We don't hear about campaign finance these days.  It got drowned in the flood of money loosed by Mike Bloomberg.  With billionaires Trump and Bloomers taking over presidential campaigns, this issue just doesn't matter much anymore.

Rather than putting their money behind someone else, the real rich guys are getting into the batting cage themselves.  While preferable to us not really knowing where a given candidate's money comes from, this does raise the hoary old fear of only the rich being able to run for president.

But it's always been only the rich who could run for president.  While paying your own way is rather in-your-face, it's not very different in principle from having someone else pay your way.  It's the principle of paying for your date or getting your date to foot the bill.  You both get there; it just looks different when somebody else pays for you.  And you're now somewhat in the other's debt.

Mike Bloomberg earned billions in technology, Donald Trump in construction.  The former is tech-oriented, the latter more people-dependent.  We know (because he's told us) that Bloomberg is a manager.  We know (because we've seen it) that Trump is a leader.  Each was very, very good at what he did.  Since both managerial and leadership qualities matter, it comes down to what you think is more needed in the highest political office in the land: a manager or a leader.

We've seen examples of both in recent presidents and presidential races.  Reagan was a leader.  Both Bushes were managers.  Clinton was something of a mix.  Obama was neither manager nor leader, though he flattered himself as a leader.  Ditto Hillary.

Bernie is a rare phenomenon of a confluence of ideas that he did not create yielding an atmosphere in which his strangeness makes him seem like a leader.  In this sense, he may parallel that German guy back in the thirties.  In less unusual times, that dude would never have made it in politics.  Were our times not so unusual, Bernie would never have been considered presidential material.

In any case, if November pits Mike against Donald, it will be a manager going up against a leader.  If it's Bernie versus Donald, it will be a weak leader with no executive experience against a strong leader with a wealth of it.  It's also two guys nobody would have given a chance a decade ago.

The world has been down this path before.  Our polity today has much in common with early 20th-century Germany.  In those days, Germans were looking for a man of action who would stop talking and do something.  Their education system had trained them for a hundred years to think that way, creating an atmosphere where a strange Austrian actually seemed appealing.

Something similar has happened here.  For too long, we let it go as the education system subverted our kids to communism.  We didn't want to confront their unpleasantness; it was just their youth, we thought, and they'd get over it.  But now those kids have created the atmosphere where a creature as odd as Bernie Sanders, neither a manager nor a leader, has to be taken seriously.  Our Left is ready, as Germans were a century ago, to burn down the old order to get the one they want.

James Hodgkinson and Kyle Jurek, Brownshirts in all but name, fly to the Bern like a moth to a flame.

If Trump wins again, we'll have four more good (or at least decent) years.  If either the criminal Left (of the Deep State) or the Idiot Left (of the Bern) gains the presidency, this time or in the foreseeable future, it's all over.  Our lassitude is coming back to haunt us, the bill coming due, the worm turning, the chickens hatching, the swan singing.  It was tragedy when this happened a century ago.  A second time around, it will not be farce, but apocalypse.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.