Bloomberg's hostile takeover of democracy

What happens to civic engagement when political campaigns are corporatized?

Michael Bloomberg.
(Image credit: Illustrated | REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo, -slav-/iStock)

I win no prizes for civic engagement. I vote regularly, serve on juries when asked, and have donated to candidates that I believed in. But I have never engaged in the serious, deep activity that either the ancients or earlier generations of Americans would recognize as civic: serving on a school board, or a town council, or in the militia.

I write about politics, it's true. But when I do, the point is to interpret the world in various way rather than change it. The truth is, I have participated only in the most attenuated way in the great democratic dance of ruling and being ruled in turn.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.