Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are naked on his Twitter feed, but Bloomberg’s imperial instincts, his indifference to limits on his power, are a conspicuous feature of his career. Trump jokes about running for a third term; Bloomberg actually managed it, bulldozing through the necessary legal changes. Trump tries to bully the F.B.I. and undermine civil liberties; Bloomberg ran New York as a miniature surveillance state. Trump has cowed the Republican Party with celebrity and bombast; Bloomberg has spent his political career buying organizations and politicians that might otherwise impede him. Trump blusters and bullies the press; Bloomberg literally owns a major media organization. Trump has Putin envy; Bloomberg hearts Xi Jinping.
I have worried since the ascendency of Trump that someone smoother and smarter than he was taking notes on the sidelines about what works and what doesn't. That person will inevitably be elected by naive, distracted Americans who will believe his con as they believed Trump's. But then it might be the Liberals who are conned. And they'll elect this new con artist because he says all the right things on the cultural issues--race, gun control, abortion, gay rights, climate change--even though he'll be just as autocratic as Trump longs to be. He'll be an enlightened despot that cosmopolitan types can get behind because in their mind anything is better than the proto-Nazis the benighted yahoos from the Red States so fervently embrace.
I don't know if Bloomberg is that guy--his record isn't particularly woke/enlightened--but if Dems really think he's an answer because he's anti-Trump, then that would prove that Trump supporters are right, that the only thing people on the cultural Right or Left really care about is tribal survival and winning the culture war. Trump supporters, like their ante-bellum soulmate predecessors in the south just realized sooner that we're in a civil war, this time Blues vs. Reds. And if they nominate Bloomberg, the Blues will prove that they are just as easily conned as the Reds they look down their noses at.
UPDATE: To be clear, I don't have a dog in this clash of cultures. I'm for sanity and a Dolly Partonesque tolerance, and I'm against fear-and-resentment-driven stupidity and delusional thinking. And the idea that you can find meaning in some political ideology is about as stupid and delusional as it gets. The political sphere should be as culturally neutral as possible. It should focus on issues that relate to setting rules that keep things fair regarding power and wealth, and it should focus on issues that relate to practical matters regarding the material well being of the commonweal--like climate change, healthcare, energy, transportation and other infrastructure issues.
Sanders seems to get this in a way that most other Democrats don't. He's right that it's all about structural class and wealth distribution issues. Everything else should be secondary in the political sphere. Tribal war in the political sphere is about as stupid and primitive as it gets, and Liberals are just as guilty as Conservatives when they make cultural issues the most important thing on their political agendas. It's not whether cultural issues are important or not; it's just that they can't be resolved in the political sphere except to codify and enforce fairness rules that protect basic human rights. Protecting human rights should be a concern for both the Right and the Left. When politics gets tribal, though, neither tribe sees the other as human.