Le Sequoit

Bobos* Are So Cute, Then They Grow Up

BOBOS* in Paradise, by David Brooks, is my latest read. I’m a little behind the Times, as this was a bestseller published in 2000. Mr. Brooks is a member of a most insidious class. Like William F. Buckley and Ben Stein, David Brooks is a conservative with a sense of humor, and a darned good one. Try watching the Dennis Miller show if you think this is easy to do.

In Brooks’ view the “two cultures” of Gertrude Himmelfarb have merged into a kind of virgin olive oil based oligarchy of counterculture “meism” and bourgeois self control, served from “an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor but is really the stove” in redwood bowls (from a fallen tree) sitting on half a New Hampshire mountain of granite in a 1200 square foot kitchen. This new, more robust elite is a result, he says, of a more productive selection process, one based on merit and ambition rather than social position.

Much of the book is a delicious send up of the Range Rover bunch, so much so that one begins to wonder where the book is heading. There is no attempt to involve the remaining 70% of society in this tale of the transformation of the elite class. Mr. Brooks does not travel in working class circles and, to his credit, doesn’t in this book (or generally) purport to having any extensive overview of the “lower” classes’ travails.

In fact it would seem that this Bobo (bourgeois/bohemian) establishment exists in perfect harmony with its minions, as Brooks takes the time to refute Thomas Frank’s notion that the business elite are using the old radicalism to de-radicalize the working classes:

In fact, it’s not so sinister or so one-sided. These renegade executives are both corporate and genuinely countercultural. The two cultural rivals have embraced and co-opted each other.

The cuteness continues to nearly the end of the book, and then the real Mr. Brooks stands up. Apparently the rampant “pluralism” of today’s elite has led to a big hole where absolute values used to live. In a matter of a few pages the Bobos transmogrify into potential neocon reactionaries, as Mark Knofler sings it, “Boom! Like that.”

At the time of publication in 2000 Brooks and his Weekly Standard buddies had a honey do list ready to go for this lot:

That suggests a course of action that is reform at home and activism abroad. Reform of these institutions and practices that no longer make us proud: the campaign finance system, which has become complex and alienating, the welfare state, which needs to be debureaucratized. And at the same time on an international sphere, it means picking up the obligations that fall to the world’s lead nation: promoting democracy and human rights everywhere and exercising American might in a way that reflects American ideals.

Odd that the leader of this “meritocracy” was not accepted at Yale on his own merit.

posted by sequoit @ 1:43 AM