Politics

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What would a Michael Bloomberg foreign policy look like? A total smoking ban across the Middle East seems imminent, even if it does risk spawning a new generation of pro-hookah jihadists. Fresh sanctions would likely be imposed on enemies of the West, including Iran and salt. Air superiority would be prioritized, especially as it pertains to illegally landing one’s personal helicopter in midtown Manhattan. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. Bloomberg has spent most of his career codifying class snobbery through petty regulations, and, while that’s a potent recipe for being annoying at home, it doesn’t really lend itself to a coherent agenda abroad.

It’s after 2 a.m. in Club 38, a nightspot in an old railway shed in Beirut. The DJ is in the cab of a rusty train. Lights sweep across a dense crowd below. My host is Andy Khawaja, a Lebanese-American businessman. We’re sitting at the club’s VIP table and he’s scrolling through photographs on his phone. Here he is with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser. Here, he’s shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office. The men he’s with in the club have shaved heads, bushy beards, tattoos. I wonder if they’re mafia, militia, or mukhabarat (secret police). When I get up and walk to the restroom, a burly minder with a Glock in his waistband follows a step behind. He turns on the tap and hands me a towel.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas. Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money. In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior.

The Bern is getting scorching. Bernie Sanders didn’t just defeat his opponents in Nevada — he crushed them. The bedwetters in the Democratic party are becoming ever more incontinent as Sanders notches victory after victory. But what if primary voters have it right? What if Bernie is the only one among the bunch who has the cojones to take on Trump? Trump’s whole re-election bid rests upon his skills as a branding master. The establishment Democrats would try to defeat him on policy grounds. But Hillary Clinton already tried that. What’s needed is someone who will get in Trump’s grill, day after day, week after week.

‘If we put our trust in Him, if we place this miracle of democracy from sea to shining sea. then He will bless America beyond all that we could ask or imagine.’ That’s how Vice President Mike Pence ended his remarks as he introduced President Trump in Colorado Springs. Pence was of course referring to the Almighty, but you wouldn’t know it. In the small maxed-out arena, the large crowd was there to listen to Trump’s sermon. Colorado Springs is known as one of the most religious cities in America. NPR dubbed the city a ‘Mecca for Evangelical Christians’, while the Guardian labeled it ‘a playground for pro-life, pro-gun evangelical Christians’. There were gloves in back pockets and more work-boots than Birkenstocks present.

Roger Stone was well-turned out for his sentencing in a Washington courthouse, sporting a blue overcoat with a dark velvet collar and a black Homburg that was first popularized by the British prime minister Anthony Eden. Two rows of supporters showed up in the courtroom to cheer him on. My guess is that he was delighted by the 40-month sentence and $20,000 fine handed down by Judge Amy Berman Jackson. Now Stone gets to emulate his heroes in the Nixon administration such as G. Gordon Liddy, who served time in the hoosegow and were able to demonstrate their loyalty to the boss. Going to jail would be one of the best things ever to happen to Stone. It would be the capstone to his self-mythologization as an adversary of the liberal elite.

Unlike the previous snoozers where all the candidates pretended to like each other, the debate in Nevada ahead of their caucuses, was exciting. It’s what happens when six politicians, picked to be on a stage together, stop being polite and start being real. But it’s unlikely to make a blip of difference. For one thing, most of the candidates didn’t do what was in their self-interest. Joe Biden had one real job — take the nomination away from runaway train Bernie Sanders. Instead, he let the Mike Bloomberg media campaign get into his head. Bloomberg isn’t on the ballot in Nevada and he isn’t on the ballot in the next contest in South Carolina either.

You wait decades for a Jewish candidate for the White House, and then two come along at once — like buses, except these two are running in different directions. With Biden having no idea where he’s heading, and Warren and Buttigieg going nowhere with swathes of the primary voters, the nomination race may, like a round of golf in Boca Raton, turn into a struggle to the death between two elderly Jewish men from the Northeast. It’ll also be a public airing of the American Jewish split over Israel. What happens in Vegas on Wednesday night won’t stay there.Sanders and Bloomberg have nothing in common ideologically. Both of them, however, have had as little to do with the Democratic party as possible.

While a successful politician in many ways, Joe Biden’s attempts to become president are marked by quite a severe flaw — he cannot enter a town hall without saying something stupid. What would American democracy be without Joe Biden garlanding astonished voters with insults and imprecations of every kind? God bless that man. Biden has been making a fool of himself at these events for so long now that I’m fairly sure Alexis de Tocqueville observed this phenomenon in a celebrated passage from his Democracy in America (1835):'I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers — and it was not there...in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there...

It might be a stretch to compare the ugly-but-not-violent warfare of American politics in 2020 with the explosive politics of the 1960s. But history does repeat itself, as the hackneyed old phrase says: first as tragedy then as farce. Consider the common thread linking these two political epochs: the rise of a messianic left that sabotaged two attempts by the Democrats to take over the White House, which eventually forced the party to change direction and move to the center. In 1968, the Democratic leadership wanted to campaign on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s historic civil-rights legislation and his efforts to reinforce the foundations of the welfare state with the Great Society programs, steps that enjoyed wide national support.

Joe Biden has blown it. His era is over. The obsequies for his campaign are pouring in. Michael Hirsh in Foreign Policy thus announced today that Biden’s vaunted experience on the foreign stage has turned out be a lead balloon: 'It appears many voters across the spectrum don’t want a restoration of anything—including, apparently, US global leadership and the decades-old status quo that Biden is identified with.'Maybe so. But to conclude that Biden’s campaign is finished may be wholly premature. For a start, Biden is in a place where voters may start to admire his gumption and grit at continuing a campaign that looks to be on life support. A comeback story, like the one Amy Klobuchar is currently enjoying, happens to be something that the media feasts upon.