Scott McLemee

Recently, Tom Frank—editor of the Baffler, author of One Market Under God, and Hermenaut contributor—and David Brooks—writer for the Weekly Standard and author of Bobos in Paradise—locked horns at Slate's "Breakfast Table." Their wrangle covered bipartisan self-aggrandizement, conservative ascendancy, corporate gentry, and "abstractions on stilts." And it all started with one question about the ideas behind Bobos in Paradise. Confused? Get some background information. What follows is Scott McLemee's take on Brooks's book, in an review originally published in Newsday.

David Brooks, a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, is also an amateur sociologist; which is to say, someone who makes mental footnotes to the New York Times. His field of specialization is the American bourgeoisie. In this much-discussed new book, Brooks demonstrates, to his own satisfaction, that a decisive shift has taken place in the folkways of the ruling class. The old conflict between the stodgy business ethos and the wild-eyes freedom of creative rebels is over; art and commerce have reached a mutually satisfying truce. Yuppie-style consumption is dead. In its place, there now reigns the Starbucks/National Public Radio aesthetic of the "bourgeois bohemians"—or, to use Brooks's coinage, "bobos."

The argument of Bobos in Paradise is simple, and the author restates it every two pages (perhaps as a courtesy to the people he is discussing, who must do their reading between cell phone messages). Half a century ago, ancient issues of the Times reveal, the American ruling class was WASP in its deepest cells. Those whose ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower sedulously mimicked the people who did—conducting their lives with a certain quiet and unpleasant dignity. Meanwhile, downtown, artists and writers and other denizens of bohemia whooped it up, enjoying a liberated existence of self-expression, which often included freedom from hot water or electricity.