’s wannabe autocrat Governor, Rick Snyder (15). Snyder, as you may know, was the man behind the Flint Water Crisis, an ongoing problem in which a new water pipe was built that provided drinking water from the dirty Flint River, instead of crystal-clear Lake Huron. Snyder used the deliberately created problem to seize emergency powers, appointing “emergency managers” (16) to take total control of not just Flint, but also Detroit, where the Huron pipe started. These managers only worsened the crisis, at Snyder’s direction — and Bloomberg stood by him. Both party establishments have long been complacent in calling out dictators and strongmen for what they are, but that doesn’t mean they should not be held accountable for their wrongdoing.
I hope it is clear to you now that Mayor Bloomberg is a threat to American democracy in his inherent disrespect for women, transgender people, and people of color, in his deliberate attacks on the press and civil liberties, in his conflicts of interest, and in his coddling to dangerous figures. But I want to outline to you the danger that lies ahead as his candidacy gains steam. Despite his serious flaws, the Democratic party is welcoming him to the primary with open arms (17) because they believe his massive spending will benefit the party as we go into the general election. They may be right, but we have to think about the long-term consequences of turning this party into a top-down structure that relies completely on his wealth. First, we have to think about what all of his ads are doing to our attention. Similar to the sheer absurdity of Trump’s daily tweets, Bloomberg’s blanket of advertisements combined with his strange Twitter posts (18) are doing a great job at getting his name out, but they aim to create a cult of personality instead of loyalty to a cause beyond himself. Many of his most viral ads compare Trump to cinematic bullies and all of his ads end with “Mike Will Get It Done.” His campaign, instead of focusing on issues like each of the other 7 Democrats in the race, poses him to be a foil to the current President. If we keep going down this road of nominating he who is perceived to be “most electable” instead of trusting our values to lead our party, the election of President Bloomberg will create a dangerous President, and we will turn into a banana republic — electing a brand new billionaire to the White House every 4 years. You may have also heard of the massive ground army that Bloomberg is hiring. As of last week, it’s reported that he has 2100 staff and plans to continue expanding until November of this year. This massive operation is sucking oxygen out of more local Democratic campaigns (19), and if Bloomberg is elected, he’ll be able to snap his fingers and make Congress do whatever he pleases, because they’ll have been made totally dependent on his money to be elected.
American democracy has always been fragile. Bureaucratic failures, as we’ve seen in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election and in the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, can create chaos. And from the Teapot Dome scandal under Warren G. Harding to the claim that corporations are people in Citizens United vs. F.E.C., we know that shady figures have outsize weight in electoral and policy outcomes. But we cannot look as Donald Trump or Michael Bloomberg as flukes — they’re the product of powerful forces manufacturing despair en masse, turning us into cynical pundits whose decisions are dictated by fear instead of led by hope. They’re recognizing that more Americans have checked out or been forced out of the political process than ever before, and know that this is their moment to seize power. I’m calling on all of you to do everything you can to keep either of these men from leading our country for the next four years. If we let that happen, we risk losing all that we care about to these bigoted New York oligarchs who have loyalty to no cause beyond themselves — not the Constitution, nor human rights, nor the future of this planet.
2: https://twitter.com/GravelInstitute/status/1227257340480585736?s=20
3: https://www.gq.com/story/bloomberg-sexism
5: https://apnews.com/8cbb1fafbb4faf01e8d9571363979501
8: https://twitter.com/WalkerBragman/status/1225277176745992195?s=20
9: https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1228138597846585344
11: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/15/occupy-journalists-media-blackout
12: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/15/us/politics/michael-bloomberg-spending.html
14: https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502592/china-social-credit-score/
15: https://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/2014/10/michael_bloomberg_pac_backing.html
16: https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2018/01/city_of_the_state_flints_histo.html
18: https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3AMike2020)%20%23BloombergFacts&src=typed_query&f=live
19: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/13/bloomberg-spending-local-state-campaigns/
20: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/nyregion/bloomberg-gives-support-to-senator-scott-brown.html
