David Brooks's "Bobos in Paradise"
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Peter. Michael. What do you know about a book called Bobos in Paradise? I know that this is the book that made David Brooks famous. Yes. Or whatever he is.

Should we start out by talking about like the phenomenon of David Brooks? I think you have to. As soon as his name comes up, it's like, okay, who's going to mention this first? Like we have to get some stuff out of the way. Yeah. David Brooks is a Times columnist. They're house conservative. Yeah. I sort of mentally and emotionally prepared for this episode by reading a couple of his columns randomly selected. And then I drilled an imperfection.

imperceptible hole in my skull and poured lukewarm water all over my brain. I mean, thinking about him as I have in the 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 the chief of staff of Obama's White House.

Right. And I always wonder whether that is influence or whether he's just being sort of used as a barometer. Right. Right. He's just sort of there and people are checking in on him. Right. Because he symbolizes something. Well, I think, I mean...

My sort of whole David Brooks thing clicked into place when I was reading his bio. He's one of these boomers who kind of brags about getting bad grades in high school. He's like, oh, school really wasn't for me. But then I attended the University of Chicago immediately upon graduation. He graduates in 1983. And then this is the thing that made everything click 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. Everything after this is just punditry. He's like a political opinion-haver. So he just sort of flits everything.

from thing to thing without any real object permanence and without really gathering any like deep expertise on anything. Yeah. And you really get the sense when you're reading his columns that that's exactly what's happening. Yeah. He will sometimes cite a single source, almost never two. It's incredible. He's creating the illusion of authority, right? He's like, FYI, in case you didn't trust me, I do read a book now and then.

I keep thinking of like those, you know, those like CBS shows where someone is like, I saw on NCIS the other day. And you're like, that's still on. Every time I see David Brooks, I'm like, oh, really? This because he really only sort of like gets talked about when he's like being made fun of on Twitter. Yeah. Three or four times a year. He'll kind of overstep the mark and he'll write something egregious and he'll get made fun of. But it's not it's very rare to see an article or to see anybody say like, oh, David Brooks had an interesting column the other day.

He doesn't really have the kind of positive influence. It's just like every once in a while, he's just like the grandpa that gets like hit with sticks. Although I also similar to NCIS, I feel like it's one of those things where you you find out not only is it still on the air, but it's like one of the top shows on television. Well, that's that's the thing. I think a lot of a lot of those people that used to read him in the early 2000s are still reading him. And I think he's probably fairly influential on that group.

Right. Because I had 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.

I was like, first of all, that's just a nightmare of a second. Secondly, this is like a three hour long conversation that I'm not willing to have with you. I was like, oh, fun fact. Interesting. So the title of the book is Bobos in Paradise, the new upper class and how they got there. Okay. 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 like break it apart and put it back together. Okay. Mostly because the overwhelming experience of reading this book is not the ideology. It's the thought.

thudding shallowness. So do you know anything about this book? Yeah, I think I know what Bobo stands for. It's a combination of bohemian and bourgeoisie. Is that right? Yes. I don't really know much more about it than that. I think he was just writing about that generation, but I don't know much beyond that. 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. And

And when he returned to America, he noticed a bunch of differences in the kinds of lifestyles, the kinds of brands that people were buying and just sort of the culture around him. So I'm going to send you an excerpt where he basically lays out the thesis of the book. Oh, my God. I know it's a big brick. This episode is going to have like a lot of quotes because some of the stuff that he says in the book, like you really have to like read it to believe it.

All right. The thing that struck me as oddest was the way the old categories no longer made sense. Throughout the 20th 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 towards sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the anti-establishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man.

By the way, no, nothing I would like less than for David Brooks to investigate my attitude towards sex. We have a really long excerpt about that later. It's really dark. I feel like 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. Like 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 Yeah and then the other archetype is when you make the observation that a generation of people That used to be like more carefree and anti-establishment 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. 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 sort of 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. Right.

And really, since the 1960s, there has been the creation of a kind of knowledge class. It's a bunch of people who have these kind of professional jobs and who do have this kind of ethos that comes from the kind of post-hereditary aristocracy world. Yeah. I think that is true. Yeah. And I feel like smarter people have written about it. Yes. About sort of, you know, this sort of 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. And I think when this giant class of like just below upper class people was created, those people brought their sort of 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 like a manufacturing society to like a knowledge society. Right. Am I wrong? I feel like we're dancing around what the term that the more diseased online folks use, which is the professional managerial class, the PMC. Yes, I have a whole section on this. Yes. The reason why I think that David Brooks's book is correct is that this is like the 48th book

to chronicle this. Like, this is a really obvious trend. Bourdieu talked about the, I think it was like the new petty bourgeoisie. Daniel Bell wrote a book called The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, which also explored this in 1973. I read a bunch of articles about yuppies from the 80s and 90s, you know, these panicked Newsweek articles. They basically said the same thing. They're like,

They're railing against selling out as they eat $8 sushi. Yeah. I found an academic article that talked about slumpies, socially liberal, urban-minded professionals. Thank God that didn't catch on. Jesus Christ. Slumpies. It's like, all right, that's a little bit try hard. But also this is like a true thing that happened. Yeah.

Yeah. In the world, like 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 like 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. Right. And this was going to define the political struggle of the next hundred years.

Yeah.

But they're also like 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. Podcasters. TikTok dancers. Yes. So Barbara and John Ehrenreich came up with this term, not necessarily to like say anything offensive.

bad about it, but just to like 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 is like, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here with this guy.

And then the professor is like, I don't know why we're talking about like working hours, minimum wages and stuff. He just wouldn't be interested in that. They estimated in the 70s that it was at that time around 25% of the workforce. People now say it's roughly like 35 to 40%. And this is now one of the defining features of like our politics, our economy, our society. It's changed things in so many different ways. Right.

And David Brooks is interested in none of these ways. David Brooks is like, you ever notice that people are drinking a lot of cappuccinos these days? Exactly. Like this is this is what he's interested in is basically he's like driving around strip malls and like taking notes on stuff that he sees. But he's not doing any of the like actual analysis or even like meeting these people. Like this is a book about Bobos, right? About a social class that comprises somewhere, you know, 50, 80 million people. Right. Right.

This book does not have one interview. So like you don't get any specificity in this book, but you do get a lot of like what we saw in the earlier description where he's like cappuccino gulping bankers. It feels like what he really wants to say is like, doesn't this stuff seem a little bit gay? Yeah. But he can't say it is. He tries to mask it because he says like, I'm a bobo myself in the introduction. But like he fucking hates these people. It's like really obvious that he fucking hates these people.

So, OK, so basically his entire argument, which, again, could have been like a magazine article, it 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 like replicating American culture along the lines of their own tastes.

So the first chapter of the book is called The Rise of the Educated Class. And 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? Yeah, the New York Times wedding page is a list of weddings. Except that it is this sort of like 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. Yeah. Yeah. This is something that you throw in the face of the house with the housewife you hate the most. Right. At your little dinner parties or whatever. If you're a New York City asshole. As a New York City asshole. Are you going to try to get one? I'm going to be honest. I don't. I didn't know that you try. I don't.

I don't know how the process works. Do you like apply? 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. So what he's basically trying to do with this chapter is he wants to contrast the previous ruling class with today's ruling class.

And the way that he does this is by talking about the New York Times wedding pages, which I think is like a smart pop journalistic way to do this. I'm just like to draw the contrast.

So he talks about the page from 1950. Of course, it was all like pedigreed people. And I guess it would mention when your ancestors arrived in America. Apparently, the women's jobs were never mentioned or like they didn't have jobs. Yeah, that was disqualifying if the woman had a job. It's just kind of like a snapshot of where the ruling class was in 1950. Right. And 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. 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.

See? He's good at what he does, man. Yeah.

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 are exploring endangered coral reefs near the Seychelles.

OK, so it's quite a portrait. It's quite a portrait. But then, OK, 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. So 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 Isenberg in Philadelphia Magazine. He's not talking about this book specifically. He's talking about a Atlantic article that he wrote basically doing a like red counties and blue counties kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. So this is an excerpt from the David Brooks article. He's talking about Franklin County, Pennsylvania, which is his like red county. Mm-hmm.

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.

So you see what he's doing, right? He's doing the same listing off of little status details that have this very appealing specificity to them.

But then Sasha Isenberg 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 like extremely popular in Texas. The thing about like 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. Right.

At one point, he says, like, in red counties, they have riding lawnmowers. And in blue counties, they have undocumented immigrants. What the fuck? No, they have, like, undocumented populations are larger in red states. Right, right. So at one point, David Brooks said that he, 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 Isenberg goes to this place and like 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 Mercerburg 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 insupportable. 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. And 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 them, how one starts. But it's just something you'll mature beyond.

What a fucking hack. What a fucking hack, dude. I don't understand. Intelligent readers would know I was lying about the Red Lobster thing. Why would you know that? Why would anyone think that you made up the amount of money that you're spending at Red Lobster? Exactly.

And so it's already obvious what we're going to find when we return to the wedding passage. Not all of the vows columns are online. And like, I don't know, I'm sure I'm missing something. But there's a huge brick of text, only like a half or a third of which we read, where David Brooks just hammers you with all of these status details from the wedding page of The New York Times.

I looked into all of these claims and like 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 like the only detail I could actually check out.

he then has this detail of proposing by putting a ring in her scuba mask, which doesn't it just like doesn't make any fucking sense as like how she putting it on and doesn't notice the ring. Right. 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. I think there's something important here here, which is that like

If all of your writing is based on anecdotal evidence, then the anecdotes should be true. Exactly. Then the fucking anecdotes should be true. But when 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.

Imagine being like the owner of a diner where like David Brooks rolls in with like pleated pants and two blue button down shirts, one on top of the other. And he's like, hi, give me your folksiest meal, please. Right. God damn it. Is that election season already? 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. 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.

So this is a story where David Brooks crossed the street. I

I feel like it's this very much defines his approach to reporting where it's like he goes places and he sees like fairly normal stuff like a car stops for you when 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? That is definitely not what they're thinking while you stand there for 20 seconds gazing into the distance.

So then he gets into this whole thing of like Burlington, Vermont is a latte town. Oh, God. He says like there's latte towns, but then even in places that aren't latte towns, they have like latte neighborhoods. And it's like, yes, David, sometimes like places are nice. Like sometimes –

I don't know. They have cute city squares in 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. I'm sure she loved that. I know. He's like, stand still, honey. I got to call him to write. 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-ponytailed 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. This is so annoying. This is nothing but obvious fiction where he's like, I would love to just sort of like paint a quick picture of the type of people I'm talking about. Yeah. What's the easiest way to do that? Well, make them up. He also says like aging hippie, but like how?

How do you know that? The guy... Right, because he's got, like, long hair. Yeah, like, it might just be a guy who works in finance 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, like, a little too perfect of a detail. Yeah, this is, I mean, and just the most purely aesthetic. Yeah. Like, this guy looks like a hippie, but he's talking about business? Yeah.

Whoa, this lady has earrings, but nearby there is business being done. What's going on in this crazy town? There's also, okay, I was not going to read this to you, but I like, I kind of can't resist. So he's walking around this latte town and he does a bunch of like excruciating shtick about like the grocery store has like organic items now, which is like, okay.

And then he says,

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 is 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's 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.

You can't ask for them to slice the bread in the store. Sir, please leave. I was livid reading this because these people just sound nice. Yeah.

They run a bakery. You went in there and they gave you a free slice of bread and they like presumably you asked 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 like best selling book and like read all this weird stuff into them. Like they were judging me for wanting the bread sliced.

According to the facts here, they just seem like nice people who, like, made some chit-chat with you. I will take your straightest, whitest loaf of bread, please. Sliced. But then, okay, so then, I mean, this then becomes, like, a whole tedious thing where, like, he goes to Anthropologie, the furniture store. Goddammit. Which is, like, very zeitgeisty at the time. And then...

He describes like the couches with, you know, distressed leather and blah, blah, blah. Oh, God, it's very hard to keep your concentration. It's just punishing to read these fucking passages. Girls are ripping their own jeans these days. But then, OK, 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. Right. The mass marketing of authenticity, of the aesthetic of authenticity. I would like to read an actual, a real book about that.

Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I also think that like the people who are doing the same corporate work as their fathers, but have like adopted the optics of either individualism or counterculture or whatever you might want to call it. That's sort of an interesting topic, too, right? That 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. I do think it's sort of

There's a degree to which corporations have adopted these aesthetics. And that is a little more nefarious and weird and complex. But I do think that if it's 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 makes sense. Yeah. I think you're right about the fact that a lot of it goes back to marketing. In a passage like...

it appears toward the end of the book and I actually skipped it. So I was like, I can't fucking do this again. He goes to, are you familiar with REI, the outdoor goods store? So it's like, you know, whatever North face, any of these like high end parka companies. And he has something that is like borderline insightful about how they're selling all this like super hardcore mountaineering gear to people who are just going to like wear it in their Subaru as they drive to their office park and walk like three minutes to their job. It's the aesthetic.

of like you're an extreme person doing extreme stuff right he has another borderline interesting section about vacations how it used to be like you'd go to paris and you'd go to the eiffel tower whatever yeah but now it's sort of like well when you go to paris you stay at like an abandoned candle factory everything has been sort of artisanized everyone wants like an individual experience and none of us want to feel like we're part of mass culture and 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. Yeah. I think it's, there's a degree to which like the suburbs have sort of like swallowed our soul that is left people feeling like they don't have a way to express themselves individually. There's just, there's too many people. We're all pretty similar people.

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. Well, this is another thing that Brooks never really talks about in his book. Because he has so much contempt for liberals who like 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. You know, George H.W. Bush didn't wear a cowboy hat. No, he was a bureaucrat and a statesman. Yeah, he's like a he's like a patrician old money guy. Right. And 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 like very obviously just like a legacy kid. An accent that's drastically stronger than his father's. Exactly. The aesthetic sort of move has happened on both sides. It just obviously happened differently. Like a lot of people in red states drive pickup trucks.

who like maybe help their friend move once a year they're doing the same thing as the rei people are doing yeah these aren't really like elite things this is kind of everybody and and most of this is like mass culture yeah starbucks was in every fucking mall in america anthropology is in every mall in america yeah this is from a weird time in like the late 90s early aughts when

For some reason, Starbucks was like just affiliated with like fluffy liberals. Yeah. This is like a massive, sprawling, multibillion dollar company. There's a tendency among the David Brooks's of the world to just like look at whatever liberals are doing and being like, well, that's just some frilly bullshit, you know? Yeah.

Why are you eating Wonder Bread off the floor? Oh, you bought a jacket. You don't really need that vest. I'm going to write a book about this. 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. Ugh.

Okay. Go down to your local park in the summertime. You'll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin tight spandex pants. All right, David. I know. Just tone it down, David. Relax. 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. Not true. David Brooks is like is telling every jogger that passes him to smile and none of them are smiling. And he's like, they never smile. They look back angrily like your wife when when you return from work two hours late after a long dinner with your research assistant. So this chapter is about

He talks about how companies are kind of getting rid of these hierarchical things. Apparently, there was a thing where DreamWorks got rid of job titles. One of the examples is AOL because it's the year 2000. So they're doing like urban villages. There's another company that sets up like rolling desks.

to make it easier for people to collaborate. Like, you know, the Bobo move is to get rid of hierarchies, right? So it's like companies are getting rid of hierarchy. Okay, yeah. CEOs are wearing jeans now. CEOs show up in sweaters. A lot of CEOs talk about work as this form of self-actualization. They talk about workers as their families. There's kind of like this casualization and it's a little bit gauche to talk about things like, oh, you're my boss or whatever at work.

Yeah. He talks about how, you know, the CEOs, even though they're all saying this, like, oh, it's not hierarchical here or whatever, they're still kind of 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, like, want to work on the weekends. Yeah. Yeah. He's kind of trying to tie it back to the jogger. He says...

He says,

Their collars 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. First of all, I am very, very annoyed to have David Brooks talking to me.

about what having a job is like. Only one of us knows what having a job is like, David. There's not, it's not that there's nothing here in the sort of like 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 aesthetics contribute nothing to productivity. So why not strip them away? Another part of it

It's always sort of felt like a lot of this shit, a lot of like the new modern workplace, which is something that was sort of just getting off the ground when he wrote this book. A lot of that is like,

sort of 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? Right. Like, would that make you feel like you're not wasting your life? Oh, yeah. I mean, one

One thing that's 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.

Yeah. Yeah.

But David Brooks just like says it and just like moves on. There's no like 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. And 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 because there's no at-will employment. You can get rid of these people at any moment. This is also during the rise of the first dot-com bubble where like all these people are going to get laid off, right? It's AOL employees.

Right. But David Brooks looks at this entire situation and the only lens he can view it through is liberal hypocrisy. Yeah. So the whole chapter, he's like, oh, Bobos say that they self-actualize at work, but they're sadder than ever. It's like, OK, David, but do you have any thoughts on like the CEOs that are cynically lying to them? Corporations that are appropriating this like

act of rebellion aesthetic without any actual fucking content. Do you have any thoughts, David, on like the power structures at play here? This is what no class consciousness does to a motherfucker. Right. Just like, huh. Right. It's very, it's very weird to watch him just like point out these phenomena that are like in

in and of themselves quite interesting and have a lot behind them and just be like another Bobo thing. Right. And then move on to the next one. Here we are. Yeah. In between writing incredibly horny paragraphs about female joggers. But look at the bra joggers more closely. Look at them so closely. 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. Right. Because it is bifurcated so much, right? 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-starved 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.

Right. This is, again, something that David Brooks does not talk about. Right. He's talking about like the CEOs are bobos and like the waitress with piercings is also a bobo. Uh huh. OK. So are we talking about people who aged into this or people who were born into this? And are we talking about people really at the top of the economic ladder? Right. Like, you know, CEOs don't wear business suits anymore. OK. But then you're also talking about people in like low level retail positions. Right. Those people don't necessarily have anything in common. No, they hate each other.

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, etc. 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 in to wages and productivity disconnecting almost completely. You're just not able to accurately describe what you're seeing. Right. Which would almost be forgivable if he even fucking tried. Right. And he's not trying. Okay. So final chapter. This, there's like an opening vignette of every chapter. And the opening vignette of this chapter is about fetishists.

I was going to say, I hope this is less horny. 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.

And this goes on. Yeah.

This is one of the things about yeah or the early days of the Internet when like all of a sudden these communities that most people in David Brooks's position weren't yeah aware of now have like a message board somewhere yeah, and he's like my god people are whipping each other and

And like, he doesn't have anything again because he didn't fucking interview anybody. He doesn't have anything interesting to say about this. Right. He's just gawking at it. It's like they're holding workshops. You believe this shit? I am sexually harassing female joggers like a normal person. And.

These guys are out here worshiping high heels. This is a section where he talks about how Bobo sexuality is just as puritanical as the old sexuality. Okay. Bobos turn 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 in 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. Weird activities. 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 governed 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. Aren't the non-judgmental people also judgmental? What are we supposed to take from this other than like,

Yeah, people who engage in like group sex adhere to certain rules and norms. Right. In the same way, if there's like a volleyball group that meets on Wednesdays, they probably also have some rules. But he's just saying like these people are degenerates without any moral moral compass. And yet they have their own rules. Exactly.

Exactly. And 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. Right. And then he immediately jumps from his fake anecdote.

Two, basically, Bobos are like 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. Also, puritanism is not just having rules and norms. Like that's not what that's not what puritanical behavior is. Exactly. This is a 2000s version of like modern cancel culture discourse where it's like

You know, 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. It's this sort of like it's this sort of equivocation that makes no sense when you actually understand the values involved on both sides. Right.

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. Get the fuck out of here. I know. Immediately. Once again, I was kicked out of a BDSM group for not recycling. This is supposed to be like the ending insight of the book is basically that the Bobos, like 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. Right. So like the mom from fucking Titanic with all the forks, we don't have that anymore. But we have, you know, rules at orgies and we have other kind of social rules about like 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 mean, I think there's some real shifts.

But also it's like he's just saying the rich liberals are the same as the rich aristocrats. By the nature that they just have social norms. Right. Not the same social norms. Exactly. But any social norms at all. We've talked about this. 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. Right.

So he then does this whole kind of try-hard thing about how Bill Clinton was the first Bobo president. Goddamn it. And then he says –

They've settled on this 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 9 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 long 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-opts and embraces. While 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. This is interesting because it reads like a withering critique of that type of centrism. And that's exactly what David Brooks' politics are. Exactly. It's fucking incredible. Yeah.

He's just saying it. He's like, oh, the ruling class is like the wealthy who like actually control things in this country. They have no governing ideology. They have no like actual preferences for anything. They basically just want to stay affluent and they want everybody to stop shouting. It's like, yeah, David. I truly cannot believe that he wrote all of that out and then went on to lead the life that he has led. I know. I know.

This is a critique that if like you showed it to him now, it would be like when you show the androids in Westworld the blueprints of themselves and they can't recognize their program to not recognize it. And then he doesn't reflect on it at all. Bobos don't seem to have any like preferences. Like there's no such thing as a Bobo utopia because all they have is these process preferences of like compromise and bipartisanship and unity. These things that don't have fucking outcomes. Right. You're saying that...

Both parties in the country are now captured by people who really don't want to change anything and who just want to go shopping at fucking anthropology all the time. I do wonder whether if he felt at the time of writing as if the rebuttal was like self-evident. Right. Because the economy is still sort of roaring. Right. We're probably right before the dotcom bust when he publishes this and like the real recession that follows. Yeah.

And maybe he just thought that it was sort of obvious that like, yeah, of course those critiques are silly. Look at how fucking great America is doing. That is actually the ending of the book, like quite explicitly. He basically says like Bobos have ushered in an unprecedented era of peace and progress, right? Like things are kind of fine. And so there aren't really any policy solutions at the end of the book. Like he doesn't even really try. He just says that Bobos have to launch, um,

a project of national greatness. Yeah, this is, I feel like something that a lot of like late 90s political writing shares in common where the sort of sense that things are going great is just permeating it and it's this underlying assumption. It reminds me of like in The Simpsons, there's an episode where Springfield gets hit by a hurricane and

Homer walks out in the eye of the hurricane and I think it's Lisa's like, watch out. Like, you know, we might just be in the eye. And he's like, relax. See how calm and eerily quiet it is. And that's how I feel like they were writing about politics in the 90s. They're like, there's no reason to be alarmed. Look how great everything's going. And then you get a recession. You get 9-11, the Iraq war, Katrina and and another incident.

far worse recession in the span of the next eight years. Right. And it's like, yeah, it is like this little postcard of like a completely lost world. Yeah. From a mind that is not prepared for what is about to happen. 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. Yeah.

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 kind 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. And 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. Okay, so he believes that he got things wrong primarily because he believes that he underestimated the degree to which

liberal elites would sneer at everyone else. Yes. What an unbelievably bad diagnosis of what he got wrong. At one point, he describes the sort of Trumpist right as people who feel that they have been rendered invisible will do anything to make themselves visible.

And then when it comes to left wing activists, right, like defund the police, like all, you know, George Floyd, everything else. He says, wokeness is not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker, a strategy for personal advancement. Yeah. The same claim of inauthenticity. 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. Well, I also think the evolution from Bobo's The Book in 2002, Bobo's The Epilogue in 2021 is also interesting because the late 90s was also when the claim of limousine liberals started appearing, latte liberals. Yeah.

Like this was a Newt Gingrich thing. And it's interesting that just after that smear starts showing up, David Brooks writes essentially a like long form version of that smear. Yeah. Right. It's just like liberal hypocrisy, the entire book. And then now in 2021, when the right is saying like, look what you made us do. He basically writes an article that is like, look what you made them do. Yeah. He's been very vocal against Trump, too, which like 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. He is a water carrier for the establishment. He's a water carrier for entrenched reactionary interests. Yeah. It's so fucking weird. And, you know, it's like this longstanding left critique that elite capitalists

would, of course, prefer fascism to any sort of socialism or social democracy. And David Brooks is like here to run cover for him. He's not I don't know if he necessarily prefers fascism, but he he definitely thinks we should hear the fascists out. So wrapping up, I mean, 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. Right. Like the reason that Brooks has a career is to reassure the liberal establishment that they are reasonable people who can who can listen to the other side and feel intelligent and feel like they're considering all of the options.

Brooks himself, though, has almost nothing to say. Right. The question for the liberal institutions that have spent two decades propping up David Brooks is why should we listen to this guy? Right. 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. Oh, this guy has a ponytail. 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. Yep. But why?

Yeah.

challenging its readers' preconceptions. It's giving their readers a completely false impression of what conservatism is. David Brooks has had no influence over conservatives since the 1990s. The number of quote-unquote reasonable conservatives in this country is roughly seven, and they all have fucking columns at newspapers. Yeah, I mean, at this point, he is, I think, openly identifying...

as a Democrat. Yeah. He was like a never Trump guy that actually held out. Right. And 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 like a few years later, it was pretty obvious that it is what conservatism is actually about. Right. And the entire movement is lining up behind Trump and people like Trump. But Brooks is

didn't do that because he's not beholden to the conservative movement because he's beholden to the liberal movement. Right. And I think that also it this sort of this dynamic explains why David Brooks sucks. He doesn't need to be good because that's not the purpose that he serves. The purpose that he serves is not to provide insight. It's right to sort of

play a role in insular liberal politics, right? Conservatives don't need David Brooks. Liberals do. I want to end with probably the most infamous David Brooks paragraph ever written. You know about this one, right? The sandwich one. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Do you want to read it or should I? You can go. You can go. 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. Oh,

Insensitively, I led 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, capicolo, and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else, and she anxiously nodded yes, and we ate Mexican. That is...

One of the masterpieces of this mind. I love the, like, I brought my doorknob stupid friend who has never heard of, like, various popular Italian sandwiches and, in fact, actually has a panic attack when she reads them on a menu. I know. Brought her to a classic deli and, of course, she will never be the same again. 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

is that it's in the middle of a column about all of the ways that people are hoarding opportunity in America. It's become one of the frameworks that people are using. So he kind of 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 costs more than it used to. College costs 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...

It's the housing. No, it's the jobs and shit. Yeah, it's the jobs and shit. Right. It just it's like such a metaphor for his whole kind of project. Yeah. Just like to look away from the really obvious and like measurably devastating stuff and look at this like dumb bullshit that I have a made up anecdote about. I mean, it is remarkable how many times he can write these pieces that.

tout the unreasonableness of like liberal, coastal, cosmopolitan aesthetics.

And in the process, he is just insanely condescending towards the people that he believes that he's boosting. Unbelievable. I know. This woman cannot read a menu. And he notices her sheer terror at the prospect of like a type of ham 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. David, what's Capicola? But on the bright side, at least nobody offered her a free slice of bread.