We sometimes hear it said of someone that they “think the world revolves around them.” Michael Bloomberg may be someone for whom this is literally true.
The billionaire and former mayor of New York City announced Wednesday that he would throw his checkbook and whatever political clout he has behind the Democrats’ campaign to retake control of Congress. “I’ve never much liked political parties,” Bloomberg’s statement begins. “I’ve always believed that we should put country before party.”
And so in his very first words, he has taken up arms against the position that party comes before country, which literally nobody holds outside of Communist China.
Of course, Bloomberg has every right to spend his money in this way. But his statement and attitude in this venture is vintage Bloomberg. Only he could dive this far into partisan politics while framing himself as the one person in America who is truly above party politics.
What allows Bloomberg to perform this mental balancing act is his unique, even bespoke, definition of partisanship. When Bloomberg talks of “putting party before country,” what he really means is disagreeing with Mike Bloomberg.
Bloomberg doesn’t like political parties because political parties involve compromise and coalition building — at least in a two-party system like the U.S. The parties are shaped by their competition for the voters affection and the resultant sorting of membership. That process helps parties maximize their support, but it also leaves lots of people at least a little bit unhappy with their party. They may be with their party on guns, but not abortion, or with them on taxes but not on healthcare. They may like their party’s governor, but not their party’s president — or vice versa.
In the end, normal people weigh these pros and cons and choose among the available choices. That’s not for Mike, though. As a technocrat, he’s never been one for such messy, rough-and-tumble sorting.
Belonging to a party never really served Bloomberg well. A longtime Democrat, Bloomberg became a Republican in the 2001 election for a very elevated purpose: the Democratic primary field was packed, and the Republican field was open, so he became a Republican. That’s putting something over party, to be sure.
Eight years later, Mayor Bloomberg decided that New York City hadn’t had enough Mayor Bloomberg, so he successfully campaigned to change the city’s term-limit laws to allow him a third term, which he served out as an independent, the Republican Party having served its purpose. In 2016, Bloomberg ostentatiously cherry-picked Republicans and Democrats to support or oppose based on whether they supported a bill strengthening background checks for gun buyers.
But what makes Bloomberg special is not that he fails to be in lockstep with one party or another — many people feel the same way. What makes him special is his complete certainty that the only people seeking what’s good for the country are the people who agree with him.
Those who hold differing policy positions — say, who oppose more hurdles to gun ownership — must be acting at the behest of special interests, or of “party.” Or maybe it’s just benighted ignorance. When Bloomberg says that “There are good people in both parties, and neither has a monopoly on good ideas,” what he means is that people can be found in both parties who agree with him on almost everything.
And of course, when Bloomberg was weighing a run for president in 2016, his fellow travelers would often point to the high levels of dissatisfaction with both parties. The implication was that the Party of Mike could unite everyone who was unhappy with both the Dems and the GOP.
But even if everyone’s unhappy, it doesn’t follow that they’re all unhappy in the same way. Some on the left are certain the Democratic Party is too centrist on economic issues. Many Republicans believe that their party is either too soft on immigration, or too hard on it, or too tough on banks or not nearly tough enough. Plenty of voters don’t like either party because they think the parties are under the sway of arrogant billionaires.
The point is that these malcontents may wish their party were different, but they certainly don’t all wish their party looked like Bloomberg’s.
To believe that, you’d have to believe he had all the answers, and only blind party loyalty or corruption could explain why nobody else could see it. You’d have to believe that you stood precisely at the political center, and everything else was in orbit around your truth.
Brian Carney, a native of New York City, is a former member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and co-author of Freedom, Inc.: How Corporate Liberation Unleashes Employee Potential and Business Performance.
