The Bloomberg way

For Americans who value government that's both effective and democratic, Michael R. Bloomberg presents a dilemma. In a country enduring a polarised and apparently paralysed political system, what Atlantic Magazine obligingly called “The Bloomberg Way” appears to be an attractive model for government. The outgoing Mayor of New York is a registered Independent. He is committed to using government to address local challenges (recycling, green transport), as well as national ones (obesity, climate change). He's been willing to buck public opinion—most notably, in 2009, he affirmed a group's constitutional right to build a Muslim community centre near the site of the 9/11 attacks—yet he remains broadly popular with New Yorkers. He recently invested a portion of his wealth in the stalled campaign for gun control, prompting the New Republic to run an excitable cover story titled “This is How the NRA Ends.” Nonetheless, “The Bloomberg Way” brings with it a disconcerting trade-off: effective government comes at the expense of democratic government.

“People aren’t good at describing what is in their own interest,” explained Bloomberg in the Atlantic. “What leaders should do is make decisions as to what they think is in the public interest based on the best advice that they can get, and then try and build a constituency and bring it along.” He has done this repeatedly, and increasingly aggressively, in recent years. In 2009 he persuaded the New York City council to overturn mayoral term limits to allow him to run for a third time, despite widespread criticism. In 2012 he imposed restrictions on the size of fizzy drinks that restaurants could sell. The same year, he instituted an initiative, disturbingly called “Latch On NYC,” which restricted the use of formula milk in hospitals in order to promote breastfeeding. Throughout his tenure, he has supported the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk program, which appears to have pushed crime rates down at the expense of alienating minority communities. (It may also be unconstitutional.)

Bloomberg's reforming impulse stops short of imposing checks on America's most economically productive sectors—the ones which, not coincidentally, tend to produce its governing class. He opposes comprehensive financial reform, noting during the 2010 senate debate over bank regulation that “the bashing of Wall Street is something that should worry everybody.” He has not been friendly to unions, who are reportedly delighted that he will be stepping down in January, according to a recent New York Times article. “Politics in the city are shifting. It's not a pipe dream. We're going to be a force,” insisted one of the union leaders, in the tremulously defiant terms of the long-suppressed.

Bloomberg's justifications for these positions take the form of “ends-not-means” arguments. A third term for mayor was necessary because, in the wake of the recession, New York “may well be on the verge of a meltdown.” Soda restrictions were required because “the correlation between the rise in obesity and the consumption of sugar is just up 100 per cent.” Regulating banks is unwise because it might drive some of them overseas. And so on. Supporters of the mayor's tend, correspondingly, to describe him as a pragmatic administrator who gets results. Opponents accuse Bloomberg, variously, of imposing a “nanny-state,” ignoring civil liberties, and forgoing representative government. One side traffics in adjectives like “effective” and “businesslike”; the other, “technocratic” and “elitist.” So a realist-idealist divide has emerged, with the managers on one side and the democrats on the other.

The reality is less dichotomised. It is perfectly possible to endorse some of the Mayor's accomplishments while acknowledging, on pragmatic rather than solely moral grounds, the limitations of his approach.

Bloomberg's model effectively ignores the immediate concerns of the already marginalised (see stop-and-frisk) while limiting the influence of those institutions which, however imperfectly, represent them (see labour unions). He emphasises the experience and judgment of the governing class over what the people they represent may or may not believe. Not unrelatedly, he has failed to address some of the most serious long-term challenges facing democratic capitalist societies—say, the need to restrain an unstable financial system, or to mend rising social fragmentation by reducing income inequality.

What's more, this is a leadership model that, for all of its lip service to realism, overlooks its basic weakness: what happens if the competent leader is not quite so competent, or gets taken in by a bad idea, or is blinded by particular loyalties to certain sectors of society? Though democracy occasionally hampers effective administration, one of its cardinal virtues is its capacity to restrain leaders who stray too far from the reality of their constituents' concerns. And it does not take much historical memory to recall that experienced, well-connected, apparently knowledgable people are capable of straying. Just over a decade ago, in late 2000, the press was busy reporting on two of President-elect Bush's appointments, describing them in terms similar to Bloomberg: they had long careers in government and business, were by all accounts non-ideological, and would presumably use their authority to effectively manage various crises. The appointees were of course Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. We all saw how that story ended.