How a terrifying hat explains Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign

Michael Bloomberg won the Democratic primary.

Yes, I get it: in some crudely literal sense the 78-year-old candidate (not to be confused with the other 78-year-old or the comparatively sprightly 77-year-old) withdrew from the race on Wednesday morning after a disappointing showing in 14 states — and a solid one in the territory of American Samoa. All told, the billionaire former mayor spent slightly more than $10 million per pledged delegate.

But that doesn't mean Bloomberg lost. He won in decisive, indeed cosmic fashion. And it was because of a hat.

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You might have seen the object to which I refer in the brief window between its much-criticized announcement and its disappearance from his online store: a black baseball cap emblazoned with the slogans "NOT A SOCIALIST" and, in much smaller letters on the afterpiece, "BRING IN THE BOSS."

Normally I would be tempted to purchase something like this as a novelty item, something that friends will get a kick out of in a few years, like the "Hipper With Tipper" sweatshirt I had the misfortune of losing in college. Not this time. Like many other observers I regarded the hat with a distinct sense of horror. I don't want it in my house.

I'm not actually sure it matters here what I want, though. The hat was not just another indifferently produced piece of campaign merchandise, like Jeb Bush's guacamole bowl of blessed memory. It was a metaphysical event, a chthonic irruption. Something unholy has been made incarnate.

It is worth thinking here about the word "boss." The noun comes to us from the Dutch baas which was originally a polite and even affectionate way of addressing an older male relation — an uncle, say, or a grandfather. It began to appear in something like its current sense in (where else?) Manhattan in the 17th century, where it became a euphemism for "master." It meant, among other things, someone whose authority, while more or less absolute, was not derived from the state and the king or the pope or the other ancient institutions that had bonded men together but from capital. Its use was, like so many other euphemisms, ultimately an act of obeisance, a painfully servile gesture whose significance arose from the fact that both parties understood precisely what was being elided. It was something entirely new in the history of human social and political relations.

This is in keeping with what "boss" has connoted ever since: terror born not of atavistic dread but of the apprehension of present futility. Bruce Springsteen is "The Boss." What he and his aging boomer fans are telling you when they remind you of this nickname is that you have no choice but to enjoy gated reverb and tuneless baritone growling and lyrics full of painfully dorky '60s hot rod clichés and creepy lust sublimated as transcendence — he is the Boss, and you'd better get over whatever lame slacker Guided By Voices hang-ups you think you have and get with the program. In video games, the most powerful enemies are not called "minions" or "henchmen" but "bosses." At the end of the game you face the "final boss." In old Nintendo titles this would often take place against the backdrop of a landscape that had itself assumed the physical qualities of the boss: boss-shaped hills rising above dreadful boss valleys through which run Lethean boss streams teeming over with boss water.

Which brings us back to the hat. What its sudden appearance signaled is that we're in Boss World now. It's not that Bloomberg himself is the boss. The boss's actual identity is irrelevant and could and indeed probably will change at any time. The boss could be Joe Biden or Jeff Bezos; it could be the CEO of a company you have never heard of that is a few years away from inventing an app that allows you to buy and sell internal organs from your phone. The hat is the quiet but unmistakable (and perhaps even accidental) announcement of a transformation of the world that began long ago. In Boss World, the boss is not simply the final arbiter of authority — which has nothing to do with nations or even empires but with the borderless power of globalized capital — but the ground of being itself. Events like "winning the Colorado primary" are epiphenomenal in Boss World, meaningless polite fictions that do not change the underlying reality. You think you're a socialist, bub? Read what it says on the hat's archived product page: "One size fits all of us." The hat fits you because your head is the boss's head, and the mountains and the trees and the canyons and the buildings are all shaped like it. The air is boss air. Your body, a specimen of boss biology, is maintaining homeostasis; the molecules that comprise it are compounded according to the discoverable principles of boss chemistry, in keeping with the widely observed constants of boss physics.

This is why my heart goes out to supporters of Bernie Sanders checking the latest odds to see what his ostensible chances are against Biden in the coming weeks and months. Maybe they didn't see the hat. They might have been too busy knocking on doors or tweeting or whatever, but they should have known better anyway. Bloomberg was always going to "win" the nomination regardless of who got the most delegates because his campaign was a cipher for something that long ago became something more than the dominant mode of economic production and consumption. Boss World is not a theory or a Milton Friedman paperback or even some spreadsheet full of GDP statistics.

That was the hat's sinister little joke. No one needs to "BRING IN THE BOSS." The boss was already here. You were always wearing the hat.

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