two referenda, but Bloomberg managed to get an exception
passed for him, meaning the thing that people most fear about
Trump—that he’ll discover some extralegal way to stay in
office past prescribed limits—is actually true of Bloomberg.
“Anti-charisma” is a phrase that keeps popping up in
Bloomberg stories. Here is a guy who has a knack for not having
the knack. As mayor he used to zip off on a private plane to
Bermuda for the weekend without informing anyone in city
government. Did New Yorkers have a right to know roughly
where their mayor was?, reporters asked. Nah, said Bloomberg.
Bloomberg has the emotional I.Q. of one of his eponymous data
machines. “Don’t ever take a lunch break or go to the bath-
room, you keep working,” Bloomberg said in 2011, as if all
outputs could be controlled with a keystroke. In 1999, he said
that if he let women have flexibility in their schedules to allow
for family commitments, he’d have to give men time off to
play golf. Even his employees, staffers, and supporters can
barely muster a kind word for him. “The thing about Mike is
he actually isn’t that interesting,” an ex-employee told New
York. “The first time I met him, he started complaining about
some soup he got that didn’t taste right. I just met the guy, and
he was, like, complaining about his sweet-and-sour soup.”
He’s old, Jewish, immensely rich, and running a campaign
about nothing—Larry David is not just a perfect Bernie
Sanders, he could be Bloomberg too.
In TV commercials, Bloomberg was Master of the
Universe. Behind the electronic curtain, though, he’s a dull,
hapless little man—the Wizard of Blahs. He has some of the
Trump attributes that turn people away but none of the ones
that make them feel like pumping their fists in the air and
putting political hats on their heads. Periodically in
American politics a businessman comes along promising to
sort out the mess and run things like a blue-chip corporation.
It almost never works. Wendell Willkie tried it, and Ross
Perot, and Steve Forbes, and remember Herman Cain? Mitt
“I like to fire people and also let Detroit go bankrupt”
Romney tried it, in his fashion. The businessman shtick
worked for Donald Trump because he’s the nation’s blue-
collar billionaire, a talk-radio caller (“Don from Queens”),
a guy who eats McDonald’s food on his private plane and
never sounds like he’s imitating the speech patterns of reg-
ular folks. The hotshots with the silver Teslas and the gyne-
cologist wives loatheTrump, just as most of the country
loathes them.
And how does “I’m a billionaire businessman” square with
today’s Democratic Party, which doesn’t mind money but is
kind of embarrassed about it? The Democrats regard capital-
ism as an irksome relative you have to invite to Thanksgiving
(or maybe, exhilaratingly, you don’t, not anymore, not at
Bernie’s place anyway). Is an Asperger’s-y Wall Street tycoon
the guy they want today? Is that the guy they want ever? Is
Bloomberg’s pitch simply that he’s not senile, not a socialist,
and not a congenital liar? Is being None of the Above enough
to make him the Democratic nominee? “We need somebody
who can... do the mundane but essential tasks of pushing leg-
islation and executing laws,” writes David Brooks in the New
York Times. One of the country’s most astute minds makes his
best case for Bloomberg, and it’s “mundane but essential”?
That’s quite the bumper sticker. Might as well go with
“Dukakis, only shorter.”T
HETrump era has been a period of intellectual fer-
ment on the right. New ideas are being proposed and
old debates renewed. Conservatives are arguing with
one another about capitalism, nationalism, the
Founding, classical liberalism, the Enlightenment, and the
proper relationship of church and state. We’re debating whether
to increase antitrust enforcement, regulate social media, adopt
policies to expand domestic manufacturing, and rethink some
civil-rights laws.
The same period, however, has been marked by policy-
paralysis. And while intra-Republican debate has often cen-
tered on degrees of support for and opposition to Trump, that
paralysis has been a party-wide phenomenon transcending the
Trump divide. When Republicans controlled the Congress and
the WhiteHouse in 2017 and 2018—the first time they had
wielded so much power since 2006—they passed only one
major piece of legislation, a tax-reform bill. They tried but
failed to replace Obamacare. After those two efforts, they ran
out the clock, attempting no major legislation for much of
2018 and running in the midterm elections without a legisla-
tive agenda.
Since the Democrats took control of the House of Repre -
sentatives in that year’s election, there has been even less leg-
islative action. The House has passed symbolic liberal measures
that had no prospects of passage in the Senate, and the Senate
barely even tried its hand at any meaningful bills, focusing
instead on confirming conservative judges. A measure approv-
ing minor changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement
has been about the only bipartisan legislation to pass. There has
been no action in Congress on health care, infrastructure, immi-
gration, higher education, religious liberty, or any of the other
policy priorities Republicans have highlighted over the past
decade. The GOP now talks about trying to retake control of the
House but offers no sense of what it would want to do if it man-
aged it.
The Trump administration has sought to partially fill this
vacuumwith regulatory measures. Some of these have been
valuable: reversing some of the most egregious abuses of the
Obama administration’s final two years, reinstating pro-life rules
enacted by past Republican administrations, and relieving some
of Obamacare’s upward pressure on insurance costs. But few28 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020The Next
Coalitionof
The Right
Some lessons of reform conservatism
BY RAMESH PONNURU &
YUVAL LEVIN2col_QXP-1127940309.qxp 3/4/2020 1:53 AM Page 28
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