Why Silicon Valley Is so Bad at Politics

Two years ago, Mark Pincus, the billionaire who is responsible for Farmville, the 21st century's answer to the Dutch Tulip Craze, had a big idea. “In this election, we'd want a million people to raise one billion dollars to run Mike Bloomberg for president,” he told The New Yorker. “Through Kickstarter.” He added, “I believe there's a million people who'd like to give a ‘fuck you' to both political parties.”

Pincus's analysis was half-right. Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the Republican Party and Bernie Sanders's strong showing in the Democratic primary proved that there are well more than a million people ready to throw both middle fingers in the air at the political establishment. But the devil is in the details, and in this case the devil is Michael Bloomberg, a centrist plutocrat who, despite being one of America's most famous “independent” politicians, represents a stratospheric elite that straddles both parties and is the source of so much popular discontent on both the left and the right. If nothing else, the 2016 election was a massive rebuttal of the idea that what Americans really want is President Michael Bloomberg.