I’ve appreciated many of Kos’s recent writings on the Democratic race. I have agreed with him on Elizabeth Warren’s appeal. And it seems that we would agree that if we could appoint the next President from among all those standing on the debate stage in Nevada tonight, Michael Bloomberg would be at the bottom of the list.
But I think Kos is dangerously too sure of himself when he pronounces in a piece today that “If We nominate Bloomberg, we are as empty and hollow as the conservative movement.” I’ll set aside the issue of whether Bloomberg is as terrible as Kos claims: although I think he grossly exaggerates Bloomberg’s defects, I’ll stipulate Kos’s takedown of him and not argue the matter here.
The part of Kos’s argument that needs to be rejected, rather, is one that he comes to at the end of his essay: “we don’t need Bloomberg to win in November.“
Wouldn’t it be great to know such a thing! But Kos doesn’t know what we need to win. Because nobody knows. (Shouldn’t it give us considerable pause, about such a claim, that the futures market currently gives Trump a 54% chance of winning re-election?)
The point that none of us should now lose sight of is that defeating Donald Trump is the overriding necessity of this political moment, because Trump’s getting a second term would be a national disaster of the first magnitude.
(At stake — as the past three years, and especially Trump’s post-impeachment actions have shown — is whether the nation will fall away from the constitutional democratic form of government and toward dictatorship.)
The imperative of that challenge cannot be simply swept aside by making some bold claim — “we don’t need Bloomberg to win” — that can only be a kind of bravado, given the considerable uncertainty about how this upcoming presidential election will play out, with one nominee or another at the top of the Democratic ticket.
If Kos were to argue, “Bloomberg should only be the nominee if there is strong reason to believe that his heading the ticket would substantially increase the probability of getting the powers of the presidency out of the hands of the present extraordinarily dangerous President,” I’d have no quarrel.
Maybe Kos doesn’t see any big difference between Bloomberg’s being President and Trump’s being President. That might be the implication of his making the equivalence, “If we nominate Bloomberg, we are as empty and hypocritical as the conservative movement.”
But if he does believe that, I think he’s dead wrong. I see no reason to believe that Bloomberg would be a threat to the survival of America’s constitutional order. But Trump clearly is such a threat.
And the need to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” is the overriding task of this political moment.
(Moreover, if Trump is re-elected, there will be no progress on any of the other issues about which we Democrats care — no progress on Americans’ being covered well on health care, no progress on addressing climate change at the national level (or any other environmental concerns), no progress on reducing gun violence, no progress on racial discrimination, no progress on a more equitable tax structure, no progress on restoring the rule of law, etc. )
So I have no quarrel with Kos promoting the candidates he thinks best, nor with his delineating his reservations about the candidates he likes least. But I would like for him to recognize
the imperative of defeating Trump (which I imagine he does recognize) that we do not know what nominee will maximize the chances of our succeeding at that imperative task (and it is not helpful to pretend that we do) that we should all sign on to accept the collective judgment that arises out of the Democrats’ nominating process, whoever emerges as the collective choice and that we should all pledge to go all out to support whoever is the nominee, whether it is Sanders or Bloomberg or any of the others.(I argued this at greater length yesterday in “The Idea that We Democrats Should Unify Around Re the 2020 Nomination.”)
If it ends up looking like it requires Michael Bloomberg to save American democracy, we should be prepared to support him vigorously. I’d ask Kos (even if one accepts his too-ugly portrait of Bloomberg): “If Churchill could provide support for Stalin to turn back Hitler’s army, shouldn’t we be able to hope and pray and work for a Bloomberg victory, if that’s what it takes to get the powers of the presidency out of the hands of this fascistic President?”