Bloomberg v Trump

Maybe this wasn’t exactly the way Neil Postman wrote it up in 1985. After all, Instagram and Twitter were unfathomable in a world where the internet was still a closely held secret among computer-sci geeks. Yet that was the world in which the late New York University media critic wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death that essentially predicted Donald Trump, the drug of 24/7 cable news, and ... everything, decades before they actually occurred.

It’s the way that a candidate with a Coca-Cola-size bank account is teaching the world to sing his praises by bombarding every possible frequency with 60-second ads, branding himself more effectively than Coke Zero Sugar but with the same amount of empty nutrition. It’s the cheap social media stunts executed through buying off 20-something “influencers” and their millions of followers for pennies on the dollar. And it’s the calculated insults that become trending topics on Twitter, all aimed at ousting a reality-TV president by putting on a higher-rated, hipper show.

The campaign of [Michael] Bloomberg — the septuagenarian former New York mayor and media mogul ranked as America’s ninth-richest person, with a nest egg pushing $60 billion — has been paying off the owners of popular Instagram accounts with names like Tank Sinatra to post memes [reportedly paying influencers $150 a pop] that basically make fun of a 78-year-old guy trying to make himself cool on Instagram [...] building the candidate’s brand, for the kind of mass consumers Postman predicted 35 years ago, willing to trade their vote for a good laugh.

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Maybe it’s the $1 million the Bloomberg candidacy drops on Facebook ads every day, a tsunami [...] . Or the campaign rallies that offer a swank buffet and free wine, which somehow is considered progress from the old days when a Philly ward leader simply bought you a beer for your vote. Or cornering the market on young campaign help, by paying kids just out of college $6,000 a month to “like Mike” and gather his petitions.

  Philadelphia Inquirer

Jesus. Is there a retiree's division?

In the large March primary states where Bloomberg is first competing, he’s already moving into the lead — with a lot of room for growth if Biden, who was the front-runner in these states, continues to fade and if those Facebook, radio and TV ads keep coming. He already leads in Florida, a big state that votes March 17, and in Arkansas, one of a number of March 3 Super Tuesday states where Bloomberg has been campaigning while the other Democrats clubbed each other in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Please. No more. I have a feeling he's only running because he hates Trump.

Even some who’ve been cynical about the (real) billionaire’s campaign cheered his New York chutzpah. Maybe Democrats don’t really want to talk about Pell grants; they just want to see The Apprentice crushed in the November sweeps.

He needs to put all that money into Democrats running to flip Senate seats. And he can make all the negative Trump ads he wants without running himself. But, he's too much of a dick to actually care about the country.

His campaign’s unconventional late-entry strategy has so far kept him off the debate stage, where Bloomberg would have to defend his record as mayor and businessman, while swamping the ad market where he fully controls the message.

And if you refuse to debate, you shouldn't be allowed to run.

In 1984, the NYU prof was asked to deliver a lecture around the year and the theme of George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel, about an age of government censorship and thought control. Postman’s provocative thesis was that modern society was devolving not toward Orwell but toward Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the masses surrender their agency as citizens for a soothing drug called soma. Except the real-life soma is TV and other mass entertainment. Engaged civic discourse in America would soon wither away because, as Postman titled his book the following year, we were amusing ourselves to death.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

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In 2015-16, some writers — myself included — saw the rise of Trump as the embodiment of Postman’s 20th century predictions. Here was a soulless demagogue whose mass rallies, with unpredictable rants targeting everyone from Mexicans to CNN, got boffo ratings, in a series that the soma-zonked masses found must-see TV to the point where people would watch the image of his plane on a tarmac.

In little more than three years as president, Trump has been systematically dismantling the basic rule of law and many of other Democratic norms, establishing a modern presidency where stealing elections and other crimes are above the law, where Congress and the courts are no longer a watchdog. The slim majority of Americans who seem to be alarmed by this have been saying that nothing less than the fate of democracy is on the ballot in 2020.

But what if democracy has already died and we just don’t want to admit it.

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Take away the $60 billion fortune that Bloomberg amassed on the backs of his workers too afraid to take bathroom breaks, and there’s no way he should even be at 0.3 percent in the Democratic polls, let alone leading in some states. In a time of the #MeToo movement against misogyny and sexual harassment, Bloomberg and his company have settled scores of lawsuits from women over a toxic work environment, including crude remarks from Bloomberg himself about women’s looks or their pregnancies. Bloomberg both expanded and praised “stop-and-frisk” policies in which black and brown people — the vast majority of whom committed no crime — were subjected to a cruel and sometimes violent police occupation.

This ... this is the Democrat? I’m old enough to remember when there was no liberal principle held higher than that the American White House is not for sale, so why the sudden embrace of this billionaire getting away with it in broad daylight?

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Preventing a Bloomberg-Trump general election could rally Democrats behind (hopefully) the woman who could best fight for actual progressive values, Elizabeth Warren, or (more likely) get many to start dropping their qualms about Bernie Sanders as a fiery leftist standard-bearer.

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In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman wrote that “[p]eople will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” In 2020 here’s Mike Bloomberg, betting $150 that Postman was right.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.