James Bowman

To a greater extent than ever, those on both sides of the political fence, and even those sitting on it, are only talking and writing to and for people who already agree with them.

It took Protestant Christianity hundreds of years to create and inculcate in ordinary people the idea of the kind of middle-class respectability and decency that Bertie Wooster was always at odds with.

Scientists turned politicians automatically become politicians first, scientists after.

The media’s unofficial commissars of the Left have to keep the pressure up on behalf of ideological conformity in order to hold the “woke” coalition together—no matter how disconnected from reality they may be.

Democrats and the media continually urge Americans to get ourselves onto “the right side of history” — which, paradoxically, also means leaving history itself behind us in our inevitable progress towards the progressively promised land. The right side of history turns out to be the one that’s turned away from it.

The mess the Boomers made will long be with us.

In a lecture hosted by the Center for Constructive Alternatives at Hillsdale College, EPPC Resident Scholar James Bowman surveys film adaptations of the works of Jane Austen.

The coronavirus, together with the measures chosen to deal with it, has been a disaster for pretty much everybody else, but it has been a godsend to the American media and their long-running anti-Trump “narrative.”

The very existence of polite fictions — such as the fiction that impeachment had arisen out of the disinterested concern of public-spirited Democrats to preserve constitutional norms and not as a squalid partisan affair — comes about because we are aware of the absurdity of regarding them as the firmly established truths they pretend to be.

The extremely low opinion, so the pollsters tell us, which Americans hold of the media could never bode well for an institution founded on the extremely high opinion the media hold of themselves.

This year’s election looks to be a referendum on which of two narratives is believed by “the American people,” to whom both sides appeal: that of the New York Times or that of President Trump.

With the departure of seriousness and responsibility from the political culture, what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” took over, and the rancorousness and hatred which are now the salient features of our political life have been increasing ever since.