fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Romney, Bloomberg, and Political Cynicism

Noah Millman makes a good observation, but he seems to be missing Scott Galupo’s objection to Romney: So expelling Mitt Romney will do nothing to change the fact that a critique of the financialization of American capitalism has barely begun anywhere in American politics. That’s correct, but what I believe Scott was saying was that […]

Noah Millman makes a good observation, but he seems to be missing Scott Galupo’s objection to Romney:

So expelling Mitt Romney will do nothing to change the fact that a critique of the financialization of American capitalism has barely begun anywhere in American politics.

That’s correct, but what I believe Scott was saying was that he wants Romney to lose so that we will be rid of Mitt Romney as a political figure. Put another way, a political system that rewards someone like Romney with the Presidency is in extremely poor health, and Scott doesn’t want our system to be as far gone as a Romney victory would prove it to be. I don’t like Bloomberg’s politics any more than I like Romney’s, but his views have had a certain horrible consistency to them for a long time. He is paternalistic and corporatist (and in that way not so different from Romney), but he hasn’t been pretending to be anything else. They’re both opportunists after a fashion, but Romney is a much more aggressive, unscrupulous opportunist. That’s arguably the reason why he is a major party presidential nominee and Bloomberg remains the fantasy candidate of a handful of pundits. Regardless, the point is that Scott is mostly objecting to what he calls Romney’s “breathtakingly cynical, borderline nihilistic pursuit of power.” It’s the sheer cynicism involved that offends even more than the interests served by that cynicism.

Update: Scott confirms in his new post that it is the cynicism that he finds most galling:

Put simply, I don’t think you should be able get away with the kind of ideological rebranding that Romney is attempting to get away with. I believe it would lower an already low bar for intellectual integrity in American politics. The sheer cynicism of it makes a festering problem — lack of trust in institutions — that much more acute.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here