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If Books Could Kill

The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds

If Books Could Kill

David Brooks's "Bobos in Paradise"

November 17, 2022

0:00 | 59:44

David Brooks became liberals' famous conservative by telling them what they wanted to hear. But ... why did they want to hear something that was lazy and wrong?

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Michael: Peter?

Peter: Michael.

Michael: What do you know about a book called Bobos in Paradise?

Peter: I know that this is the book that made David Brooks famous-

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: -or whatever he is.

[If Books Could Kill podcast theme]

Michael: Should we start out by talking about the phenomenon of David Brooks.

Peter: I think you have to.

Michael: As soon as his name comes up, it's like, "Okay, who's going to mention this first?" We have to get some stuff out of the way.

Peter: [laughs] Yeah, David Brooks is a Times columnist, their house conservative. I mentally and emotionally prepared for this episode by reading a couple of his columns randomly selected and then I drilled an imperceptible hole in my skull and poured lukewarm water all over my brain.

Michael: [laughs] Thinking about him as I have last month, unfortunately, if you were putting together a list of the most influential thinkers and writers of the 2000s, I think he would be probably in the top five. He apparently had phone calls with Rahm Emanuel, who was at the time that Chief of Staff of Obama's White House once or twice a week, like a huge swath of the American establishment, like looked to him for guidance of what they should be saying and doing.

Peter: Right. I always wonder whether that is influence or whether he's just being used as a barometer, right?

Michael: Right.

Peter: He's just there and people are checking in on him, because he symbolizes something.

Michael: Well, my hold David Brooks thing clicked into place when I was reading his bio, he's one of these boomers who brags about getting bad grades in high school. He's like, "Oh, at school, it wasn't for me, but then I attended the University of Chicago immediately upon graduation."

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: He graduates in 1983, and then this is the thing that made everything clicked for me. He, for the next year, is a police reporter in Chicago. This is the only feet on the ground journalism that he does.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Everything after this is just punditry. He's like a political opinion haver. He just flits from thing to thing without any real object permanence and without really gathering any deep expertise on anything.

Peter: Yeah, and you really get the sense when you're reading his columns that that's exactly what's happening.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: He will sometimes cite a single source almost never to.

Michael: It's incredible.

Peter: He's creating the illusion of authority, right?

Michael: Right.

Peter: He's like, "FYI, in case you didn't trust me, I do read a book now and then."

Michael: [laughs] I keep thinking of like, you know those CBS shows, where someone is like, "I saw on NCIS the other day," and you're like, "That's still on?"

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: Every time I see David Brooks, I'm like, "Oh, really this fucking guy?" Because he really only gets talked about when he's being made fun of on Twitter. Three or four times a year, he'll overstepped the mark and he'll write something egregious and he'll get made fun of. But it's very rare to see an article or to see anybody say like, "Oh, David Brooks had an interesting column the other day." [Peter laughs] He doesn't really have the positive influence. Every once a while, he's just like the grandpa that gets hit with sticks.

Peter: Although, similar to NCIS, I feel it's one of those things where you find out not only is it still on the air, but it's one of the top shows on television.

Michael: Well, that's the thing. I think a lot of those people that used to read him in the early 2000s are still reading him. I think he's probably fairly influential on that group. One of my parents church friends the other day was I mentioned I had lived in Denmark, and I made some joke about socialism, and they're like, "Oh, did you know Denmark isn't actually socialist? I read in a David Brooks column the other day."

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: First of all, that's just a nightmare-- [crosstalk] Secondly, this is like a three-hour long conversation that I'm not willing to have with you. I was like, "Oh, fun fact."

Peter: [laughs] Yeah.

Michael: Interesting. So, the title of the book is Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: As opposed to other books that we've done on the show, I'm not going to talk about this book thematically. I'm not going to break it apart and put it back together. Mostly because the overwhelming experience of reading this book is not the ideology. It's the thudding shallowness. [Peter laughs] So, do you know anything about this book?

Peter: Yeah, I think I know what Bobo stands for. It's a combination of bohemian and bourgeoisie. Is that right?

Michael: Yes.

Peter: I don't really know much more about that. I think he was just writing about that generation. But I don't know much beyond that.

Michael: So, the book comes from his observation. He was posted in Brussels for four years in the early 1990s for The Wall Street Journal covering Europe. When he returned to America, he noticed a bunch of differences in the kinds of lifestyles, the kinds of brands that people buy, and just the culture around him. So, I'm going to send you an excerpt where he basically lays out the thesis of the book.

Peter: Oh, my God.

Michael: I know it's a big brick. This episode's going to have a lot of quotes, because some of the stuff that he says in the book, you really have to read it to believe it.

Peter: All right. "The thing that struck me as oddest was the way the old categories no longer made sense. Throughout the twentieth century it's been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits. They were the artists and the intellectuals, the hippies and the beats. But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn't just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people's attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man." By the way, nothing I would like less than for David Brooks to investigate my attitude towards sex.

Michael: [laughs] We have a really long excerpt about that later. It's really dark.

Peter: I feel this is combining two of the most hackish think pieces. The first is where you define an entire generation of people based on like a couple of mostly aesthetic shared features. The modern version of this is you just find out what app is popular with 15-year-olds and then you pitch to your editor, a piece called like the Snapchat generation.

Michael: Yeah. [laughs]

Peter: And then the other archetype is, when you make the observation that a generation of people that used to be more carefree and antiestablishment in their youth are now more bland and conservative, because they're like 45. It's like, "Well, this guy used to listen to Nirvana. But now, he has a job selling insurance."

Michael: Right. [laughs] But then I also think that in a way that is not a given for the books that we talk about on this show, I think the central premise of this book is true. The first chapter is where he lays out the core argument. And the core argument is essentially, there used to be a much more entrenched hereditary elite in the United States. Like the old money Carnegie's East Coast elites. Really, since the 1960s, there has been the creation of a knowledge class. It's a bunch of people who have these kinds of professional jobs and who do have this ethos that comes from the post hereditary aristocracy world.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: I think that is true.

Peter: Yeah. I feel smarter people have written about it-

Michael: Yeah. [laughs]

Peter: -about this post New Deal realignment, where you had this generation of more educated upper middle-class types. Not really part of the elite, but sharing some common features, and in fact, perhaps, associating themselves with the elite more than the traditional middle class.

Michael: I think when this giant class of just below upper-class people was created, those people brought their counterculture attitudes and also their counterculture aesthetics into that class. It's really just the transition of the United States, and frankly, every other developed country from a manufacturing society to a knowledge society.

Peter: Right. I feel we're dancing around what the term that the more diseased online folks use, which is the professional-managerial class, the PMNC.

Michael: Yes, I have a whole section on this.

Peter: Okay. [laughs]

Michael: The reason why I think that David Brooks's book is correct is that this is the 48th book to chronicle this. [Pater laughs] This is a really obvious trend [unintelligible [00:08:51] board you talked about, I think it was the new petty bourgeoisie. Daniel Bell wrote a book called The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society, which also explored this in 1973. I read a bunch of articles about yuppies from the 1980s and 1990s in these panicked Newsweek articles. They basically said the same thing. They're like, "They're railing against selling out as they eat $8 sushi."

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: I found an academic article that talked about Slumpys socially liberal, urban minded professionals.

Peter: Ah, thank God, that didn't catch on.

Michael: Oh, Jesus Christ.

Peter: Slumpys.

Michael: All right, that's a little bit try hard. But also, this is a true thing that happened.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: In the world, there is now the creation of a knowledge class. And, yes, the famous and I think most accurate description of this is Barbara and John Ehrenreich's terminology of the professional-managerial class. They were coming at this from a socialist labor organizing perspective. And their original paper from, I believe it was 1978, essentially said that, "Marx predicted that the world was going to be divided between capital and labor." This was going to define the political struggle of the next hundred years. What he didn't predict was that overtime, you have the creation of a class that is in between. In some ways, they are tied to capital and they want to protect capitals interests, because many of them are wealthy. But they're also, a lot of middle managers are workers and they have bosses. And so, in a lot of ways, they're also similar to labor.

In their original piece, they said school teachers, civil servants, professors, journalists, entertainers, social workers, doctors, lawyers, admin.

Peter: Podcasters.

Michael: TikTok dancers, yes.

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: So, Barbara and John Ehrenreich came up with this term, not necessarily to say anything bad about it, but just to note that it existed, and also to talk about how this was to them anyway at the time was the fundamental split in the left. So, they said that they would have these organizing meetings at their house where it would be like a truck driver, and like a university professor. The truck driver's like, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here with this guy." [Peter laughs] And then the professor is like, "I don't know why we're talking about working hours, minimum wages, and stuff." He just wouldn't be interested in that. They estimated in the 1970s that it was at that time around 25% of the workforce, people now say, it's roughly 35% to 40%. This is now one of the defining features of our politics, our economy, our society. It's changed things in so many different ways. And David Brooks is interested in none of these ways.

Peter: David Brooks is like, "You ever noticed that people are drinking a lot of cappuccinos these days?"

Michael: Exactly. This is what he's interested in is basically he's just driving around strip malls and taking notes on stuff that he sees. But he's not doing any of the actual analysis or even meeting these people. This is a book about Bobos, about a social class that comprises somewhere 50, 80 million people. This book does not have one interview. So, you don't get any specificity in the book, but you do get a lot of-- what we saw in the earlier description was like cappuccino gulping bankers.

Peter: It feels like what he really wants to say is like, "Doesn't this stuff seem a little bit gay?" But he can't say that.

Michael: [laughs] It is, he tries to mask it, because he says like, "I'm a Bobo myself" in the introduction, but he fucking hates these people. [Peter laughs] It's really obvious that he fucking hates these people. Okay, so basically, his entire argument, which again could have been like a magazine article would have been fine is that it's essentially education that has caused all this. The mass availability of education starting in the 1960s, the expansion of higher education created all these educated people and then all these millions of educated people, essentially flooded into the workforce, and then started replicating American culture along the lines of their own tastes.

The first chapter of the book is called The Rise of the Educated Class. To illustrate the difference between America's previous ruling class and its current ruling class, he contrasts-- You're familiar with the New York Times wedding page, right?

Peter: Yeah, the New York Times wedding page is a list of weddings [laughs] except that it is this prized status symbol. If you are a couple of successful people, you might get a wedding write up. If one of you is the child of someone famous, you will certainly get a wedding write up. So, yeah, this is something that you throw in the face of the housewife you hate the most at your little dinner parties or whatever, if you're a New York City asshole.

Michael: As a New York City asshole, are you going to try to get one?

Peter: To be honest, I didn't know that you try.

[laughter]

Michael: I don't know how the process works. Do you apply?

Peter: Someone has to mention it to someone at the times like, "Hey, one of the top 20 legal podcasters in the country is getting married. Let's not drop the ball here."

Michael: What he's basically trying to do with this chapter is he wants to contrast the previous ruling class with today's ruling class. The way that he does this is by talking about the New York Times wedding pages, which I think is a smart, pop journalistic way to do this. Just like to draw the contrast. So, he talks about the page from 1950. Of course, it was all pedigreed people, and I guess it would mention when your ancestors arrived in America.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: Apparently, the women's jobs were never mentioned or they didn't have jobs.

Peter: Yeah, that was disqualifying, if the woman had a job.

Michael: It's just like a snapshot of where the ruling class was in 1950. Then he contrasts this with a bunch of wedding announcements from 1998. So, I'm going to send you another abysmally long excerpt from this.

Peter: All right. "The couples tell a little of their own story in these articles. An amazing number of them seem to have first met while recovering from marathons or searching for the remnants of Pleistocene man while on archaeological digs in Eritrea. They usually enjoyed a long and careful romance, including joint vacations in obscure but educational places like Myanmar and Minsk. Many of the couples broke up for a time. Then there was a lonely period apart while one member say, arrange the largest merger in Wall Street history, while the others settled for neurosurgery after dropping out of sommelier school." [laughs]

Michael: See, he's good at what he does, man.

Peter: "Sometimes we get to read about modern couples who proposed to each other simultaneously. But most of the time, the groom does it the old-fashioned way. Often, it seems, while hot air ballooning above the Napa Valley or by letting the woman find a diamond engagement ring in her scuba mask while they're exploring endangered coral reefs near the Seychelles." Okay, it's quite a portrait.

Michael: It's quite a portrait. Okay. So, he's doing something here that he's clearly very good at. He's giving you these little status details that indicate the aesthetic shift that has happened in America in the last 50 years. To understand what David Brooks is really doing here, we're going to take a little detour. By far the best article that's ever been written about David Brooks was in 2004 by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia Magazine. He's not talking about this book, specifically. He's talking about a Atlantic article that he wrote basically doing red counties and blue counties kind of thing.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: So, this is an excerpt from the David Brooks article. He's talking about Franklin County, Pennsylvania, which is his red County. He says, "Franklin County is a place where no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings, where people don't complain that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be. In red America, churches are everywhere. In blue America, Thai restaurants are everywhere. In red America, they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers tour and hunting. In blue America, we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing."

You see what he's doing. He's doing the same listing off of little status details that have this very appealing specificity to them. But then Sasha Issenberg actually checks these things and it turns out that QVC is not more popular in red states. It's much more of like a suburban exurban thing across the country. Doris Kearns Goodwin is extremely popular in Texas.

They go to church in red states and they go to Thai restaurants in blue states is just totally fucking baffling. And I can't believe it got past an editor. Obviously, they have Thai restaurants everywhere in America. At one point, he says like, "In red counties, they have riding lawnmowers. And in blue counties, they have undocumented immigrants."

Peter: [laughs] What the fuck? [laughs]

Michael: No. Undocumented populations are larger in red states.

Peter: Right.

Michael: At one point, David Brooks said that like, "It was a challenge for me to spend $20 on a meal when I was in red America." And he's like, "I went to Red Lobster over and over again, I couldn't spend 20 bucks." And then Sasha Issenberg goes to this place and he goes to Red Lobster, and the most expensive item on the menu is a steak for 28 bucks. So, in this piece, he says, "I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. I didn't see it when I was there, but it's true. You can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. That was partially to make a point that if red lobster is your upper end," he replied, his voice trailing away, "that was partially tongue in cheek, but I did have several mini dinners there and I never topped $20."

"I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared in supportable, he accused me of being too pedantic, taking all this too literally, or of taking a joke and distorting it. Satire has its purpose, but assuming it's on the mark, Brooks should be able to adduce real world examples that are true. I asked him how I was supposed to tell what was comedy and what was sociology. Generally, I rely on intelligent readers to know. I think at the Atlantic Monthly, every intelligent reader can tell what the difference is," he replied. "You're not approaching the piece in the spirit of an honest reporter," he said. "Is this how you're going to start your career, I mean, really doing this kind of piece? I used to do them. I know then how one starts, but it's just something you'll mature beyond."

Peter: [laughs] What a fucking hack.

Michael: What a fucking hack, dude.

Peter: I don't understand like intelligent readers would know I was lying about the Red Lobster, the thing. Why? How? [crosstalk]

Michael: Why would you know that?

Peter: Why would anyone think that you made up the amount of money that you're spending at Red Lobster? [laughs]

Michael: Exactly. And so, it's already [crosstalk] obvious what we're going to find when we return to the wedding passage. Not all of the vows columns are online. I don't know, I'm sure I'm missing something. But there's a huge brick of text only a half or a third of which we read, where David Brooks just hammers you with all the status details from the wedding page of the New York Times. I looked into all of these claims and very few of them check out. So, he says, "An amazing number of couples seem to have first met while recovering from marathons," couldn't find any of that. He says, "They went on romantic vacations to Myanmar and Minsk." I could find no reference to that.

I did actually find somebody who proposed to his girlfriend in a hot air balloon. That was the only detail I could actually check out. But he then has this detail of proposing by putting a ring in her scuba mask, which doesn't make any fucking sense is how she putting it on and doesn't notice the ring. So, I think his defense of that one would be that like, "Well, that one's obviously a joke." But then you're also maybe lying about people meeting each other while recovering from marathons.

Peter: I think there's something important here, which is that, if all of your writing is based on anecdotal evidence, then the anecdotes should be true.

Michael: Exactly. Then the fucking anecdote should be true. Well, then you're just repeating these little factoids, it's like, "Oh, you're just doing stereotypes. You're basically doing Jeff Foxworthy." You're like, "And you might be a Bobo."

Peter: [laughs] Imagine being the owner of a diner where David Brooks rolls in with pleated pants, and two blue buttoned-down shirts, one on top of the other and he's like, "Hi, give me your folksiest meal, please." [crosstalk] "God damn it." Is it election season already?

Michael: So, I'm going to send you the opening of the next chapter. You tell me whether this is lying or not. He does something extremely weird.

Peter: All right. "I'm holding up traffic. I'm walking down the street in Burlington, Vermont and I come to a corner and see a car approaching, so I stop. The car stops. Meanwhile, I've been distracted by some hippies playing frisbee in the park and I stand there daydreaming for what must be 15 or 20 seconds. The car waits. In a normal city, cars roll through these situations. If they see an opening, they take it. But this is Burlington, one of the most socially enlightened cities in America and drivers here are aware that America has degenerated into a car obsessed culture, where driving threatens to crush the natural rhythms of foot traffic and local face to face community."

"This driver knows that while sitting behind the wheel, he is ethically inferior to a pedestrian like me. And to demonstrate his civic ideals, he is going to make damn sure that I get the right of way, no matter how long it takes. Eventually, he honks politely and I wake up and belatedly crossed the street. I have to go through this embarrassing ritual about a dozen times before I finally adapt to local mores and trudge straight into intersections."

Michael: This is a story where David Brooks crossed the street.

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: I feel it's this very much defines his approach to reporting was like, he goes places and he sees fairly normal stuff, like a car stops for you and you're standing at an intersection and then he projects all this weird shit onto it. He's like, "They think that I'm superior to them and that's why they stopped." It's like, "Well, did you talk to them?"

Peter: That is definitely not what they're thinking while you stand there for 20 seconds gazing into the distance.

Michael: [laughs] Then, [exhales], he gets into this whole thing of like, "Burlington, Vermont is a latte town."

Peter: Oh, God.

Michael: He says like there's latte towns within even in places that aren't latte towns. They have latte neighborhoods. It's like, "Yes, David sometimes places are nice, sometimes, I don't know, they have cute city squares and various towns. I don't really know what you're saying with this." But then he gets to a restaurant where he has lunch and he says, "I was sitting outside at a table eating lunch, counting the number of piercings the waitress had on her ears, nose, lips, and belly button. 19, I think."

Peter: I'm sure she loved that.

Michael: I know. [laughs]

Peter: He's like, "Standstill, honey. I've got a column to write."

Michael: "But I kept getting distracted by an aging hippie at the next table, who would not shut up about zero-based budgeting and the differences between preferred and common stock. Gray ponytails and casual about his grooming, he was lecturing like a professor at the Harvard Business School to a young Woodstock wannabe in grainy glasses and a peasant dress. She was taking notes on a yellow legal pad and intermittently, they would digress and talk about some bookkeeping practice or management technique they could adopt at their own company."

Peter: Oh, God, this is so annoying. This is nothing but obvious fiction where he's like-

Michael: I know.

Peter: -"I would love to just paint a quick picture of the type of people I'm talking about. What's the easiest way to do that? Well, make them up."

Michael: He also says like, "Aging hippie, but how do you know that?"

Michael: Right. Because he's got long hair.

Michael: Yeah, it might just be a guy who works in describing finance things. Also, I don't know that any of this fucking happened frankly. Do some people have 19 piercings? Sure, but it's a little too perfect of a detail.

Peter: Yeah, this is-- and just the most purely aesthetic like, "This guy looks like a hippie, but he's talking about business."

Michael: [laughs] I know.

Peter: "Whoa, this lady has earrings, but nearby there is business being done. [Michael laughs] What's going on in this crazy town?"

Michael: Okay, I was not going to read this to you but I can't resist. So, he's walking around his latte town and he does a bunch of excruciating schtick about the grocery store has organic items now, which like okay. And then, he says, "The Great Harvest Bread Company has recently opened up a franchise in town. This particular store is owned by Ed and Lori Kerpius. Ed got his MBA in 1987 and moved to Chicago where he was a currency trader. Then, as it's driven by the ineluctable winds of the zeitgeist, he gave up on the decade of greed stuff, so he could spend more time with his family and community. So, him and his wife opened up the shop."

They greet you warmly as you walk in the door and hand you a sample slice about the size of a coffee table book. A short lecture commences on the naturalness of the ingredients and the authenticity of the baking process. The store spare, so you won't think there's any salesmanship going on. Instead, there are teddy bears and children's books for the kids who hang around and there are Starbucks coffee on sale for the adults. If you ask them to slice the bread in the store, they look at you compassionately as one who has not yet risen to the higher realm of bread consciousness."

Peter: [chuckles] You can't ask for them to slice the bread in the store. "Sir, please leave."

Michael: I was livid reading this, because these people just sound nice.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: [chuckles] They run a bakery, you went in there, and they gave you a free slice of bread, and presumably you ask them about their life story, and they told you like, "Yeah, I used to be a currency trader. Then I moved up here to serve bread," and then you're like, "Oh, fuck these people. I'm going to make fun of them in my bestselling book, and read all this weird stuff into them like they were judging me for wanting to bread sliced." According to the facts here, they just seem nice people who made some chit chat with you.

Peter: "I will take your straightest, whitest loaf of bread please, sliced."

Michael: [laughs] Okay. This then becomes like a whole tedious thing, where he goes to anthropology in the furniture store-

Peter: Oh, God damn it.

Michael: -which is like very zeitgeisty at the time and then he describes the couches with distressed leather and blah, blah, blah. Oh, God, it's very hard to keep your concentration. It is punishing to read these fucking passages.

Peter: Girls are ripping their own jeans these days.

Michael: Okay. But then what really frustrates me about this book is that I actually think that he's onto something. I think that this aesthetic shift that we went through from the 80s to I guess, the 2000s, where like, "Yeah, people were paying $150 for jeans that had fucking holes in them." The mass marketing of authenticity of the aesthetic of authenticity. I would like to read an actual real book about that.

Peter: Yeah. No, I agree with that. And I also think that the people who are doing the same corporate work as their fathers, but have adopted the optics of either individualism or counterculture, whatever you might want to call it, that's an interesting topic too. The aesthetics have changed, but the least interesting way to go about that is to walk into a bakery and be like, "Things are crazy now. Apricot, loaves."

Michael: [laughs]

Peter: I do think there's a degree to which corporations have adopted this aesthetics. That is like a little more nefarious, and weird, and complex. But I do think that if it's like the year 2000 and there's someone who was a hippie in 1971, and now they have a job but also a ponytail, that's not that weird to me. That just sort of make sense.

Michael: Yeah. I think you're right about the fact that a lot of it goes back to marketing. In a passage, it appears toward the end of the book and actually skeptics, I was like, "I can't fucking do this again." Are you familiar with REI, the outdoor goods store?

Peter: Sure.

Michael: It's like, whatever, North Face, any of these high-end park up companies. He has something that is borderline insightful about how they're selling all this super hardcore mountaineering gear to people who are just going to wear it in their Subaru as they drive to their office park and walk three minutes to their job.

Peter: Yep, right.

Michael: It's the aesthetics of like, "You're an extreme person doing extreme stuff."

Peter: Right.

Michael: He has another borderline interesting section about vacations, how it used to be like, "You'd go to Paris and you go to the Eiffel Tower," or whatever. But now, it's like, "Well, when you go to Paris, you stay at an abandoned candle factory." Everything has been artisanized. Everyone wants like an individual experience and none of us want to feel we're part of mass culture. The mass culture has gotten very good at selling that back to us. The idea that we're our own individual person, even as like, "I'm wearing an REI coat that 40,000 other people own."

Peter: Yeah, I think there's a degree to which the suburbs have swallowed our soul. That is left people feeling like they don't have a way to express themselves individually. There's just too many people. We're all pretty similar. How do you reckon with existence? How do you fend off your perpetual existential crisis? You need to believe that you are doing something interesting.

Michael: Yeah. Well, this is another thing that Brooks never really talks about in his book because he has so much contempt for liberals who run nice bakeries, he keeps going back to this as like a liberal thing. But I read this really interesting article when I was researching our episode on the chicks for You're Wrong About, about the aesthetics of country western music taking over the Republican Party. George H. W. Bush didn't wear a cowboy hat.

Peter: Yeah. No, he was a bureaucrat and a statesman.

Michael: Yeah. He's like a patrician old money guy. When you get to his son, who has this fake ranch in Texas and he has to play up all this Texas stuff, even though he's very obviously, just like a legacy kid.

Peter: An accent that's drastically stronger than his father's.

Michael: Exactly. The aesthetic move has happened on both sides. It's just obviously happened differently. A lot of people in red states drive pickup trucks, who maybe help their friend move once a year. They're doing the same thing as the REI people are doing. These aren't really like elite things. This is everybody. Most of this is like mass culture. Starbucks was in every fucking mall in America. Anthropology is in every mall in America.

Peter: Yeah, this is from a weird time in the late 1990s, early aughts when, for some reason, Starbucks was just affiliated with fluffy liberals.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: This is like a massive, sprawling multibillion dollar company.

Michael: Right.

Peter: There's a tendency among the David Brooks's of the world to just look at whatever liberals are doing and being like, "Well, that's just some frilly bullshit."

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: "Why aren't you eating wonder bread off the floor?"

Michael: "Oh, you bought a jacket."

Peter: "You don't really need that vest. I'm going to write a book about this."

Michael: All right. So, the next chapter is about corporations. It gets into a different tendency of his, but first, we have to start with the opening vignette. This is about business and pleasure.

Peter: Ugh, okay. "Go down to your local park in the summertime. You'll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin tights spandex pants." All right, David.

Michael: I know. Just [laughs] tone it down, David. Relax.

Peter: "Imagine if the Puritans could get a load of this. Women running around in their underwear in public, but look at the bra joggers more closely. It's not wanton hedonism you see on their faces. 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're setting goals and striving to achieve them. You never see them smile."

Michael: Not true.

Peter: David Brooks is telling every jogger that passes him to smile and none of them are smiling.

Michael: Yeah. [laughs]

Peter: He's like, "They never smile. [Michael laughs] They look back angrily like your wife-

[laughter]

Peter: -when you return from work two hours late after a long dinner with your research assistant."

Michael: So, this chapter is about companies. He talks about how companies are getting rid of these hierarchical things. Apparently, there was a thing where DreamWorks got rid of job titles.

Peter: Okay.

Michael: One of the examples is AOL, because it's the year 2000. So, they're doing urban villages. There's another company that sets up rolling desks to make it easier for people to collaborate. The Bobo move is to get rid of hierarchies. So, it's like companies are getting rid of hierarchy.

Peter: Okay, yeah.

Michael: CEOs are wearing jeans now, CEO show up and sweaters, a lot of CEOs talk about work as this form of self-actualization, they talk about workers as their families. There's this casualization and it's a little bit goes to talk about things like, "Oh, you're my boss," or whatever at work.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: He talks about how the CEOs, even though they're all saying this like, "Oh, it's not hierarchical here," whatever, they're still bragging, "When I go into work on the weekends, I see a lot of people coming. They're part of our family. And so, they just want to work on the weekends."

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: He's trying to tie it back to the jogger. He says, "Countercultural capitalists are not restrained by the old puritanical or Protestant code. Instead, they've constructed their own ethos that creates a similar and perhaps more rigorous system of restraint. They have transformed work into a spiritual and intellectual vocation. So, they approach their labor with the fervor of artists and missionaries. Their colors may not be buttoned up and their desks may not be neat, but they are after a fashion quite self-disciplined. Members of the educated class, often regard work as an expression of their entire being. So, of course, they devote themselves to it with phenomenal energy. For many, there is no time when they are not at work."

Peter: [laughs] First of all, I'm very, very annoyed to have David Brooks talking to me about what having a job is like. [Michael laughs] Only one of us knows what having a job is like, David. [Michael laughs]. It's not that there's nothing here in this shift from traditional workplace aesthetics to modern workplace aesthetics. But, A, a lot of that is like CEOs realizing that a lot of traditional workplace aesthetic contribute nothing to productivity. So, why not strip them away?

Michael: Right.

Peter: Another part of it, it's always felt a lot of this shit, a lot of like the new modern workplace, which is something that was just getting off the ground when he wrote this book. A lot of that is like a late capitalist thing, where people realize on some level that they're getting a bad deal. They're working too much and losing their grip on the things in life that matter to them. And so, workplaces responded by being like, "What if there was an espresso machine?"

Michael: Right. [laughs]

Peter: "Would that make you feel like you're not wasting your life?"

Michael: Oh, yeah. One thing that was amazing to me about this book is that every once in a while, he will write a paragraph like this one that is, I think insightful and true, but he doesn't have any thoughts about it. So, what he's basically saying here is that CEOs have started marketing work as self-actualization. And at the same time, he's saying like, "Well, wait a minute. All this is doing is making everyone work harder." This only benefits the CEOs.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: This is like a fucking communist trash. This could appear in Jacobin. Like, rise up and break out of your shackles. But David Brooks just says it [laughs] is moves on. There's no reflection of like, well, wait a minute, maybe this is all just cynical, David. Maybe there's no actual Bobo anything. Maybe it's just fucking marketing. It's a form of control and it's something you tell workers to increase retention rates and to get them to do dumb shit like work on the weekends. But this isn't a form of self-actualization. There's at will employment, you can get rid of these people at any moment. This is also during the rise of the first dotcom bubble, where all these people are getting laid off. It's AOL employees.

Peter: Right.

Michael: But David Brooks looks at this entire situation and the only lens he can view it through is liberal hypocrisy. So, the whole chapter, he's like, "Ah, Bobos say that they self-actualize at work, but they're sadder than ever."

Peter: [laughs] Yeah.

Michael: It's like, "Okay, David, but do you have any thoughts on the CEOs that are cynically lying to them, corporations that are appropriating this act of rebellion aesthetic without any actual fucking content? Do you have any thoughts, David, on the power structures at play here?"

Peter: This is what no class consciousness does to a motherfucker, right? Just like, "Huh"

Michael: Right.

Peter: It's very weird to watch him just point out these phenomena that are in and of themselves quite interesting and have a lot behind them and just be like, "Another Bobo thing," and then move on to the next one.

Michael: Here we are. Yeah.

Peter: In between writing incredibly horny paragraphs about female joggers.

Michael: [laughs]

Peter: "But look at the bra joggers more closely. [Michael laughs] Look at them so closely."

Michael: But then this also represents an interesting epilogue to the other books that were written about this. So, Barbara Ehrenreich, unfortunately passed away earlier this year. But in the last 10, 15 years of her life, she had completely discarded the concept of the professional-managerial class, because it is bifurcated so much. You have tenured university professors and then you have all these adjuncts who are just like hourly labor. She says, "Those of us who have higher degrees have proven to be no more indispensable to the American capitalist enterprise than those who hone their skills on assembly lines. The debt ridden unemployed and underemployed college graduates, the revenue star of teachers, the overworked and underpaid service professionals, even the occasional whistleblowing scientist or engineer, all face the same kind of situation that confronted industrial workers in the late 20th century."

Peter: Right.

Michael: This is again something that David Brooks does not talk about. He's talking about the CEOs are Bobo's and the waitress with piercings is also a Bobo.

Peter: Uh-huh.

Michael: Okay. So, we talking about people who aged into this or people who were born into this? Are we talking about people really at the top of the economic ladder? "CEOs don't wear business suits anymore." Okay. But then you're also talking about people in low level retail positions. Those people don't necessarily have anything in common.

Peter: No, they hate each other.

Michael: Right.

Peter: There's no evidence that they have the same values, except that he believes that adherence to certain formalist archetypes, like the way you dress, the way you present yourself, et cetera. He believes that that's a value in and of itself. When you write about something as complex as an entire generation of people and you're not talking about class in any way, you're not talking about the fact that at this point, you were about a quarter century into wages and productivity disconnecting almost completely, you're just not able to accurately describe what you're seeing, which would almost be forgivable if he even fuckin tried.

Michael: Right. And he's not trying.

Peter: Yeah. [laughs]

Michael: Okay. So, final chapter. There's an opening vignette of every chapter. The opening vignette of this chapter is about fetishists.

Peter: Oh, my God. I was going to say, I hope this is less horny.

Michael: I'm going to send you an excerpt in a second, but this is just the very beginning of the chapter. He says, "If you'd like to be tortured and whipped with dignity and humiliated with respect, you really ought to check out the internet newsletter of the Arizona power exchange, an S&M group headquartered in Phoenix. The organization offers a full array of services to what is now gentilly known as the leather community. For example, on a recent August 3rd, according to the summer newsletter, there was a discussion and humiliation session. On August 6th at 7:00 PM, there was a workshop on caning. The next night, the bondage, sadomasochism, personal growth, and support group met with Master Lawrence. While on August 10th, Carla helped lead a discussion on high heel and foot worship," and this goes on. This goes on. It's so boring. It's so judgy.

Peter: This is one of the things about the early days of the internet when all of a sudden, these communities that most people in David Brooks's position weren't aware of. Now have a message board somewhere. And he's like, "My God, people are whipping each other."

Michael: [laughs] He doesn't have anything again, because he didn't fucking interview anybody. He has anything interesting to say about this. He just gawking at it. It's like, "[scoffs] They're holding workshops."

Peter: "You believe this shit. I am sexually harassing female joggers like a normal person [Michael laughs] and these guys are out here worshipping high heels."

Michael: This is a section where he talks about how Bobo sexuality is just as puritanical as the old sexuality.

Peter: Okay. "Bobos turned out to be the parsons of the pubic region. Nearly gone are the 1960s traces of Dionysian wantonness. Instead, play safe and play responsibly are the slogans that are repeated again and again and sophisticated sex literature. The practitioners talk so much about how healthy it all is that you'd think they were doing jumping jacks. To keep everything responsible and under control, weird activities are codified in rules and etiquette."

Michael: Weird activities.

Peter: "The rules at a group sex community meeting, when it is necessary to sign a legal waiver, when to wear latex gloves, when it's okay to smoke are strictly adhered to. Theirs may not be the same as the etiquette that govern behavior in a 19th century parlor, but in their relentless demands on self-control, they weirdly mimic these sorts of social codes. In odd ways, these are moralistic people. I imagine that if there were a room full of people rubbing each other's excrement over each other and somebody confessed he didn't recycle, he'd be immediately expelled from the group and told never to come back. It's a weird version of propriety, but it's propriety nonetheless."

Michael: Aren't the nonjudgmental people also judgmental?

Peter: What are we supposed to take from this other than like, "Yeah, people who engage in group sex adhere to certain rules and norms?"

Michael: Right, in the same way, if there's a volleyball group that meets on Wednesdays. They probably also have some rules.

Peter: But he's just saying like, "These people are degenerates without any moral compass and yet, they have their own rules and etiquette."

Michael: Exactly. The final paragraph is a fucking masterpiece, where he literally says, "I imagine that if there's an orgy and somebody says that he doesn't recycle, he'll be expelled." And then he immediately jumps from his fake anecdotes to, "Basically, Bobos are just as puritanical as the previous ruling classes." But this is a completely hollow fucking argument, because you've made up the evidence for it. You said, "I imagine."

Peter: Also, Puritanism is not just having rules and norms.

Michael: Right.

Peter: That's not what puritanical behavior is.

Michael: Exactly.

Peter: This is a 2000s version of modern canceled culture discourse, where it's like, "The left says that they don't like the authoritarian impulses of the right, but they're critiquing this professor on Twitter for using a well-known slur against Mongolians."

Michael: [laughs]

Peter: It's this sort of equivocation that makes no sense when you actually understand the values involved on both sides. This is the one area where I would forgive David Brooks for not being able to do any actual reporting, because if he walked into a BDSM social group, they would be like, "Sir, you need to leave."

Michael: Get the fuck out of here. I know. Immediately.

Peter: "Once again, I was kicked out of a BDSM group for not recycling."

Michael: This is supposed to be like the ending insight of the book is basically now that the Bobos are like the new ruling elite. They're setting up a whole set of rules that are just as opaque, and oppressive, and weird as the previous ruling class. So, the mom for fucking Titanic with all the forks, we don't have that anymore, but we have rules and orgies and we have other kinds of social rules about the way that you talk about money, the way that you dress, there's less, I guess, conspicuous consumption now than there would have been. I think there's some real shifts, but also, he's just saying the rich liberals are the same as the rich aristocrats

Peter: By the nature that they just have social norms.

Michael: Right.

Peter: Not the same social norms-

Michael: Exactly.

Peter: -but any social norms at all.

Michael: We've talked about this in the last chapter of these nonfiction airport books is always the worst chapter, because they get into the policy steps like, "What are the implications?" whatever. So, he then does this whole try hard thing about how Bill Clinton was the first Bobo president.

Peter: Ah, God damn it.

Michael: And then he says, "They've settled on the style of politics, because this is what appeals to the affluent suburbanites and the sorts of people who control the money, media, and culture in American society. Today, there are about nine million households with incomes over 100,000, the most vocal and active portion of the population. And this new establishment, which exerts its hegemony over both major American political parties has moved to soften ideological edges and damp down doctrinal fervor. The people of the left and the right who longed for radical and heroic politics are driven absolutely batty by tepid Bobo politics. They see large problems in society and they cry out for radical change. This new centrist establishment frustrates or stifles their radical ideas and yet, they find it hard to confront this power elite head on. The Bobo establishment seems to have no there there. It never presents a coherent opposition, it never presents its opponents with a set of consistent ideas that can be argued and refuted. Instead, it co-ops and embraces. Well, those on the left and right hunger for confrontation and change, the Bobos seem to be following the advice on their throw pillows, living well is the best revenge."

Peter: This is interesting, because it reads like a withering critique of that type of centrism. And that's exactly what David Brooks politics are.

Michael: Exactly. It's fucking incredible. He's just saying that, he's like, "Oh, the ruling classes like the wealthy actually control things in this country. They have no governing ideology, they have no actual preferences for anything. They basically just want to stay affluent and they want everybody to stop shouting. It's like, "Yeah, David." What the fuck.

Peter: I truly cannot believe that he wrote all of that out and then went on to lead the life that he has led.

Michael: I know.

Peter: This is a critique that if you showed it to him now, it would be like, when you show the androids in Westworld, the blueprints have themselves and they're programmed to not recognize it.

Michael: [laughs] And then he doesn't reflect on it at all.

Peter: Right.

Michael: Bobos don't seem to have any preferences. There's no such thing as a Bobo utopia, because all they have is these process preferences of compromise and bipartisanship and unity. These things that don't have fucking outcomes.

Peter: Right.

Michael: You're saying that both parties in the country are now captured by people who really don't want to change anything, and just want to go shopping at fucking anthropology all the time.

Peter: I do wonder whether if he felt at the time of writing as if the rebuttal was like self-evident, because the economy is still roaring, were probably right before the dotcom bust when he publishes this and the real recession that follows. Maybe he just thought that it was obvious that like, "Yeah, of course, those critiques are silly. Look at how fucking great America is doing."

Michael: That is actually the ending of the book quite explicitly. He basically says like, "Bobos have ushered in an unprecedented era of peace and progress." Things are fine. And so, there aren't really any policy solutions at the end of the book. He doesn't even really try. He just says that Bobos have to launch a project of national greatness.

Peter: Yeah, this is, I feel something that a lot of late 1990s political writing shares in common, where the sense that things are going great is just permeating it and it's this underlying assumption. It reminds me of in The Simpsons, there's an episode where Springfield gets hit by a hurricane and Homer walks out in the eye of the hurricane. I think it's Lisa's like, "Watch out, we might just be in the eye," and he's like, "Relax, see how calm and eerily quiet it is."

Michael: [laughs]

Peter: That's how I feel they were writing about politics in the 1990s. They're like, "There's no reason to be alarmed. Look how great everything's going." Then you get a recession, you get 911, the Iraq War, Katrina, and another far worse recession in the span of the next eight years.

Michael: Right. Yeah. It's like this little postcard of a completely lost world.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: From a mind that is not prepared for what is about to happen.

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: So, that's the book. I want to fast forward. In late 2021, he writes an article for The Atlantic, that's basically a follow up to this book and it's called How the Bobos Broke America. So, I'm not going to read large excerpts of it. We're not going to go through it in detail, but I will read you a brief excerpt of the thesis statement. David Brooks says, "I got a lot wrong about the Bobos. I didn't anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes. I underestimated the way the creative class would successfully raise barriers around itself to protect its economic privileges, not just through schooling, but through zoning regulations that keep home values high, professional certification structures that keep doctors and lawyers' incomes high, while blocking competition from nurses and paralegals and more. I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades, the number of working class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling. When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they're going to react badly, and they have."

Peter: Okay. So, he believes that he got things wrong primarily, because he believes that he underestimated the degree to which a liberal elites would sneer at everyone else.

Michael: Yes.

Peter: What an unbelievably bad diagnosis of what he got wrong. [laughs]

Michael: At one point, he describes the Trumpist right as, "People who feel that they have been rendered invisible will do anything to make themselves visible."

Peter: Oh, God.

Michael: And then when it comes to left wing activists like defund the police, George Floyd, everything else, he says, "Wokeness is not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker, a strategy for personal advancement."

Peter: Yeah, the same claim of inauthenticity.

Michael: Right.

Peter: "I don't have to abide by any of the social norms or whatever that you're championing, because I don't believe that you're doing it in good faith. I think that you're being dishonest and you're just posturing."

Michael: Right. Well, I also think the evolution from Bobos the book in 2002, Bobos the epilogue in 2021 is also interesting, because the late 1990s was also when the claim of limousine liberals appearing, latte liberals. This was a Newt Gingrich thing. It's interesting that just after that smear starts showing up, David Brooks writes essentially a long form version of that smear.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: It's just like liberal hypocrisy, the entire book. And then now in 2021, when the right is saying, "Look what you made us do." He basically writes an article that is like, "Look what you made them do." He's been very vocal against Trump too, which I give him credit for, but also, he is echoing like a more polite version of precisely the same arguments that you do find on the far right.

Peter: He is a water carrier for the establishment. He's a water carrier for entrenched reactionary interests.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: It's so fucking weird. It's like this long-standing left critique that elite capitalists would, of course, prefer fascism to any socialism or social democracy. David Brooks is here at to run cover for them.

Michael: I don't know if he necessarily prefers fascism, but he definitely thinks we should hear the fascists out.

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: So, wrapping up, this is a podcast about the most harmful ideas of the last 50 years. And thinking about the harms of David Brooks, I don't actually think that the problem is David Brooks himself. The problem is the need for David Brooks.

Peter: Right. The reason that Brooks has a career is to reassure the liberal establishment that they are reasonable people who can listen to the other side and feel intelligent and feel they're considering all of the options. Brooks himself though has almost nothing to say.

Michael: Right. The question for the liberal institutions that have spent two decades propping up David Brooks is, why should we listen to this guy?

Peter: Right.

Michael: Is it because he's like a subject matter expert? No, David Brooks doesn't have any deep knowledge of anything. Is it because he does deep reporting? No, David Brooks doesn't do the most basic level of investigation to find out whether his impressions are true. He just prints his impressions. "Ooh, this guy has a ponytail."

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: Has he been right about a lot of other things in the past? Also no. The only reason to listen to David Brooks is some sort of empty commitment to ideological diversity.

Peter: Yep.

Michael: But what is the point of intellectual diversity, if the person we're hearing out is shallow, and lazy, and lying, and wrong about everything. That's not the New York Times opinion page challenging its readers preconceptions. It's giving their readers a completely false impression of what conservatism is.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: David Brooks has had no influence over conservatives since the 1990s. The number of "reasonable conservatives" in this country is roughly seven and they all have fucking columns at newspapers.

Peter: Yeah, at this point, he is, I think, openly identifying as a Democrat?

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: He was like a Never Trump guy that actually held out. I would say the reason that he held out is because a lot of the Never Trump folks were conservatives who were like, "This isn't what conservatism is really about." And then a few years later, it was pretty obvious that it is what conservatism is actually about. And the entire movement is lining up behind Trump and people like Trump, but Brooks didn't do that, because he's not beholden to the conservative movement, because he's beholden to the liberal movement.

Michael: Right.

Peter: I think that also-- This dynamic explains why David Brooks sucks. [Michael laughs] He doesn’t need to be good, because that's not the purpose that he serves. The purpose that he serves is to provide insight. It's to play a role in insular liberal politics. Conservatives don't need David Brooks. Liberals do.

Michael: I want to end with probably the most infamous David Brooks paragraph ever written. You know about this one, the sandwich one?

Peter: Oh, Jesus Christ, yeah. [laughs]

Michael: Do you want to read it or should I?

Peter: You can go, you can go.

Michael: Okay. So, this is in one of his New York Times columns. He says, "Recently, I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I let her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly, I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named Padrino and Pomodoro and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo, and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

Peter: [laughs]

Michael: That is one of the masterpieces of this mind.

Peter: Yeah, I love the, "I brought my doorknob stupid friend, who has never heard of various popular Italian sandwiches. And in fact, actually has a panic attack when she reads them on a menu.

Michael: I know.

Peter: Brought her to a classic deli. And, of course, she will never be the same again."

Michael: [laughs] I know. But then, okay. What I learned reading like 400 David Brooks columns is that he is the king of having things that look really bad when they're taken out of context and look worse when they're in context. What gets lost with this unbelievably condescending paragraph is that it's in the middle of a column about all of the ways that people are hoarding opportunity in America is become one of the frameworks that people are using. So, he runs down all of the evidence for this phenomenon that it's just harder to get ahead than it used to be. But then the article uses the sandwich anecdote to say, it's not really, really fucking obvious things like jobs don't pay as much as they used to, housing cost more than it used to, college cost more than it used to. It's not that stuff. It's the aesthetic stuff. Fucking names of fucking sandwiches. It's like, "No, David, it's the housing."

Peter: No, it's the jobs and shit.

Michael: It’s the jobs and shit.

Peter: Right.

Michael: It's like such a metaphor for his whole kind of project of just like, "No, no, look away from the really obvious and measurably devastating stuff. And look at this dumb bullshit that I have a made-up anecdote about."

Peter: It is remarkable how many times he can write these pieces that tout the unreasonableness of liberal, coastal, cosmopolitan aesthetics.

Michael: I know. [laughs]

Peter: In the process, he is just insanely condescending towards the people that he believes that he's boosted.

Michael: Unbelievable. I know.

Peter: This woman cannot read a menu and he notices [Michael laughs] her sheer terror at the prospect of like a type of hand she hasn't had before and he's like, "Do you want to leave?" And she's like, "Yes, please. I don't feel safe here. What's capicollo?"

Michael: But on the bright side, at least nobody offered her a free slice of bread.

Peter: [laughs]

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