Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There Paperback – March 6, 2001

A fun and generally well-written book that has updated the "Yuppie" generation a major step. Today's real successes, opines journalist David Brooks, are the "bourgeois-bohemians" (or BoBo's) who make long green updating granola values. A BoBo might be an investment counselor to the self-employed successes who work in "latte towns" (think: rich college towns like Northampton, MA) with their German pedestrian malls, Scandinavian government, Native American crafts, and Berkeley-style human rights groups. Or s/he might be a rich business start-up who made a killing selling ten-speeds, hoagies, or yoga clothing in such venues. Although this book is eighteen years old, it's well worth a read.

An insightful work of social chronicling, written by an astute, clever, and keen cultural historian. Brooks’ trenchant observations on American culture, particularly from 1980 to 2000, are quite entertaining. Reading this book, I can’t help but think that the author wanted to be a novelist, as his prose is novelistic and at times, downright funny when analyzing the absurdities of social behavior in the United States:

“Universities tolerate tattoos and piercing that would have seemed outrageous in the early 1950s, but they crack down on fraternity drinking rituals that would have seemed unexceptional. We feel less strict with our children, but in fact we intervene in their lives far more than parents did in the 1950s.”

I mean, I work in academia and don’t get it. A guy who wears a tie, smokes a cigarette, and likes to drink at the college pub is more of a threat than someone who looks like he just left a Slipknot concert. And yes, he’s the guy sitting next to your daughter in her “History of Sexuality” class at her private college. So this book resonates with me.

Also, Brooks’ insight on scantily clad women everywhere one looks is hilarious:

“To get a firsthand glimpse of these new codes, go down to your local park in the summertime. You’ll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin-tight spandex pants. […] Women running around in their underwear in public. They’re not exposing themselves for the sake of exhibitionism. Any erotic effect of their near nudity is counteracted by their expressions of grim determination. They are working out.”

The preceding quote is amusingly accurate. It’s like I am reading a Tom Wolfe novel!

He makes several other good points: Americans no longer worship God, really, they worship health and their bodies. (I suppose it is truly a temple, as our Sunday School teachers taught us—before the Protestant decline in the U.S., which Brooks ably covers!) Also, the “intellectuals” today are bit soft—they go to bed early and are more concerned with getting their kids to school and making sure the “I Support NPR” bumper sticker is clean on the Prius—rather than discussing hermeneutics or Jorge Luis Borges, for example, over some whiskey and beer. I mean, it seems the Christopher Hitchens days of drinking and talking all night might be gone.

The text runs a bit long—he could have cut it down by 50 pages or so—and at times his commentary is too exaggerated, but overall this is a book that historians will read 20, 30 years from now in order to understand the pre-9/11 gilded age of the 1980s and 1990s. And yes, I hate to say it, but it is refreshing that Brooks is a moderate, and not completely consumed by political ideology.

Good read.

David Brooks is almost a self-caricature of the public intellectual, and he seems to oscillate between an ironic self-
awareness of this and the lack thereof. This was epitomized in the sandwich controversy last year, which briefly
interrupted everybody's arguing about Trump and allowed all sides to dump on Brooks. He brought a young
lady friend to an Italian sandwich deli and realized that she wasn't familiar with some of the names and might
be self-conscious about it and uncomfortable, so he wrote a column and told the whole world in the New York
Times. The internet went nuts! The left couldn't stand him because he's a conservative elitist, and many on the
right these days can't stand him because he's a conservative elitist. This episode shows how the book, written
at the turn of the millenium, has become outdated.

Brooks was allied with Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz, but he's actually more like their fathers and mothers,
the original neocons, with not just foreign policy but a heavy emphasis on culture, and he does discuss the
previous generation in this book. Brooks is liberal on gay marriage and similar issues, but also has a desire
for community similar to his fellow Times columnist Ross Douthat, as outlined in the chapter on religion
and community and his recent book on character. Bobos in Paradise is a work of informal sociology that
goes with the insights of Charles Murray, whose Bell Curve is mentioned but whose more important work
may be the later Coming Apart, as well as liberal communitarians like Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.

Brooks works in a heck of a lot of his fellow public intellectuals. There's a joke about Francis Fukuyama's
End of History being "wrong" because history didn't end. But in fact Fukuyama's book really is widely
seen to have been wrong, because liberal democracy has not triumphed the way that he observed. Russia,
China, the US and various parts of Europe are going for nationalism and populism. Fukuyama is now writing
on identity politics, which is a function of the crackup of his post Cold War order. Bobos in Paradise also
has turned out to be outdated. Bill Clinton's centrism on the budget and welfare reform, crime, school
uniforms and v chips, and George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism as more than just getting government
off our backs, are signs of the Bobo consensus, combining 60s bohemianism with the 80s bourgeois values.

But it hasn't turned out that way. Obama's liberalism undid Clinton's centrism as the focus of the Democratic
Party, and even before that there was 2004 with Dean, Kucinich and Sharpton, as the Dems went nuts after
Iraq. I was reading this book the day of John McCain's funeral, and both Democratic candidates, Al Gore and
Bill Bradley, and the top two Republicans, George W. Bush and McCain, were identified by Brooks as Bobos.
Who's not accepted by Bobos as their representative? The first name was Donald Trump, and then for different
reasons Pat Robertson. Bobos can spend money, but it has to be for a serious and useful purpose, and Trump was
lavish for exactly the opposite reasons.

Being from Plattsburgh area, I found the description of Burlington as the new Berkeley to be absolutely hilarious,
with all the freaks on the Church Street marketplace and the serious Bobos eating it up. But the most important
epitome of the Burlington mentality is Bernie Sanders, who in important ways has gone nationwide and just like
Trump, reflects the breakup of the Bobo consensus.

I would actually give this one 3.5 stars. It's a bit dated at this point, having come out in 2000, but it is a classic David Brooks work, and his skills of cultural/historical observation (especially modern and postmodern eras) were in full swing. The chapter on Bourgeois-Bohemian politics was a bit short, and some of his conclusions there were a bit too simplified.

His sections on the issues of profligate spending and materialism and the excuses the bobos make for some of them while condemning others were also too short. Loved his detailed level descriptions of subcultures, mostly socioeconomic, but some were based on ethnicity. He was careful not to be offensive in either direction.

I do recommend this book to those who are David Brooks fans, and as an introduction to the whole concept of trying to decipher what motivates the "New Upper Class" but don't stop here if you do start with this title. I am in the process of looking at other works in this area and will review them as I get through them.