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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what we are seeing lately is the media’s attempt to use their own #MeToo narrative to correct the Bill’n’Monica narrative so as to avoid any blame to themselves or the responsibility that any truly “evenhanded” treatment would see as falling on them for the scandal-culture that has taken over our political life.

The alternative to a world of nations is not the benign “globalisation” that was a by-product of the end of the Cold War and now looks, in retrospect, like a Golden Age. It is a reversion to the more feral and primitive version of honor which preceded the emergence of the modern nation-state.

If the midterm election were a referendum on President Trump, it is far from easy to tell what its verdict was.