
James Bowman
Resident Scholar
Mr. Bowman is well known for his writing on honor, including his book, Honor: A History and “Whatever Happened to Honor,” originally delivered as one of the prestigious Bradley Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, and republished (under the title “The Lost Sense of Honor”) in The Public Interest.
James Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Mr. Bowman is well known for his writing on honor, including his book, Honor: A History and “Whatever Happened to Honor,” originally delivered as one of the prestigious Bradley Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, and republished (under the title “The Lost Sense of Honor”) in The Public Interest.
Among the other publications to which he has contributed are Harper’s, The Public Interest, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph of London, The Weekly Standard and National Review.
He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002.
Mr. Bowman received B.A. degrees from Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge in England, where he also did graduate study and received an M.A. in 1979.
Experts in Spate
James Bowman

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.”
Articles
The New Criterion - May 2020 issue / June 18, 2020
Polite Fictions
James Bowman

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.
Articles
The New Criterion - March 2020 issue / April 16, 2020
Ripley’s Believe It or Else
James Bowman

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.
Articles
The New Criterion - February 2020 issue / March 17, 2020
Uncivil Service
James Bowman

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.
Articles
The New Criterion - January 2020 issue / February 12, 2020
Just “Politics”
James Bowman

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.
Articles
The New Criterion - December 2019 issue / January 9, 2020
Revolutionism Redux, Part III
James Bowman
If, as now seems possible, the country as a whole learns from the impeachment fiasco to look upon the media-Democrat complex with more skepticism, it may also come to see that the revolutionary whistle-blower is the scandal to democracy to which we should have been paying attention all along.
Articles
The New Criterion - November 2019 issue / December 1, 2019
Revolutionism Redux, Part II
James Bowman

A New York Times town hall meeting reveals that paper’s newsroom as the epicenter of the revolutionary dynamic now manifesting itself among American progressives.
Articles
The New Criterion - October 2019 issue / November 22, 2019
Revolutionism Redux, Part I
James Bowman

If it takes one kind of Holy Madness to drive out another, dissenters from the identity politics of the newly socialist and liberationist left may be driven to join the Trumpites under the banner of nationalism.
Articles
The New Criterion - September 2019 issue / October 30, 2019
Irony of Ironies
James Bowman

That the entire “collusion” narrative was misconceived simply could not be true, in the view of the mainstream media, since their entire political world-view was based upon it.
Articles
The New Criterion - May 2019 issue / May 31, 2019
Avenging Reality
James Bowman

The $1.2 billion, record-breaking opening weekend for Avengers: Endgame last week was cause for much rejoicing in Hollywood. For those whose interest in movies is aesthetic rather than financial, however, there may be less reason to celebrate.
Articles
The Washington Examiner / May 3, 2019
Make-Believe Worlds
James Bowman

In coverage of both the Mueller report and the Jussie Smollett scandal, the mainstream media and its readers inhabit a world which is not only gratifying to their prejudices but one where everybody as far as the eye can see thinks more or less exactly as they do on the important issues of the day.
Articles
The New Criterion - April 2019 issue / May 1, 2019
Geography Lessons
James Bowman

Just as the media denies their own biases, other branches of the elite deny the obvious truths surrounding them. One feels something close to despair that the public’s trust in their rulers, official or unofficial, can ever be restored.
Articles
The New Criterion - February 2019 issue / February 28, 2019