Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line lands like a deadpan trap: it pretends to describe a civic norm while exposing it as an absurd demand. “It is like” signals feigned hesitation, the rhetorical equivalent of raising an eyebrow. He’s not merely noting that people trust official narratives; he’s mocking the social pressure to treat government statements as self-validating. The word “obliged” is the tell. Trust isn’t presented as earned or rational, but as a compulsory posture, a kind of polite hostage situation in which skepticism becomes bad manners.

The subtext is darker than generic anti-government cynicism. Bovard is pointing at a structural asymmetry: the state holds the information, the classification stamps, the PR machinery, and often the legal authority to punish leaks, while the public is asked to behave as though transparency is the default. That’s why the sentence repeats “doing” and “says it is doing” like a loop; it mimics the circular logic of official accountability. If the only proof of action is the state’s own description of it, then oversight collapses into etiquette.

Contextually, this is classic Bovard: post-Watergate suspicion hardened into a late-20th-century critique of the national security state, bureaucratic self-protection, and media stenography. The line also anticipates our current era of “trust the process” messaging, where institutions ask for deference while offering curated visibility. Bovard’s punchline is that the most modern form of control isn’t brute force; it’s insisting that disbelief itself is irresponsible.