Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
SIMON AND SCHUSTER, 2000

Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing in the Marketing of Culture
By John Seabrook
VINTAGE BOOKS, 2001

The Paradox of American Democracy
By John Judis PANTHEON BOOKS, 2000

Those who may still believe in America’s providential destiny might recall the fact that two centuries ago Thomas Jefferson was president and that one hundred years later, Theodore Roosevelt held the office. Today, in 2002, George W. Bush rules the land.   The problem, of course, is that Americans who maintain the illusion of providential destiny will miss the tragic irony of this comparison, whereas those like myself, who relinquished it long ago, can only bemoan the sorry condition of our once democratic republic. 

 

Without rehearsing the careers of Jefferson or TR, it suffices to say that both men were elite individuals who affirmed, preserved, and expanded democracy.   Though neither man was free of contradictions, self-interest, or ambition, mere mention of their names suggests a special American connection between democracy and elites—that is, a group of individuals with old and distinguished family connections, wealth, a pedigreed education providing both cultural sophistication and moral authority, and endowed with the view that disinterested public service for the common good is the highest of all vocations.  

 

This definition will startle most people to whom elites, old or new, are synonymous with the rich—the Vanderbilts of yesteryear or the Bill Gateses and Warren Buffetts of today.  And to supporters of labor and popular democracy, rich people are often bad people.   Philanthropy may whitewash the reputations of robber barons or monopolists but cannot overcome skepticism about the motivations of the wealthy.  Bill Gates’s $19 billion foundation specializes in giving computers and computer software to public schools, a strategy that helps maintain and build markets for Microsoft products.

 

But the individuals or groups to whom this article refers are not merely rich, nor philanthropic, nor motivated to good deeds that may dim memory of bad deeds.  Jefferson and TR acted for the public good in spite of potential harm to their political careers.   Facing opposition from all regions of our fledgling republic, Jefferson lost both reputation and efficacy in his second term as president by imposing an embargo on English and French goods, deeming it better to forego commerce with our principal trading partners than choose between them in the Napoleonic Wars. 

 

And Teddy Roosevelt, as governor of New York and as president, risked political death by angering big businessmen:  he threw New York City trolley car magnates out of his office in Albany, because they opposed a subway with a five-cent fare that workers could afford; and in the White House he interpreted and enforced the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, in defiance of the Supreme Court, so as to assure that business was not above the law, and that its expanded size and power would be matched by the “controlling activity” of an expanded government.  

 

Jefferson and TR were likewise moralists whose authority derived in part from cultural sophistication: both read, wrote, and traveled extensively; both relished experience of many classes, different kinds of people, viewpoints, and behaviors.  Jefferson one, in the Virginia bill of 1785 recognizing freedom of religion, and Roosevelt, in negotiating a peace in 1905 between Japan and Russia that merited a Nobel Prize, provided evidence of a moral authority rooted in what Matthew Arnold called culture—acting in accord with one’s “best self,” working to assure that “reason and the will of God prevail.”      

 

George W. Bush, like Jefferson and TR, comes from an elite background.  He was     born into old money and family connection.  His grandfather was a Connecticut senator and his father was president.  A mediocre student, he nonetheless attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School.  But here any meaningful comparison between Bush Jr. and his predecessors breaks down.  He may use elite connections to get ahead, but he is no disinterested elitist.  With Bush, we know what not to expect: any will towards disinterested public service (tax cuts for the rich, more work rules for the poor, cuts in social services and corollary augmentation of defense appropriations); any evidence of cultural sophistication (before becoming president he never traveled anywhere but Mexico, and he rarely reads books, much less writes them).  With respect to moral authority, he talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk.  He rails against political injustice in nations that comprise his “axis of evil,” but ignores social injustice—vast economic disparities—here in America and between North and South around the globe.  And he allows John Ashcroft, his reactionary attorney general, to abrogate civil liberties for vague purposes of national security.   It is not his elite derivation that makes Bush Jr. pertinent to my purpose here, but rather that he epitomizes a problem that requires clarification—the failure of elite social reproduction.         

 

   For many reasons discussed below, writing about matters relevant to elite social reproduction is not currently on the agenda.  Which is why it seems at once curious and propitious that the books reviewed here—David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise, John Seabrook’s Nobrow, and John Judis’s The Paradox of American Democracy—actually discuss elites and their relation to American history and democracy.  These are useful and, with one exception, relatively informative and original volumes.  And all three at least correctly situate the question precisely where it belongs, at the tricky juncture between the market, social class, culture, and politics.  

 

                                           

The worst of the bunch, Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks, is the one best known.  Its author is celebrated for coining the word “bobos,” meaning highly educated folk of the information age who, besides constituting a new elite, simultaneously practice (and reconcile) the work ethic of the once philistine and uptight bourgeoisie and the hedonistic ethic of the once seedy but indulgent bohemians.  The book is little more than a cute and conservatively slanted reworking of two clichés: the first that bourgeois and bohemian were once in fact opposing lifestyles; and the other that with the advent of the service economy and post—industrialism, a “professional middle class” (PMC) has eventually become the ruling class.  Brooks himself is clueless about the contradiction between what he asserts and what his book actually demonstrates.  He claims to have discovered a new elite, yet what he shows is that elite social reproduction has failed.           

 

            The key to understanding Brooks’s information age upper class is its obsession with self-actualization.  Bobos are diligent, ambitious, and entrepreneurial because for them work is both cause and effect of a self-actualizing career or vocation; without work, one cannot have such a career, and with such a career, work becomes interesting, enjoyable, and energizing.   In private they pursue other self-actualizing activities such as creative avocations (writing, painting, ceramics), pleasurable recreation (including sex, select consumerism, athletics, adventurous vacations), and good causes (environmentalism and educational improvement, mostly because health, knowledge, and self-actualization correlate). 

 

Yet bobo virtues indicate why they cannot possibly be described as members of an elite: everything they do, even when they are doing good, revolves around the self; they have work lives and private lives, but no public life.   Brooks acknowledges that his bobos are too private. They “think of morality in personal terms” and eschew commitments that override their individual self-interest.  He also shows them as principally expressing their values via the conventional roles of a market society—as producers (of services) and consumers.  They cannot constitute an elite, because they simply have no interest in setting moral or cultural standards for their fellow Americans or for mankind, nor, as I shall show, do they have the least capacity or desire to move beyond the personal to the public, to become leaders with a large and critical vision of American society.   

 

            Brooks is a bad historian and a weak sociologist.  Bohemians have always been bourgeois, and vice versa.  Most if not all of the major artists of the last two centuries came from middle-class backgrounds, and spent their lives, in rather comfortable bourgeois surroundings, reflecting, however ambivalently or critically, on their origins—think of Flaubert, Joyce, Gide, and Mann, or the films of Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut, the art of Matisse, Cezanne, Bonnard, and Lucien Freud.  At the same time, by the mid- or late-nineteenth century, an important segment of the upper levels of the bourgeoisie adopted bohemian habits of life:  leisure, hedonistic experiments with drugs, a kind of luxurious and expensive asceticism that complemented their distaste for certain aspects of modernity (the city, machines of the industrial age, disintegration of community, moral and institutional instability).

 

This same upper-class group idolized artisans, sponsored the Arts and Crafts movement, and embraced modernist art as a primitivist critique of modern society and an affirmation of bohemian aestheticism (“art for art’s sake”) opposed to the mundane dreariness of bourgeois life.  They were likewise first to make self-actualization the central tenet of their antimodern beliefs.  

 

In short, Brooks lacks the erudition to know that boboism—a bourgeoisie reconciled with bohemianism—has a long and not necessarily salutary history, inasmuch as many of the antimoderns were racist, sexist, and enamored of military force.  He also fails to see that his contemporary bobos are a kind of expanded but ersatz parody of their antimodern predecessors:  their aestheticism is commercialized and infinitely replicable; their primitivism is mostly about style and persona; and their anticapitalism is false.  The early bobos were viscerally distressed by modern capitalist society, whereas Brooks’s bobos, as their title location in “paradise” implies, appear content with their lot in the best of all possible worlds. 

 

            They are, that is, not elites but “tools.”  They are happy, even complacent, as well-paid servants who conform to the demands that their bosses and the social conventions of our time impose on them.  And while bobos may have impressive educational credentials, enabling them to make a good living and enjoy a comfortable, perhaps even luxurious, lifestyle, they do not have, nor do they exercise, power.  As the well-paid employees of Enron discovered, they can be fired at any time, and they can be castigated severely for infringement of the rules—principal among which are disobeying their bosses, or, worse yet, snitching on the bosses and revealing to the public how business in the contemporary corporation or governmental agency is really conducted. 

 

My own view is that bobos are not as happy as they appear, but they keep smiling, with their noses to the ground, so as to survive in a scary and unstable environment.  They accept market values and pride themselves on being “hot” commodities.  In their private lives their ideal of self-actualization tunes them in to where Oprah, Martha Stewart, Madonna, Steven Spielberg and other media giants want them—that is, primed for high-end consumption, expressing their self-development through endless acquisition of goods and cultural consumerism, trained to gentle cynicism by “Saturday Night Live,” socially aware and politically correct, but decidedly not to the extent where they might comprise a constituency for a critical culture and politics.  

 

            Bobos in Paradise is a typical product of the late 1990s era of boom and dot.com bubble.  Brooks’s book enjoyed market success because it corresponded to the triumphalism of the end of the decade, in which it was possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, meaning transform persons derided in the 1980s as “yuppie scum” or witless capitalist tools into virtuous and superior beings, reconcilers of middle-class and bohemian ideals, and the raw material of a new elite.  Now that the bubble has burst, now that we know about Enron and Andersen and Merrill Lynch, we can perhaps see Brooks’s book for what it is—superficial.  Its one virtue, which runs contrary to its author’s intention, is that it shows what an elite is not.

 

 

            John Seabrook’s Nobrow:  The Culture of Marketing—The Marketing of Culture is the best of the bunch, a book full of original insights about our contemporary cultural situation, about class, culture, and elites in American history, and about the democratic and undemocratic implications of popular culture.  The problem with Nobrow is that it is hastily composed and falls prey to what its author criticizes, the fact that quality is no longer the standard by which culture (literature, art, music) is created or judged, and that all that matters is how things are marketed, how much “buzz” they can generate, and how “hot” they are.   Seabrook is a journalist who has the pop culture beat at The New Yorker; he writes with market appeal in mind and with the catchy categories that make a book hot.  The result is that his many acute insights never amount to a trenchant analysis, and he misses an important angle—that the debased and deceptive values of contemporary culture owe as much to our deteriorating politics as to marketplace economics.

 

The crux of Seabrook’s argument is that elites have disappeared along with the postmodern amalgam of art and entertainment.   Why should class be so inextricably connected with culture?  Seabrook understands that this is the American way, that our democratic society eschewed class discourse from the beginning and only allowed class distinctions as an expression of taste and culture—e.g., Mozart and Bach rather than Frank Sinatra or rock; foreign “art films” vs. Hollywood products.   But now pop culture and high culture have become one: Seabrook is very good in describing how George Lucas brilliantly mixes Kurosawa, Leni Riefenstahl, and Fritz Lang with Flash Gordon and Butch Cassidy in his Star Wars series.  And once pop culture has absorbed high culture, there is no longer any way to affirm taste, a quality Edmund Burke related to moral as well as cultural authority, to define and uphold an elite.

 

 

Seabrook provides other nuanced and even dialectical ideas about the implications of total cultural commodification.  The cultural marketplace is democratic because everyone consumes and all tastes are equal.  It is likewise fragmented:  there are many market niches and cult audiences; everybody is catered to and at the same time the old belief in a common culture becomes irrelevant.  But the new, ostensibly democratic culture—multicultural, primed for every racial, religious, gender, or sexual preference—is likewise deceptive.  It hides the stark economic disparities in a class society:  the fans of football and basketball—now transformed from games to global products—are indigent compared to the multimillionaire players, team owners, and season ticket holders who require new stadiums.  But marketized culture does not always deceive.  Sometimes, even when it is all about money, like “gangsta rap,” it can contain lyrics that describe in vivid detail the degradation and violence of the urban ghetto and thus yield social criticism.  

 

The analysis in Nobrow might have been improved, however, if Seabrook had recognized that the fate of culture is likewise the fate of other elements of society.  We live in a world of anarchic capitalism where the market devours and debases all values and institutions—not only the high culture that defined elites, but also politics, religion, the family, and education.  

 

And he also might have paid more attention to the politics of marketization.  For today’s disordered capitalism did not evolve naturally in response to new cybernetic technologies and the global economy.  Since the 1970s in both America and Britain, there has been a broad and intensely political assault on culture and society.  State power and neoliberalism have forged a new and extreme laissez-faire marketplace in which “all that is solid melts into air.”  The primacy of politics is natural to human social life; the primacy of economics and the market is something that must be artificially created.  Insistence on deregulation (utilities, the media, telecommunications, financial institutions), constant devaluation of government, abuse of labor unions, the attack on many or all elements of the welfare state and environmentalism, the transformation, in short, of market economies into market societies—these are the effects of conscious government policies and the purposeful use of state power under Reagan, Thatcher, Bush Sr. and Jr., Clinton, and Blair. 

 

 The disintegration of American politics—the very matter that Seabrook omits mentioning—is what John Judis’s The Paradox of American Democracy is about.  The paradox Judis refers to is the curious but “integral” relation between elites and democracy in the United States.  Our democracy has functioned best when elites were for an activist government that reconciles capital and labor and when they behaved disinterestedly, meaning above party, class, and race.  Such elites are necessary because Judis sees the electorate as passive—it votes but does not make policy—and powerful business interests look out only for themselves.

 

Judis mentions several elite institutions which, in the old days, acted disinterestedly to realize the common good:  the New Civic Federation pushed for the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913; the Committee on Economic Development (CED) promoted a diluted version of the Employment Act of 1946, which at least affirmed the principle of government responsibility for economic stability; and the Council on Foreign Relations helped to assure that after the Second World War, America would accept its international obligations and become a world leader

 

But now things have changed.  Judis is a Washington liberal insider who laments the takeover of K Street (D.C.’s principal business and professional thoroughfare) by groups who are narrowly ideological or, as he describes them, “irresponsible elites.”  He recalls that, because of incessant corporate lobbying, Congress never even voted on a bill—Burke-Hartke (1971)—that would have precluded tax breaks for American multinationals investing overseas and that would have allowed the president to restrict export of capital that threatened American jobs.  He shows how Richmond lawyer Lewis Powell (later Justice Powell of the Supreme Court) and Irving Kristol convinced CEOs to fight government regulation and fund conservative think tanks.  And in spite of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, he reveals prestigious publishers and national foundations succumbing to business and right wing intimidation:  Katherine Graham and the Sulzbergers fired senior liberal editors to satisfy advertisers who objected to their democratic views, and the Ford Foundation turned from issues like consumer reform and environmentalism to business friendly and minimally effective community activism.      

 

The information is persuasive, but the story that frames it is not.  Judis is too enamored of the immediate post–World War II era.  He describes it as “an age of celebration and agreement,”  in which capital, labor, and government, guided by policy elites, cooperated on domestic and foreign policy—the minimum wage (Eisenhower increased it by 33 percent), urban renewal, highway construction, free trade, foreign aid, and the Cold War containment policy. 

 

But this glowing picture of cooperation is only one side of the coin, a side that ignores the paths by which the postwar era led to later conservative triumphs and many current problems.    First recall the dangerous inhibition of civil liberties:  loyalty oaths, anticommunist purges, and the domestication of labor unions and all left-wing organizations that promoted socialist democracy.   And then, equally important, the indirect effects of the Cold War, which, by stressing the value of  “free enterprise” versus Communism, legitimized business and made heroes of corporate leaders.  Eisenhower had a famously corporate cabinet that included “engine Charlie” Wilson (formerly of GM) who said “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” and “electric” Charlie Wilson (formerly of GE), who put Ronald Reagan on television proclaiming that “progress is our finest product.”  Ironically, even though government subsidized private sector growth and used Keynesian methods to control economic cycles, business was seen as the sole cause of  “the rising tide that lifts all boats.” The postwar social compact that Judis celebrates was embodied in the racist deal between developers and lily-white labor unions known as urban renewal, a policy resulting in devastated central cities and the isolation of African-Americans and the immigrant poor in inner-city ghettoes.  Interstate highways spurred suburban development, serving to create a depoliticized and passive electorate interested mainly in things appropriate to the private world of the American Dream:  the nuclear family as opposed to the old ties of community and extended family, consumption, leisure, hedonism, and self-actualization. 

 

Judis is also mostly wrong about the 1960s.  A good liberal, he likes civil rights, consumer and environmental reform, and even credit cards that stimulate both economic growth and service jobs.  He dislikes black power advocates, student radicals who wanted to create “apocalypse now” in America, and countercultural types who, in the name of raised consciousness, took sex, drugs, and self-indulgence to extremes.    Everything he labels good about the 1960s has transformed America for the better; anything bad was the cause of the terrible popular and business counterreaction that followed. 

 

  He mentions Vietnam, but exculpates the old elites who began and ran the war, arguing that these same “wise men” later told Lyndon Johnson to end it.  This begs the question, because by 1968 the damage had been done.  The elites discredited themselves, Johnson’s presidency was down the drain along with its promise of a Great Society, and not only student and countercultural radicals but most intelligent people began to feel that a tripartite (corporate, political, military) elite or “military-industrial complex” presided over a national security state that betrayed them and democracy.  Judis misunderstands the warning that C. Wright Mills and Dwight Eisenhower gave to the country at the end of the 1950s—that the old and sometimes disinterested elite, whose principal function was to balance democracy and power, had coagulated into an elite with only one concern: national and imperial power, with America as the central node of a great world-system.              

 

  Judis does more special pleading when he assumes that things he likes about the sixties, such as civil rights and consumer and environmental reform, had nothing to do with the popular or business-led counterrevolution that followed.  This ignores the fact that the white working class was threatened by black gains in the civil rights movement, and they, combined with white southerners who lamented the effects of desegregation, constituted a potential electorate for George Wallace and comprised the “silent majority” that allowed for Nixon’s and, ultimately, Reagan’s electoral triumphs.  And were businessmen and workers in manufacturing generally as happy about Nader or environmental reform as foundation elites in Washington and New York? 

 

To understand the contemporary era of globalization, we might also ask where was the old elite—at the Council on Foreign Relations or Brookings—when Nixon in 1971 unilaterally abrogated the fixed exchange rates established at Bretton Woods in 1944?  As international economic policy, the abrogation of Bretton Woods is a complex matter, involving floating rates in lieu of fixed rates of exchange, as well as a total disconnect between the value of money and the value of gold.  As a power play, however, Nixon’s unilateral action produced two simple and desired results:  it gave the United States financial leverage over all its advanced industrial competitors in Western Europe and Japan, and also made the conduct of business so risky that democratic reform, even if urgently needed, became a secondary consideration.  The old elite agreed with Nixon because, like him, it had long ago decided that the maintenance and extension of American power—embodied in control over other players—was more important than either stability or democracy.   

 

We can, then, conclude that the old elites betrayed themselves and the nation, lost our trust, and are no more.  In their heyday they legitimized their own power by using an expanded and relatively autonomous government to create a modicum of economic security and stability, to ameliorate class disparities, and to regulate the corporate economy.  With their passing we have clearly entered a new gilded age where special interests not only wield preponderant influence over government, but in important ways are the government:  Bush Jr. and company are indistinguishable, in both style and goals, from the corporate interests they serve.  Our last gilded age, however, provoked an era of popular outrage and elite reform.  Will this pattern of the last century recur in some form in this millennial century?   In other words, the question of elite social reproduction comes down to this: do we or do we not have a usable past?

 

A usable past will depend on which of two directions we take in response to emerging globalization.  One direction will lead to disaster and to a cognitive, cultural, and political dissonance between America and the rest of the world.  The other direction may lead to democratic reform in the United States, enabling us to use our immense power disinterestedly, for the good of others as well as ourselves, and wisely, so that, as we confront the political, economic, and cultural diversity of a new century, a global age can emerge in which we play an important but not a singular role. 

 

 A number of powerful illusions continue to dominate our history, culture, and politics, to which most Americans and elite reformers were or still are stubbornly attached.  First is the belief that we are a people endowed with a special providential destiny and moral mandate: the old Puritan “city on the hill” that inspired Jonathan Edwards as well as Ronald Reagan.  Then there is Jefferson’s view of American exceptionalism, expressed in his statement that “America is the world’s best hope for democracy.”  In the twentieth century, we began to believe that our morality, democracy, and economic power obligated us to police the world.  In the postwar era, we subscribed to Henry Luce’s notion of an “American Century” in which an imperial America—with military troops and armaments at ready around the globe—would achieve a “Pax Americana.”  We also believe that democracy is easily compatible with both capitalism and world power; that America is the embodiment of modern Western culture; that our utopian vision of global capitalism can be exported wholesale because, as John Judis says, “Americans stand poised to realize the dream of Wilsonian internationalism: to create a world capitalism no longer threatened by either imperialist rivalries or Communism.”  

 

 If we persist in these illusions—from which neither liberals nor the Left and labor are wholly free—we risk isolating ourselves from the rest of the world.  Even our allies in the European Union and Japan are dubious about them; others, as 9/11 should demonstrate, entirely reject them. 
 

But there is another road we can take, one that provides a usable past.  A constituency for democratic reform is emerging that consists of African-Americans, the millions of immigrants (Latino, Asian, African, Caribbean) who have come here because of the nature of global labor markets, the liberal and democratic socialist intelligentsia, and many independent-minded Americans who cannot be bought off by bobo status or special interests, and who fear both for their own futures and the future of our democracy.  This emerging constituency is not yet a movement, which means several things.  The separate groups that compose it are divided by ethnic conflict (as shown by recent elections in New York and Los Angeles) Many of the immigrants, especially in the second and third generations, are tempted by the seductions of conventional success in our consumer society.  These groups also lack the kind of elite leadership that usually arises in response to well-defined popular movements rather than to an inchoate if emergent constituency.   

 

Yet this emergent constituency has helped keep hope alive for a progressive politics and critical culture within the labor movement and among a small but not entirely irrelevant group of educated, thoughtful, and culturally sophisticated Americans.  Indeed, some believe that as our demography changes, as ethnic conflict turns into class solidarity, as we become a majority-minority nation, as labor organizing efforts make headway, and as a critical intelligentsia finds its voice and its audience, the new gilded age will go the way of its nineteenth-century avatar, resulting in a resurgence of reform.  While we should not be sanguine about these possibilities, they gain credence, as the stolen election of 2000 shows, to the extent that the Right feels obliged to deny them.   Democratic reform based on resistance to the old American illusions may also help form and inspire new leaders—perhaps new elites—who can respond not only to the American vox populi but also—humbly, with cultural sensitivity and justice—to the peoples of the globe.   This is good work, and work aplenty, for the twenty-first century.