RUTHFULLY YOURS

In October last year, The Atlantic magazine detailed the 25 media boomlets over the past decade that have speculated Michael Bloomberg would run for president. Today the New York Times launched yet another one, reporting that the former New York mayor would be willing to spend “at least $1 billion of his fortune” on an independent race, should Bernie Sanders or a “gravely weakened” Hillary Clinton become the Democratic nominee.

While the public is clearly disenchanted with both major parties, the odds of the 73-year-old Bloomberg’s parachuting into the presidential race are laughably low. It’s true that more than 70 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track, and that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have unfavorable ratings of above 50 percent with the general public. But as Michael Goodwin, a New York Post columnist who has frequent contact with Bloomberg, put it this weekend: “He won’t run if he can’t win, and anybody who sells him a vision of victory is suffering hallucinations or looking for a payday.”

Theoretically, the obstacles to beginning a race this late aren’t terribly daunting. Deadlines for ballot access in most states fall in July or August, so getting his name before voters as an independent would be nothing more than an expensive irritation for someone of Bloomberg’s wealth. Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News, estimates that Bloomberg would have to spend $5 million to $6 million to get ballot lines in all 50 states. The first deadline is in Texas, which requires 80,000 valid signatures on petitions be submitted by May 9 of this year.

My friends and colleagues have said in National Review’s recently published symposium almost everything that there is to be said on the matter of Donald Trump, the vicious demagogue who currently leads the Republican presidential pack in national polls. I myself have written a small book on the subject. Forgive me for turning to one other aspect of the question, which is that the candidacy of Donald Trump is something that could not happen in a nation that could read.

This is the full flower of post-literate politics.

There are still individual Americans who can read, a fact for which we writers should say daily prayers of gratitude. There are even reading communities of a sort, and not only ladies’ pinot parties loosely organized around 50 Shades of Grey. Conservatives are great readers, which is why the overwhelmingly left-leaning world of New York City publishing constantly is looking forward to the next offering from Mark Levin or Bill O’Reilly, whose works produce literary profit sufficient to subsidize the careers of any number of poets and high-minded novelists. But we are not a nation that reads, or a nation that shares a living tradition of serious contemporary literature, fiction or nonfiction. Indeed, some critics of our Trump symposium sneered that none of the contributors had much in the way of “mass appeal,” as though the fact that our populist friends fail to read John Podhoretz and R. R. Reno were a judgment on those writers rather than on themselves. But serious writers, even those who manage to be both serious and popular at the same time, have rarely enjoyed much influence in the practical matter of winning elections: William F. Buckley could not carry Barry Goldwater very far on his own in an age when serious writing enjoyed much more prestige than it does today.

On Wednesday’s show Rush Limbaugh discussed the Trump phenomenon through the lens of a 20-year-old Sam Francis article:

“Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?” What do you think might happen in the current climate, where the middle class in the country feels totally left out of everything going on?

They feel like they’ve been targeted by every liberal Democrat policy that has not been stopped by the Republican Party. What if you dropped [talking] about the free market,” stop all of that, “and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society … you simply promised to restore the Middle American core,” and everything it stands for?

Rush’s view is that “nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal” – ie, that there are insufficient takers for conservatism. It comes to something when the nation’s Number One conservative talk-show host is putting it that way, but you can see what he’s getting at.

In contrast to the ebb and flow of eternally shifting multiparty systems, America has a rigid, inflexible two-party choice:

One party is supposed to be the party of big government, the other the party of small government. When the Big Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger, and, when the Small Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger.

One party is supposed to be the party of social liberalism, the other the party of social conservatism. When the Socially Liberal Party is in power, the country gets more liberal, and, when the Socially Conservative Party is in power, the country gets more liberal.