If Books Could Kill - David Brooks's ＂Bobos in Paradise＂

00:00:00.000 Peter. Michael. What do you know about a book called Bobo's in Paradise?

00:00:05.160 I know that this is the book that made David Brooks famous. Yes. Or whatever he is.

00:00:25.820 Should we start out by talking about like the phenomenon of David Brooks?

00:00:29.720 I think you have to.

00:00:31.140 As soon as this name comes up, it's like, okay, who's going to mention this first?

00:00:34.400 We have to get some stuff out of the way.

00:00:36.700 Yeah.

00:00:37.020 David Brooks is a Times columnist.

00:00:40.720 They're House conservative.

00:00:41.980 Yeah.

00:00:42.240 I sort of mentally and emotionally prepared for this episode by reading a couple of his

00:00:46.700 columns, randomly selected, and then I drilled an imperceptible hole in my skull and poured

00:00:53.000 lukewarm water all over my brain.

00:00:55.880 I mean, thinking about him as I have in the last month, unfortunately.

00:00:59.720 If you were putting together a list of the most influential thinkers and writers of the

00:01:06.000 2000s, I think he would be probably in the top five.

00:01:09.200 He apparently had phone calls with Rahm Emanuel, who was at the time the chief of staff of

00:01:14.920 Obama's White House, once or twice a week.

00:01:17.940 Like a huge swath of the American establishment looked to him for guidance of what they should

00:01:23.740 be saying and doing.

00:01:24.580 Right. And I always wonder whether that is influence or whether he's just being sort of used as a barometer.

00:01:32.000 Right. Right. He's just sort of there and people are checking in on him because he symbolizes something.

00:01:37.320 Well, I think, I mean, my sort of whole David Brooks like thing clicked into place when I was reading his bio. He's one of these boomers who like kind of brags about getting bad grades in high school. He's like, oh, school really wasn't for me. 0.70

00:01:50.840 But then I attended the University of Chicago, like immediately upon graduation.

00:01:56.040 He graduates in 1983.

00:01:58.300 And then this is the thing that like made everything click for me.

00:02:01.060 He for the next year is a police reporter in Chicago.

00:02:05.640 This is the only feet on the ground journalism that he does.

00:02:09.360 Yeah.

00:02:09.540 Everything after this is just punditry.

00:02:12.100 Right.

00:02:12.260 He's like he's like a political opinion haver.

00:02:14.860 Right.

00:02:15.080 So he just sort of like flits from thing to thing without any real object permanence and without really gathering any like deep expertise on anything.

00:02:25.640 Yeah. And you really get the sense when you're reading his columns that that's exactly what's happening.

00:02:30.320 Yeah.

00:02:30.500 He will sometimes cite a single source, almost never two.

00:02:34.980 It's incredible.

00:02:35.620 He's creating the illusion of authority, right?

00:02:37.860 He's like, FYI, in case you didn't trust me, I do read a book now and then. 0.85

00:02:42.360 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 fucking guy because he really only sort of like gets talked about when he's like being made fun of on Twitter. 0.85

00:02:59.280 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 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.

00:03:18.380 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.

00:03:26.320 Well, that's that's the thing.

00:03:27.660 I think a lot of a lot of those people that used to read him in the early 2000s are still reading him.

00:03:32.120 And I think he's still probably fairly influential on that group.

00:03:35.080 Right.

00:03:35.360 Because I had 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.

00:03:41.160 And they're like, oh, did you know Denmark isn't actually socialist?

00:03:44.440 I read in a David Brooks column.

00:03:46.120 the other day i was like first of all that's just a nightmare of a sudden secondly that this is like

00:03:50.660 a three hour long conversation that i'm not willing to have with you i was like oh fun fact

00:03:54.480 interesting so the title of the book is bobos in paradise the new upper class and how they got

00:04:01.340 there okay as opposed to other books that we've done on the show i'm not going to talk about this

00:04:05.160 book thematically i'm not gonna like break it apart and put it back together okay mostly because

00:04:09.800 the overwhelming experience of reading this book is not the ideology. It's the thudding

00:04:16.200 shallowness. So do you know anything about this book? Yeah, I think I know what Bobo stands for.

00:04:23.080 It's a combination of bohemian and bourgeoisie. Is that right? Yes. I don't really know much more

00:04:29.540 about it than that. I think he was just writing about that generation, but I don't know much

00:04:33.760 beyond that. So the book comes from his observation. He was posted in Brussels for

00:04:40.420 four years in the early 1990s for the Wall Street Journal covering Europe. And when he returned to

00:04:45.540 America, he noticed a bunch of differences in the kinds of lifestyles, the kinds of brands that

00:04:49.300 people were buying and just sort of the culture around him. So I'm going to send you an excerpt

00:04:54.020 where he basically lays out the thesis of the book. Oh, my God. I know it's a big brick. This

00:05:00.080 episode is going to have like a lot of quotes because some of the stuff that he says in the

00:05:03.260 book like you really have to like read it to believe it all right the thing that struck me

00:05:08.280 as oddest was the way the old categories no longer made sense throughout the 20th century

00:05:13.280 it's been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian

00:05:17.980 counterculture the bourgeoisie were the square practical ones they defended tradition and

00:05:23.180 middle class morality they worked for corporations lived in suburbs and went to church meanwhile the

00:05:29.420 bohemians were the free spirits, they were the artists and the intellectuals, the hippies and

00:05:34.140 the beats. But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up.

00:05:40.120 It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker.

00:05:45.840 And this wasn't just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated

00:05:49.780 people's attitudes towards sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder

00:05:55.500 to separate the anti-establishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man by the way no

00:06:00.760 nothing i would like less than for david brooks to investigate my attitude toward sex we have a

00:06:06.980 really long excerpt about that later it's really dark i feel like this is combining two of the

00:06:15.460 most hackish think pieces the first is where you define an entire generation of people based on like

00:06:23.120 a couple of mostly aesthetic shared features like the modern version of this is you just

00:06:28.060 find out what app is popular with 15 year olds and then you pitch to your editor a piece called

00:06:34.620 like the snapchat generation yeah right and then the other archetype is when you make the

00:06:40.680 observation that a generation of people that used to be like more carefree and anti-establishment

00:06:46.800 in their youth are now more bland and conservative because they're like 45.

00:06:53.860 It's like, well, this guy used to listen to Nirvana, but now he has a job selling insurance.

00:07:01.500 But then I also think that in a way that is not a given for the books that we talk about

00:07:05.000 on this show, I think the central premise of this book is true.

00:07:09.460 The first chapter is where he lays out the sort of core argument.

00:07:12.800 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.

00:07:21.360 Right. And really, since the 1960s, there has been the creation of a kind of knowledge class.

00:07:27.460 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.

00:07:38.160 Yeah. I think that is true.

00:07:39.640 Yeah. And I feel like smarter people have written about it.

00:07:42.600 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 some common features and in fact, perhaps associating themselves with the elite more than the traditional middle class.

00:08:05.420 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.

00:08:17.640 It's really just the the transition of the United States and frankly, every other developed country from like a manufacturing society to like a knowledge society.

00:08:25.540 Right. Am I am I wrong? I feel like we're dancing around what the the term that the more diseased online folks use, which is the professional managerial class, the PMC.

00:08:36.820 Yes. I have a whole section on this. The reason why I think that David Brooks's book is correct

00:08:42.760 is that this is like the 48th book to chronicle this. This is a really obvious trend. Bordieu

00:08:51.100 talked about the, I think it was like the new Petit Bourgeoisie. Daniel Bell wrote a book called

00:08:58.020 The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, which also explored this in 1973. I read a bunch of

00:09:02.880 articles about yuppies from the 80s and 90s you know these panicked newsweek articles they basically

00:09:06.960 said the same thing they're like they're railing against selling out as they eat eight dollar sushi

00:09:12.000 yeah i found an academic article that talked about slumpies socially liberal urban-minded

00:09:19.400 professionals thank god that didn't catch on jesus christ slumpies it's like all right that's a

00:09:24.920 little bit try hard but also this is like a true thing that happened yeah in the world like there

00:09:30.640 is now the creation of a knowledge class. And yes, the famous and I think most accurate description

00:09:35.720 of this is Barbara and John Ehrenreich's terminology of the professional managerial

00:09:41.240 class. They were coming at this from like a socialist labor organizing perspective. And

00:09:46.400 their original paper from, I believe it was 1978, essentially said that Marx predicted that the

00:09:51.760 world was going to be divided between capital and labor, right? And this was going to define

00:09:55.000 the political struggle of the next hundred years. What he didn't predict was that over time you have

00:10:00.340 the creation of a class that is in between. In some ways, they are tied to capital and they want

00:10:06.140 to protect capital's interest because many of them are wealthy. But they're also like a lot

00:10:10.500 of middle managers are workers and they have bosses. And so in a lot of ways, they're also

00:10:14.940 similar to labor. In their original piece, they said schoolteachers, civil servants, professors,

00:10:19.700 journalists, entertainers, social workers, doctors, lawyers, admin, podcasters, TikTok dancers. Yes.

00:10:25.960 So Barbara and John Ehrenreich came up with this term, not necessarily to like say anything bad about it, but just to like note that it existed.

00:10:34.160 And also to talk about how this was to them anyway at the time was the fundamental split in the left.

00:10:40.420 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. 0.97

00:10:47.160 The truck driver is like, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here with this guy.

00:10:49.800 And then the professor is like, I don't know why we're talking about like working hours, minimum wages and stuff.

00:10:55.500 He just wouldn't be interested in that.

00:10:57.200 They estimated in the 70s that it was at that time around 25 percent of the workforce.

00:11:03.040 People now say it's roughly like 35 to 40 percent.

00:11:06.360 And this is now one of the defining features of like our politics, our economy, our society.

00:11:10.800 It's changed things in so many different ways.

00:11:14.000 And David Brooks is interested in none of these ways.

00:11:16.420 David Brooks is like, you ever notice that people are drinking a lot of cappuccinos these days?

00:11:21.260 Exactly. Like this is this is what he's interested in is basically he's just like driving around strip malls and like taking notes on stuff that he sees.

00:11:27.660 But he's not doing any of the like actual analysis or even like meeting these people.

00:11:32.120 Like this is a book about Bobo's right about a social class that comprises somewhere, you know, 50, 80 million people.

00:11:38.200 Right. This book does not have one interview.

00:11:40.500 so like you don't get any specificity in this book but you do get a lot of like what we saw

00:11:46.760 in the earlier description where he's like cappuccino gulping bankers it feels like what

00:11:50.200 he really wants to say is like doesn't this stuff seem a little bit gay yeah but he can't say it

00:11:54.620 it is he tries to mask it because he says like i'm a bobo myself in the introduction but like 0.99

00:12:01.020 he fucking hates these people it's like really obvious that he fucking hates these people 0.98

00:12:05.800 so okay so basically his entire argument which again could have been like a magazine article 1.00

00:12:12.260 it would have been fine is that it's essentially education that has caused all this the the mass

00:12:17.460 availability of education starting in the 1960s the expansion of higher education created all

00:12:23.180 these educated people and then all these millions of educated people essentially flooded into the

00:12:27.220 workforce and then started like replicating american culture along the lines of their own

00:12:31.580 tastes. So the first chapter of the book is called The Rise of the Educated Class. And to illustrate

00:12:38.640 the difference between America's previous ruling class and its current ruling class,

00:12:44.160 he contrasts, are you, you're familiar with the New York Times wedding page, right?

00:12:49.300 Yeah, the New York Times wedding page is a list of weddings that,

00:12:54.660 um except that it is this sort of like prized status symbol if you are a couple of successful

00:13:06.000 people you might get a wedding write-up if one of you is the child of someone famous you will

00:13:11.580 certainly get a wedding write-up but yeah this is something that you um throw in the face of uh

00:13:18.880 the house the housewife you hate the most right at your little uh dinner parties or whatever if 1.00

00:13:24.300 you're a New York City asshole. As a New York City asshole, are you going to try to get one? 1.00

00:13:27.940 I'm going to be honest. I don't I didn't know that you try. I don't know how the process works. Do 1.00

00:13:33.920 you like apply? Someone has to mention it to someone at the Times like, hey, one of the top

00:13:39.980 20 legal podcasters in the country is getting married. Let's not drop the ball here. So what

00:13:45.500 he's basically trying to do with this chapter is he wants to contrast the previous ruling class

00:13:49.760 with today's ruling class and the way that he does this is by talking about the new york times

00:13:55.420 wedding pages which i think is like a smart pop journalistic way to do this i'm just like to draw

00:14:01.640 the contrast so he talks about the page from 1950 of course it was all like pedigreed people and i 0.98

00:14:08.220 guess it would mention when your ancestors arrived in america okay apparently the women's jobs were

00:14:16.720 ever mentioned or like they didn't have jobs yeah that was disqualifying if the woman had a job it's

00:14:21.320 just kind of like a snapshot of where the ruling class was in 1950 right and then he contrasts this

00:14:27.380 with a bunch of wedding announcements from 1998 so i'm going to send you another abysmally long

00:14:35.200 excerpt from this all right the couples tell a little of their own story in these articles

00:14:40.520 an amazing number of them seem to have first met while recovering from marathons or searching for

00:14:45.140 remnants of Pleistocene man while on archaeological digs in Eritrea. They usually enjoyed a long and

00:14:51.660 careful romance, including joint vacations in obscure but educational places like Myanmar and

00:14:56.880 Minsk. Many of the couples broke up for a time. Then there was a lonely period apart while one

00:15:01.620 member, say, arranged the largest merger in Wall Street history while the other settled for

00:15:06.180 neurosurgery after dropping out of sommelier school. See? He's good at what he does, man.

00:15:11.540 Sometimes we get to read about modern couples who propose to each other simultaneously.

00:15:16.280 But most of the time, the groom does it the old-fashioned way.

00:15:18.900 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.

00:15:30.860 Okay.

00:15:31.580 So.

00:15:32.180 It's quite a portrait.

00:15:33.300 It's quite a portrait.

00:15:34.460 But then, okay.

00:15:36.080 So he's doing something here that he's clearly very good at.

00:15:39.180 He's giving you these little status details that indicate the aesthetic shift that has happened in America in the last 50 years.

00:15:46.680 So to understand what David Brooks is really doing here, we're going to take a little detour.

00:15:51.080 By far the best article that's ever been written about David Brooks was in 2004 by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia Magazine.

00:15:58.380 He's not talking about this book specifically.

00:16:00.080 He's talking about a Atlantic article that he wrote basically doing a like red counties and blue counties kind of thing.

00:16:07.020 Yeah.

00:16:07.380 Yeah. So this is an excerpt from the David Brooks article. He's talking about Franklin County,

00:16:11.900 Pennsylvania, which is his like red county. He says, Franklin County is a place where no blue

00:16:17.360 New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings, where people don't complain

00:16:22.120 that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be. In Red America, churches are everywhere. 0.95

00:16:26.820 In Blue America, Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America, they have QVC,

00:16:31.580 the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America, we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin,

00:16:36.460 and socially conscious investing.

00:16:38.540 So you see what he's doing, right?

00:16:39.940 He's doing the same listing off of little status details

00:16:43.980 that have this very appealing specificity to them.

00:16:48.820 But then Sasha Isenberg actually checks these things.

00:16:52.040 And it turns out that QVC is not more popular in red states.

00:16:55.460 It's much more of like a suburban ex-urban thing

00:16:57.760 across the country. 0.99

00:16:59.340 Doris Kearns Goodwin is like extremely popular in Texas. 1.00

00:17:02.920 the thing about like they go to church in red states and they go to thai restaurants in blue

00:17:08.100 states is just totally fucking baffling and i can't believe it got past an editor like obviously

00:17:12.400 they have thai restaurants everywhere in america at one point he says like in red counties they 0.98

00:17:18.320 have riding lawnmowers and in blue counties they have undocumented immigrants no they have

00:17:25.260 like undocumented populations are larger in red states right right so at one point david brooks

00:17:31.000 Brooks said that he, like, it was a challenge for me to spend $20 on a meal when I was in

00:17:36.160 Red America. And he's like, I went to Red Lobster over and over again. I couldn't spend 20 bucks.

00:17:41.160 And then Sasha Issenberg goes to this place and like, he goes to Red Lobster and the most

00:17:46.180 expensive item on the menu is a steak for 28 bucks. So in this piece, he says, I called Brooks

00:17:52.560 to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County and the ease with

00:17:57.560 which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. I didn't see it when I was there,

00:18:02.060 but it's true. You can get a nice meal at the Mercerburg Inn. I said it was just as easy at

00:18:06.280 Red Lobster. That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end, he replied,

00:18:11.620 his voice trailing away. That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini

00:18:16.000 dinners there, and I never topped $20. I went through some of the other instances where he

00:18:20.720 made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being too pedantic, taking all

00:18:25.520 this too literally, or of taking a joke and distorting it. Satire has its purpose, but assuming

00:18:30.240 it's on the mark, Brooks should be able to adduce real-world examples that are true. I asked him how

00:18:36.600 I was supposed to tell what was comedy and what was sociology. Generally, I rely on intelligent

00:18:41.220 readers to know, and I think at the Atlantic Monthly, every intelligent reader can tell what

00:18:45.620 the difference is, he replied. You're not approaching the piece in the spirit of an honest

00:18:49.840 reporter, he said. Is this how you're going to start your career? I mean, really doing this kind

00:18:53.880 a piece i used to do them i know them how one starts but it's just something you'll mature 0.95

00:18:58.320 beyond what a fucking hack what a fucking hack dude i don't i don't understand like the like 0.95

00:19:04.840 intelligent readers would know i was lying about the red lobster thing like what yeah why would 0.99

00:19:09.700 why would you know that why would anyone think that you made up the amount of money that you're

00:19:14.000 spending at red lobster and so it's already threateningly obvious what we're gonna find

00:19:19.980 when we return to the wedding passage.

00:19:22.800 Not all of the vows columns are online.

00:19:25.240 And like, I don't know, I'm sure I'm missing something,

00:19:27.600 but there's a huge brick of text,

00:19:29.840 only like a half or a third of which we read,

00:19:33.220 where David Brooks just hammers you

00:19:35.300 with all of these status details

00:19:36.440 from the wedding page of the New York Times.

00:19:38.360 I looked into all of these claims

00:19:41.180 and like very few of them check out.

00:19:44.780 So he says, an amazing number of couples

00:19:47.400 seem to have first met

00:19:48.760 while recovering from marathons couldn't find any of that he says they went on romantic vacations

00:19:56.300 to myanmar and minsk i could find no reference to that i did actually find somebody who proposed

00:20:03.940 to his girlfriend in a hot air balloon that was like the only detail i could actually check out

00:20:10.200 but he then has this detail of proposing by putting a ring in her scuba mask which doesn't

00:20:19.440 it just like doesn't make any fucking sense as like how she putting it on and doesn't notice

00:20:23.080 the ring right so i think his defense of that one would be that like well that one's obviously

00:20:28.800 a joke but then you're also maybe lying about people meeting each other while recovering from

00:20:34.880 marathons i think there's something important here here which is that like if all of your writing 0.98

00:20:40.440 is based on anecdotal evidence right then the anecdotes should be true exactly then the fucking 0.85

00:20:46.100 anecdotes should be true you know but when you're just repeating these little factoids it's like oh 0.85

00:20:49.320 you're just doing stereotypes you're basically doing jeff foxworthy you're like and you might 0.72

00:20:53.760 be a bobo imagine being like the owner of a diner where like david brooks rolls in with like pleated 0.95

00:20:59.800 pants and two blue button-down shirts, one on top of the other. 0.64

00:21:07.280 And he's like, hi, give me your folksiest meal, please.

00:21:10.420 Right. 0.99

00:21:10.860 God damn it. 0.99

00:21:12.360 Is that election season already? 0.99

00:21:13.880 So I'm going to send you the opening of the next chapter.

00:21:16.700 You tell me whether this is lying or not.

00:21:18.520 He does something extremely weird.

00:21:20.900 All right.

00:21:21.860 I'm holding up traffic.

00:21:23.580 I'm walking down the street in Burlington, Vermont, and I come to a corner and see a

00:21:27.400 car approaching.

00:21:28.140 So I stop.

00:21:28.800 The car stops. Meanwhile, I've been distracted by some hippies playing frisbee in the park, 0.99

00:21:34.100 and I stand there daydreaming for what must be 15 or 20 seconds. The car waits. In a normal city,

00:21:40.160 cars roll through these situations. If they see an opening, they take it. But this is Burlington,

00:21:45.180 one of the most socially enlightened cities in America, and drivers here are aware that America

00:21:50.300 has degenerated into a car-obsessed culture where driving threatens to crush the natural rhythms of

00:21:56.340 foot traffic, and local face-to-face community. This driver knows that while sitting behind the

00:22:01.580 wheel, he is ethically inferior to a pedestrian like me. And to demonstrate his civic ideals,

00:22:07.440 he is going to make damn sure that I get the right of way, no matter how long it takes.

00:22:13.320 Eventually, he honks politely, and I wake up and belatedly cross the street. I have to go through

00:22:18.820 this embarrassing ritual about a dozen times before I finally adapt to local moors and trudge

00:22:23.840 straight into intersections so this is a story where david brooks crossed the street i feel like

00:22:31.080 it's this very much defines his approach to reporting where it's like he goes places and

00:22:35.740 he sees like fairly normal stuff like a car stops for you when you're standing at an intersection

00:22:40.340 and then he projects all this weird shit onto it he's like they think that i'm superior to them

00:22:45.520 and that's why they stopped it's like well did you talk to them that is definitely not what 0.98

00:22:49.780 they're thinking while you stand there for 20 seconds gazing into the into the distance

00:22:54.740 so then he goes into this whole thing of like burlington vermont is a latte town

00:23:00.580 he says like there's latte towns but then even in places that aren't latte towns they have like

00:23:05.000 latte neighborhoods and it's like yes david sometimes like places are nice like sometimes

00:23:10.960 i don't know they have cute city squares in various towns i don't really know what you're

00:23:15.440 saying with this but then he gets to a restaurant where he has lunch and he says i was sitting

00:23:21.420 outside at a table eating lunch counting the number of piercings the waitress had on her ears

00:23:26.520 nose lips and belly button 19 i think i'm sure she loved that i know he's like he's like stand

00:23:31.840 still honey i gotta i gotta call him to write but i kept getting distracted by an aging hippie at

00:23:36.460 the next table who would not shut up about zero based budgeting and the differences between

00:23:41.820 preferred and common stock. Gray ponytailed and casual about his grooming, he was lecturing like

00:23:47.200 a professor at the Harvard Business School to a young Woodstock wannabe in grainy glasses and

00:23:51.940 a peasant dress. She was taking notes on a yellow legal pad and intermittently they would digress

00:23:57.380 and talk about some bookkeeping practice or management technique they could adopt at their

00:24:01.540 own company. God, this is so annoying. This is nothing but obvious fiction where he's like,

00:24:09.380 I know.

00:24:09.920 I would love to just sort of like paint a quick picture of the type of people I'm talking

00:24:13.400 about.

00:24:13.800 Yeah.

00:24:14.020 What's the easiest way to do that?

00:24:15.340 Well, make them up.

00:24:16.540 He also says like aging hippie.

00:24:18.100 But like, how do you know that the guy because he's got like long hair?

00:24:21.560 Yeah.

00:24:21.880 Like it might just be a guy who works in finance, describing finance things. 0.97

00:24:25.280 Also, I don't know that any of this fucking happened, frankly. 0.96

00:24:28.400 Do some people have 19 piercings? 0.99

00:24:30.360 Sure.

00:24:31.080 But it's like a little too perfect of a detail.

00:24:33.680 Yeah.

00:24:34.080 This is I mean, and just the most purely aesthetic.

00:24:37.420 Yeah.

00:24:37.600 Like, this guy looks like a hippie, but he's talking about business?

00:24:42.480 Whoa.

00:24:44.440 This lady has earrings, but nearby there is business being done. 0.96

00:24:49.820 What's going on in this crazy town?

00:24:52.880 There's also, okay, I was not going to read this to you, but I kind of can't resist. 1.00

00:24:56.860 So he's walking around this latte town and he does a bunch of excruciating shtick about

00:25:01.800 like the grocery store has organic items now, which is like, okay.

00:25:05.680 And then he says,

00:25:07.620 The Great Harvest Bread Company has recently opened up a franchise in town.

00:25:11.440 This particular store is owned by Ed and Lori Kirpius.

00:25:14.680 Ed got his MBA in 1987 and moved to Chicago, where he was a currency trader.

00:25:18.680 Then, as if driven by the ineluctable winds of the zeitgeist,

00:25:21.780 he gave up on the decade of greed stuff so he could spend more time with his family and community.

00:25:25.960 So him and his wife opened up the shop.

00:25:27.580 They greet you warmly as you walk in the door and hand you a sample slice about the size of a coffee table book.

00:25:32.840 A short lecture commences on the naturalness of the ingredients and the authenticity of

00:25:37.440 the baking process.

00:25:38.660 The store is spare, so you won't think there's any salesmanship going on.

00:25:42.180 Instead, there are teddy bears and children's books for the kids who hang around, and there's

00:25:45.620 Starbucks coffee on sale for the adults.

00:25:47.700 If you ask them to slice the bread in the store, they look at you compassionately as

00:25:51.740 one who has not yet risen to the higher realm of bread consciousness.

00:25:58.400 You can't ask for them to slice the bread in the store.

00:26:01.020 What?

00:26:01.460 sir what sir please leave i was livid reading this because like these people just sound nice

00:26:07.120 yeah they they run a bakery you went in there and they gave you a free slice of bread and they like

00:26:12.700 presumably you asked them about their life story and they told you like yeah i used to be a currency 0.99

00:26:16.380 trader then i moved up here to serve bread and then you're like oh fuck these people i'm gonna 0.96

00:26:20.420 make fun of them in my like best-selling book right and like read all this weird stuff into 0.96

00:26:24.860 them like they were judging me for wanting the bread sliced according to the facts here they

00:26:29.300 just seem like nice people who like made some chit chat with you i will take your straightest

00:26:34.900 whitest loaf of bread sliced but then okay so then i mean this then becomes like a whole tedious

00:26:43.220 thing where like he goes to anthropology even the furniture store which is like very zeitgeisty at

00:26:49.260 the time and then he describes like the couches with you know distressed leather and blah blah

00:26:55.140 lots oh god it's it's very hard to keep your concentration just punishing to read these 0.97

00:26:59.820 fucking passages girls are ripping their own jeans these days but then okay but then what 0.97

00:27:05.640 really frustrates me about this book is that i actually think that he's on to something i think 0.99

00:27:11.220 that this aesthetic shift that we went through from the 80s to i guess the 2000s where like 0.90

00:27:16.920 yeah people were paying 150 dollars for jeans that had fucking holes in them right the mass 0.96

00:27:22.760 marketing of authenticity, of the aesthetic of authenticity. I would like to read an actual, 0.95

00:27:29.520 a real book about that. Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I also think that like the people who

00:27:36.000 are doing the same corporate work as their fathers, but have like adopted the optics of

00:27:45.480 either individualism or counterculture, whatever you might want to call it.

00:27:49.980 that's sort of an interesting topic too right that um the the aesthetics have changed but the least

00:27:57.260 interesting way to go about that is to walk into a bakery and be like things are crazy now apricot

00:28:02.880 loaves i do think it's sort of there's a degree to which like corporations have adopted these

00:28:10.500 aesthetics and that is like a little more nefarious and weird and complex but i do think

00:28:16.520 that if it's like the year 2000 and there's like someone who was a hippie in 1971 and now they have

00:28:22.760 a job but also a ponytail that's not that weird to me that just sort of yeah yeah i i think you're

00:28:28.800 right about the fact that it's that a lot of it goes back to marketing in a passage like it appears 0.67

00:28:34.300 toward the end of the book and i actually skipped it so it's like i can't fucking do this again 0.60

00:28:36.960 he goes to are you familiar with rei the outdoor goods store sure so it's like you know whatever 0.77

00:28:42.460 North Face, any of these like high end parka companies. And he has something that is like

00:28:47.740 borderline insightful about how they're selling all this like super hardcore mountaineering gear

00:28:52.980 to people who are just going to like wear it in their Subaru as they drive to their office park

00:28:57.100 and walk like three minutes to their job. It's the aesthetics of like, you're an extreme person

00:29:02.020 doing extreme stuff. He has another borderline interesting section about vacations, how it used

00:29:08.800 to be like you'd go to paris and you'd go to the eiffel tower whatever yeah but now it's sort of

00:29:13.160 like well when you go to paris you stay at like an abandoned candle factory everything has been

00:29:18.140 sort of artisanized everyone wants like an individual experience and none of us want to

00:29:22.220 feel like we're part of mass culture and the mass culture has gotten very good at selling that back

00:29:27.180 to us the idea that we're our own individual person even as like i'm wearing an rei coat that

00:29:32.840 40,000 other people own yeah i i think it's there's a degree to which like the suburbs have

00:29:38.860 sort of like swallowed our soul that is left people feeling like they don't have a way to

00:29:45.900 express themselves individually um there's just there's too many people we're all pretty similar

00:29:51.660 how how do you reckon with existence how do you fend off your exist your perpetual

00:29:57.640 existential crisis. You need to believe that you are doing something interesting.

00:30:03.740 Well, this is another thing that Brooks never really talks about in his book. Because he has

00:30:08.680 so much contempt for liberals who like run nice bakeries, he keeps going back to this as like a

00:30:15.000 liberal thing. But I read this really interesting article when I was researching our episode on the

00:30:20.340 chicks for You're Wrong About, about the aesthetics of country Western music taking

00:30:26.920 over the Republican Party. You know, George H.W. Bush didn't wear a cowboy hat.

00:30:31.360 No, he was a bureaucrat and a statesman.

00:30:33.540 Yeah, he's like he's like a patrician old money guy. Right. And you get to his son

00:30:37.520 who has this fake ranch in Texas and he has to play up all this Texas stuff,

00:30:42.780 even though he's like very obviously just like a legacy kid.

00:30:46.300 An accent that's drastically stronger than his father's.

00:30:49.180 Exactly. The aesthetic sort of move has happened on both sides. It just obviously happened

00:30:55.160 differently. Like a lot of people in red states drive pickup trucks who like maybe help their

00:31:00.860 friend move once a year. They're doing the same thing as the REI people are doing. Yeah. These

00:31:06.140 aren't really like elite things. This is kind of everybody. And most of this is like mass culture.

00:31:11.920 Yeah. Starbucks was in every fucking mall in America. Anthropologie is in every mall in 0.99

00:31:16.380 america yeah this is from a weird time in like the late 90s early aughts when for some reason

00:31:23.240 starbucks was like just affiliated with like fluffy liberals yeah this is like a massive

00:31:29.040 sprawling multi-billion dollar company right there's a tendency among the david brookses of

00:31:34.540 the world to just like look at whatever liberals are doing and being like well that's just some 0.98

00:31:41.380 frilly bullshit you know why why are you eating uh wonder bread off the floor oh you bought a 0.94

00:31:48.380 jacket you don't really need that vest i'm gonna write a book about this all right so the next 0.98

00:31:52.480 chapter is about corporations it gets into a different tendency of his but first we have to

00:31:57.900 start with the opening the opening vignette this is about uh business and pleasure okay go down to

00:32:05.180 your local park in the summertime you'll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin tight

00:32:10.000 band-ex pants. All right, David. I know. Just tone it down, David. Relax. Imagine if the Puritans 0.97

00:32:15.760 could get a load of this. Women running around in their underwear in public. But look at the 1.00

00:32:20.140 bra joggers more closely. It's not wanton hedonism you see on their faces. They're not exposing 0.72

00:32:26.440 themselves for the sake of exhibitionism. Any erotic effect of their near nudity is counteracted

00:32:33.340 by their expressions of grim determination. They're setting goals and striving to achieve

00:32:38.600 them you never see them smile not true david brooks is like is uh telling every jogger that

00:32:44.600 passes him to smile and none of them are smiling and he's like they never smile they look back

00:32:50.700 angrily like your wife when when you return from work two hours late after a long dinner with your

00:32:57.900 research assistant so this chapter is about companies he talks about how companies are

00:33:03.680 kind of getting rid of these hierarchical things apparently there was a thing where dreamworks

00:33:07.460 got rid of job titles okay one of the examples is aol because it's the year 2000 so they're doing

00:33:13.480 like urban villages there's another company that sets up like rolling desks to make it easier for 0.86

00:33:18.760 people to collaborate like you know the bobo move is to get rid of hierarchies right so it's like 0.92

00:33:23.160 companies are getting rid of hierarchies okay yeah ceos are wearing jeans now ceos show up in 0.95

00:33:27.280 sweaters a lot of ceos talk about work as this form of self-actualization they talk about workers

00:33:32.440 as their families there's kind of like this casualization and it's a little bit gauche to

00:33:36.940 talk about things like oh you're my boss or whatever at work yeah he talks about how you

00:33:41.360 know the the ceos even though they're all saying this like oh it's it's not hierarchical here or

00:33:45.680 whatever they're still kind of bragging when i go into work on the weekends i see a lot of people

00:33:50.120 coming they're part of our family and so they just like want to work on the weekends yeah yeah he's

00:33:54.900 kind of trying to tie it back to the jogger he says countercultural capitalists are not restrained

00:34:00.080 by the old puritanical or protestant code instead they've constructed their own ethos that creates

00:34:05.400 a similar and perhaps more rigorous system of restraint. They have transformed work into a

00:34:10.340 spiritual and intellectual vocation, so they approach their labor with the fervor of artists

00:34:15.000 and missionaries. Their collars may not be buttoned up, and their desks may not be neat,

00:34:20.180 but they are, after a fashion, quite self-disciplined. Members of the educated class

00:34:24.540 often regard work as an expression of their entire being, so of course they devote themselves

00:34:28.880 to it with phenomenal energy. For many, there is no time when they are not at work.

00:34:33.560 first of all i am very very annoyed to have david brooks talking to me about what having a job is

00:34:40.860 like only one of us knows what having a job is like david there's not it's not that there's

00:34:46.600 nothing here in the sort of like shift from traditional workplace aesthetics to modern

00:34:52.200 workplace aesthetics but a a lot of that is like ceos realizing that a lot of traditional

00:34:58.860 workplace aesthetics contribute nothing to productivity. So why not strip them away?

00:35:03.600 Another part of it, it's always sort of felt like a lot of this shit, a lot of like the 0.98

00:35:08.580 new modern workplace, which is something that was sort of just getting off the ground when 0.98

00:35:12.980 he wrote this book. A lot of that is like a sort of late capitalist thing where people

00:35:20.120 realize on some level that they're getting a bad deal. They're working too much and losing

00:35:28.540 their grip on the things in life that matter to them. And so workplaces responded by being like,

00:35:35.400 what if there was an espresso machine? Right. Like, would that make you feel like you're not

00:35:41.400 wasting your life? Oh, yeah. I mean, one thing that's amazing to me about this book is that

00:35:45.960 every once in a while, he will write a paragraph like this one that is, I think, insightful and

00:35:51.480 true, but he doesn't, like, have any thoughts about it. So what he's basically saying here

00:35:56.680 is that ceos have started marketing work as like self-actualization yeah and at the same time he's

00:36:03.720 saying like well wait a minute all this is doing is making everyone work harder this only benefits 0.86

00:36:08.940 the ceos yeah this is like a fucking communist tract like this could appear yeah in jacobin 0.97

00:36:15.200 right so like like rise up and like break out of your shackles but david brooks just like says it 0.98

00:36:21.820 it just like moves on right there's no like reflection of like well wait a minute maybe 0.98

00:36:26.500 this is all just cynical david maybe there's no actual bobo anything maybe it's just fucking

00:36:31.340 marketing yeah and it's a form of control and it's something you tell workers to increase 0.96

00:36:35.820 retention rates and to get them to do dumb shit like work on the weekends but this isn't a form 0.89

00:36:39.860 of self-actualization because they're still at will employment you can get rid of these people 0.95

00:36:42.760 at any moment this is also during the rise of the like the first dot-com bubble where like all

00:36:46.340 these people are gonna get laid off right it's aol employees right but david brooks looks at this

00:36:50.580 entire situation and the only lens he can view it through is liberal hypocrisy yeah so the whole

00:36:57.840 chapter he's like oh bobos say that they self-actualize at work but they're sadder than

00:37:03.560 ever it's like okay david but do you have any thoughts on like the ceos that are cynically

00:37:10.880 lying to them corporations that are appropriating this like act of rebellion aesthetic without any 0.79

00:37:18.520 actual fucking content do you have any thoughts david on like the power structures at play here 0.99

00:37:24.900 this is what no class consciousness does to a motherfucker right just like huh right it's very 0.99

00:37:31.920 it's very weird to watch him just like point out these phenomena that are like in and of themselves 0.98

00:37:36.720 quite interesting and have a lot behind them and just be like another bobo thing right and then

00:37:42.760 move on to the next one here we are yeah in between writing incredibly horny paragraphs 0.96

00:37:48.000 about uh female joggers but look at the bra joggers more closely look at them so closely

00:37:56.760 but then this also represents an interesting epilogue to the other books that were written

00:38:01.220 about this so barbara ehrenreich unfortunately passed away earlier this year but in the last

00:38:07.560 10, 15 years of her life, she had completely discarded the concept of the professional

00:38:13.440 managerial class because it has bifurcated so much, right? You have tenured university professors,

00:38:19.820 and then you have all these adjuncts who are just like hourly labor. She says,

00:38:24.760 those of us who have higher degrees have proven to be no more indispensable to the American

00:38:29.300 capitalist enterprise than those who hone their skills on assembly lines. The debt-ridden,

00:38:33.680 unemployed and underemployed college graduates, the revenue-starved teachers, the overworked

00:38:38.240 and underpaid service professionals, even the occasional whistleblowing scientist or

00:38:42.000 engineer, all face the same kind of situation that confronted industrial workers in the

00:38:46.320 late 20th century.

00:38:47.820 Right.

00:38:47.960 This is, again, something that David Brooks does not talk about, right?

00:38:51.920 He's talking about, like, the CEOs are Bobos, and, like, the waitress with piercings is

00:38:55.580 also a Bobo.

00:38:56.380 Uh-huh.

00:38:56.800 Okay, so are we talking about people who aged into this or people who were born into this?

00:39:01.280 And are we talking about people really at the top of the economic ladder, right?

00:39:04.720 Like, you know, CEOs don't wear business suits anymore.

00:39:06.980 OK.

00:39:07.880 But then you're also talking about people in like low level retail positions.

00:39:11.900 Right.

00:39:12.220 Those two people don't necessarily have anything in common.

00:39:15.280 No, they hate each other.

00:39:16.360 Right.

00:39:16.580 There's no evidence that they have the same values except that he believes that like adherence

00:39:23.100 to certain formalist archetypes, like the way you dress, the way you present yourself,

00:39:29.800 et cetera.

00:39:30.480 he believes that that's a value in and of itself right when he when you write about something as

00:39:35.240 complex as like an entire generation of people right and you're not talking about class in any

00:39:41.360 way you're not talking about the fact that like at this point you were about a quarter century

00:39:46.840 in to wages and productivity disconnecting almost completely you're just not able to accurately 0.92

00:39:55.980 describe what you're seeing right which would almost be forgivable if he even fucking tried 0.52

00:40:00.880 right and he's not trying okay so final chapter this there's like an opening vignette of every 0.88

00:40:08.620 chapter and the opening vignette of this chapter is about fetishists oh my i was gonna say i hope

00:40:14.760 this is less horny i'm gonna send you an excerpt in a second but this is just the very beginning 0.81

00:40:19.060 of the chapter he says if you'd like to be tortured and whipped with dignity and humiliated 0.57

00:40:24.660 with respect, you really ought to check out the internet newsletter of the Arizona Power Exchange,

00:40:29.680 an S&M group headquartered in Phoenix. The organization offers a full array of services

00:40:35.020 to what is now genteely known as the leather community. For example, on a recent August 3rd,

00:40:40.220 according to the summer newsletter, there was a discussion and humiliation session.

00:40:43.900 On August 6th at 7pm, there was a workshop on caning. The next night, the Bondage,

00:40:48.560 Sadomasochism, Personal Growth, and Support Group met with Master Lawrence, while on August 10th,

00:40:53.660 Carla helped lead a discussion on high heel and foot worship.

00:40:57.200 And this goes on.

00:40:58.860 This goes on.

00:41:00.140 It's so boring.

00:41:01.640 It's so judgy.

00:41:02.820 This is one of the things about, yeah, the early days of the internet when, like, all of a sudden these communities that most people in David Brooks's position weren't aware of now have, like, a message board somewhere.

00:41:17.680 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:41:18.060 And he's like, my God, people are whipping each other. 0.96

00:41:21.860 And like he doesn't have anything, again, because he didn't fucking interview anybody. 0.86

00:41:25.380 He doesn't have anything interesting to say about this, right? 0.94

00:41:27.520 He's just gawking at it.

00:41:28.640 It's like they're holding workshops. 1.00

00:41:30.920 You believe this shit? 1.00

00:41:32.080 I am sexually harassing female joggers like a normal person. 1.00

00:41:36.260 And these guys are out here worshiping high heels. 0.87

00:41:39.760 This is a section where he talks about how Bobo sexuality is just as puritanical as the old sexuality.

00:41:48.420 OK.

00:41:48.680 Okay. Bobos turn out to be the Parsons of the pubic region. Nearly gone are the 1960s traces 0.95

00:41:54.720 of Dionysian wantonness. Instead, play safe and play responsibly are the slogans that are

00:42:00.780 repeated again and again in sophisticated sex literature. The practitioners talk so much about

00:42:06.640 how healthy it all is that you'd think they were doing jumping jacks. To keep everything

00:42:10.800 responsible and under control, weird activities are codified in rules and etiquette. Weird

00:42:16.080 activities. The rules at a group sex community meeting, when it is necessary to sign a legal 0.73

00:42:21.220 waiver, when to wear latex gloves, when it's okay to smoke, are strictly adhered to. Theirs may not

00:42:28.060 be the same as the etiquette that govern behavior in a 19th century parlor, but in their relentless

00:42:32.580 demands on self-control, they weirdly mimic these sorts of social codes. In odd ways, these are

00:42:39.340 moralistic people. I imagine that if there were a room full of people rubbing each other's excrement 0.99

00:42:45.100 over each other and somebody confessed he didn't recycle he'd be immediately expelled from the

00:42:51.040 group and told never to come back it's a weird version of propriety but it's propriety nonetheless

00:42:57.480 aren't the non-judgmental people also judgmental what what is this like what are we supposed to

00:43:02.620 take from this other than like yeah people who engage in like group sex adhere to certain rules

00:43:10.200 and norms right in the same way if there's like a volleyball group that meets on wednesdays they

00:43:15.300 probably also have some rules but he's just saying like these people are degenerates without any moral 0.99

00:43:21.240 moral compass and yet they have their own exactly exactly and the the final paragraph is a fucking 0.98

00:43:29.480 masterpiece where he literally says i imagine that if there's an orgy and somebody says that 0.99

00:43:35.380 he doesn't recycle he'll be expelled right and then he immediately jumps from his fake

00:43:40.400 anecdote to basically bobos are like just as puritanical as the previous ruling classes 0.98

00:43:47.520 but this is a completely hollow fucking argument because you've made up the evidence for it you've 0.82

00:43:52.920 said i imagine also puritanism is not just having rules and norms right like that's not what that's 0.98

00:43:59.240 not what puritanical behavior is exactly this is a 2000s version of like modern cancel culture

00:44:04.960 discourse where it's like, you know, the left says that they don't like the authoritarian impulses of

00:44:11.680 the right, but they're critiquing this professor on Twitter for using a well-known slur against

00:44:18.480 Mongolians. It's this sort of like, it's this sort of equivocation that makes no sense when you

00:44:24.020 actually understand the values involved on both sides. This is the one area where I would forgive

00:44:29.760 David Brooks for not being able to do any actual reporting because if he walked into a BDSM 0.99

00:44:34.260 social group they would be like sir you need to leave get the fuck out of here i know immediately

00:44:38.760 once again i was kicked out of a bdsm group uh for not recycling this is supposed to be like the 0.83

00:44:44.020 ending insight of the book is basically that the bobos like now that the bobos are like the new

00:44:49.920 ruling elite they're setting up a whole set of rules that are just as opaque and oppressive and 0.83

00:44:57.340 weird as the previous ruling class right so like the mom from fucking titanic with all the forks 0.98

00:45:03.640 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. 0.96

00:45:26.940 By the nature that they just have social norms.

00:45:31.560 Right.

00:45:31.740 Not the same social norms.

00:45:32.940 Exactly.

00:45:33.380 But any social norms at all.

00:45:34.940 We've talked about this.

00:45:35.940 The last chapter of these nonfiction airport books is always the worst chapter because they get into the policy steps.

00:45:42.840 Like what are the implications?

00:45:44.340 Whatever.

00:45:45.460 So he then does this whole kind of try hard thing about how Bill Clinton was the first Bobo president.

00:45:50.960 and then he says they've settled on this style of politics because this is what appeals to the

00:45:57.840 affluent suburbanites and the sorts of people who control the money media and culture in american

00:46:02.460 society today there are about nine million households with incomes over a hundred thousand

00:46:07.200 the most vocal and active portion of the population and this new establishment which

00:46:11.560 exerts its hegemony over both major american political parties has moved to soften ideological

00:46:16.600 edges and damp down doctrinal fervor. The people of the left and the right who long for radical

00:46:21.920 and heroic politics are driven absolutely batty by tepid Bobo politics. They see large problems

00:46:27.680 in society and they cry out for radical change. This new centrist establishment frustrates or

00:46:32.860 stifles their radical ideas and yet they find it hard to confront this power elite head on.

00:46:37.920 The Bobo establishment seems to have no there there. It never presents a coherent opposition,

00:46:43.000 it never presents its opponents with a set of consistent ideas that can be argued and refuted.

00:46:48.000 Instead, it co-opts and embraces. While those on the left and right hunger for confrontation and

00:46:53.760 change, the Bobos seem to be following the advice on their throw pillows. Living well is the best 0.86

00:46:59.100 revenge. This is interesting because it reads like a withering critique of that type of centrism.

00:47:04.720 And that's exactly what David Brooks' politics are. Exactly. It's fucking incredible. He's just

00:47:10.580 saying it he's like oh the ruling class is like the wealthy who like actually control things in

00:47:15.380 this country they have no governing ideology they have no like actual preferences for anything

00:47:22.540 they basically just want to stay affluent and they want everybody to stop shouting

00:47:26.540 it's like yeah david i truly cannot believe that he wrote all of that out and then went on to lead

00:47:33.680 the life that he has led i know this is a critique that if like you showed it to him now it would be

00:47:39.840 like um when you show the androids in westworld uh the blueprints of themselves and they just and

00:47:45.420 they can't record their program to not recognize it and then he doesn't reflect on it at all right 0.89

00:47:52.380 bobos don't seem to have any like preferences like there's no such thing as a bobo utopia 0.66

00:47:56.180 because all they have is these process preferences of like compromise and bipartisanship and unity 0.94

00:48:01.140 these things that don't have fucking outcomes right you're saying that the both parties in

00:48:05.660 the country are now captured by people who really don't want to change anything and who just want to 0.90

00:48:11.760 go shopping at fucking anthropology all the time i do wonder whether if he felt at the time of 0.93

00:48:17.420 writing as if the rebuttal was like self-evident right because the economy is still sort of roaring 0.96

00:48:23.960 right we're probably right before the dot-com bust when he uh publishes this and like the real

00:48:30.260 recession that follows and maybe he just thought that it was sort of obvious that like yeah of 0.60

00:48:35.160 course those critiques are silly look at how fucking great america is doing that is actually 0.63

00:48:40.440 the ending of the book like quite explicitly he basically says like bobos have ushered in 0.96

00:48:45.300 an unprecedented era of peace and progress right like things are kind of fine and so there aren't

00:48:52.020 really any policy solutions at the end of the book like he doesn't even really try he just says

00:48:57.080 that bobos have to launch a project of national greatness yeah this is i feel like something that

00:49:03.580 a lot of like late 90s political writing shares in common where the sort of sense that things are

00:49:09.620 going great is just permeating it and it's this underlying assumption it reminds me of like in

00:49:14.860 the simpsons there's an episode where springfield gets hit by a hurricane and homer walks out in

00:49:20.180 the eye of the hurricane and i think it's lisa is like watch out like you know you we might just be

00:49:24.960 in the eye and he's like relax see how calm and eerily quiet it is and that's how i feel like

00:49:31.680 they were writing about uh politics in the 90s they're like there's no reason to be alarmed

00:49:36.720 look how great everything's going and then you get a recession you get 9 11 uh the iraq war

00:49:43.680 katrina and uh and another far worse recession in the span of the next eight years right and it's

00:49:50.700 like yeah it is like this little postcard of like a completely lost world yeah from a mind that is

00:49:55.980 not prepared for what is about to happen. So that's the book. I want to fast forward. In late

00:50:03.840 2021, he writes an article for The Atlantic that's basically a follow up to this book. And it's called

00:50:10.240 How the Bobos Broke America. So I'm not going to read large excerpts of it. We're not going to go 0.69

00:50:16.540 through it in detail. But I will read you a brief excerpt of kind of the thesis statement. David

00:50:21.400 says, I got a lot wrong about the Bobos. I didn't anticipate how aggressively we would move to

00:50:27.480 assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and

00:50:32.580 thought codes. I underestimated the way the creative class would successfully raise barriers

00:50:37.400 around itself to protect its economic privileges, not just through schooling, but through zoning

00:50:42.000 regulations that keep home values high, professional certification structures that

00:50:45.840 keep doctors and lawyers incomes high while blocking competition from nurses and paralegals

00:50:50.000 and more. And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five

00:50:55.520 decades, the number of working class and conservative voices in universities, the

00:50:59.860 mainstream media, and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling.

00:51:04.600 When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing,

00:51:08.400 they're going to react badly, and they have. Okay, so he believes that he got things wrong

00:51:13.360 primarily because he believes that he underestimated the degree to which

00:51:19.120 liberal elites would sneer at at everyone else yes what a unbelievably bad diagnosis of what he

00:51:28.420 got wrong at one point he describes the sort of trumpist right as people who feel that they have

00:51:35.060 been rendered invisible will do anything to make themselves visible and then when it comes to

00:51:41.000 left-wing activists right like defund the police like all you know george floyd everything else

00:51:44.800 he says wokeness is not just a social philosophy but an elite status marker a strategy for personal

00:51:52.300 advancement yeah same the same claim the same claim of inauthenticity right i don't have to

00:51:58.380 abide by any of the social norms or whatever that you're championing because i don't believe that

00:52:04.620 you're doing it in good faith i think that you're being dishonest and you're just posturing well i

00:52:08.800 also think the evolution from Bobo's the book in 2000 to Bobo's the epilogue in 2021 is also

00:52:16.000 interesting because the late 90s was also when the claim of limousine liberals started appearing

00:52:23.820 latte liberals. Like this was a Newt Gingrich thing. And it's interesting that just after that

00:52:29.900 smear starts showing up, David Brooks writes essentially a like long form version of that

00:52:35.280 smear yeah right it's just like liberal hypocrisy the entire book and then now in 2021 when the

00:52:40.920 right is saying like look what you made us do he basically writes an article that is like look what

00:52:46.420 you made them do yeah he's been very vocal against trump too which like i give him credit for but

00:52:51.460 also he is echoing like a more polite version of precisely the same arguments that you do find on

00:52:57.780 the far right he is a water carrier for the establishment he's a water carrier for entrenched

00:53:04.940 reactionary interests yeah it's so fucking weird and you know it's like this long-standing left 0.60

00:53:11.600 critique that elite capitalists would of course prefer fascism to any sort of socialism or social

00:53:18.340 democracy and david brooks is like here to run cover for him right he's not i don't know if he

00:53:24.360 necessarily prefers fascism but he he definitely thinks we should hear the fascists out so wrapping

00:53:30.800 up, I mean, this is a podcast about the most harmful ideas of the last 50 years. And thinking

00:53:37.840 about the harms of David Brooks, I don't actually think that the problem is David Brooks himself.

00:53:44.900 The problem is the need for David Brooks. Right. Like the reason that Brooks has a career

00:53:50.260 is to reassure the liberal establishment that they are reasonable people who can who can listen to

00:53:57.900 the other side and feel intelligent and feel like they're considering all of the options.

00:54:03.600 Brooks himself, though, has almost nothing to say.

00:54:06.960 Right. The question for the liberal institutions that have spent two decades propping up David

00:54:12.320 Brooks is why should we listen to this guy? Right. Is it because he's like a subject matter

00:54:18.140 expert? No, David Brooks doesn't have any deep knowledge of anything. Is it because he does

00:54:23.260 deep reporting? No, David Brooks doesn't do the most basic level of investigation to find out

00:54:30.480 whether his impressions are true. He just prints his impressions. Oh, this guy has a ponytail.

00:54:36.120 Has he been right about a lot of other things in the past? Also, no. The only reason to listen to

00:54:42.880 David Brooks is some sort of empty commitment to ideological diversity. But what is the point of

00:54:49.740 intellectual diversity if the person we're hearing out is shallow and lazy and lying and wrong about

00:54:59.360 everything. Yeah. Right. That's not the New York Times opinion page challenging its readers

00:55:04.480 preconceptions. It's giving their readers a completely false impression of what conservatism

00:55:11.680 is. Yeah. David Brooks has had no influence over conservatives since the 1990s. The number of

00:55:18.280 quote unquote reasonable conservatives in this country is roughly seven. And they all have

00:55:22.840 fucking columns at newspapers. Yeah. I mean, he at this point, he is, I think, openly identifying 1.00

00:55:28.960 as a Democrat. Yeah. He was like a never Trump guy that actually held out. And I would say the

00:55:35.580 reason that he held out is because a lot of the never Trump folks were conservatives who were

00:55:39.480 like, this isn't what conservatism is really about. And then like a few years later, it was

00:55:43.320 pretty obvious that it is what conservatism is actually about. Right. And the entire movement

00:55:47.780 is lining up behind Trump and people like Trump. But Brooks didn't do that because he's not beholden

00:55:54.600 to the conservative movement because he's beholden to the liberal movement. And I think

00:55:59.300 that also this sort of this dynamic explains why David Brooks sucks. He doesn't need to be good 0.97

00:56:07.960 because that's not the purpose that he serves. The purpose that he serves is not to provide

00:56:11.760 insight. It's to sort of play a role in insular liberal politics, right? Conservatives don't need

00:56:21.920 David Brooks. Liberals do. I want to end with probably the most infamous David Brooks paragraph

00:56:28.120 ever written. You know about this one, right? The sandwich one? Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Do you want

00:56:33.500 to read it or should I? You can go. You can go. Okay. So this is in one of his New York Times

00:56:37.060 columns. He says, recently, I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively,

00:56:43.740 I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly, I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted

00:56:50.060 with sandwiches named padrino and pomodoro and ingredients like soppressata, capicolo,

00:56:56.580 and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else,

00:57:00.780 and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate mexican that is one of the masterpieces of this mind 0.94

00:57:09.280 yeah i i love the like i brought my uh doorknob stupid friend who has never uh heard of like 0.87

00:57:18.700 various popular italian sandwiches and in fact uh actually has a panic attack when she reads them 0.95

00:57:25.280 on a menu i know brought her to uh a classic deli and uh of course she will never be the same again

00:57:32.700 but then okay what i learned reading like 400 david brooks columns is that he is the king

00:57:39.400 of having things that look really bad when they're taken out of context and look worse

00:57:44.980 when they're in context what gets lost with this unbelievably condescending paragraph

00:57:50.200 is that it's in the middle of a column about all of the ways that people are hoarding opportunity

00:57:57.960 in America. It's like become one of the frameworks that people are using. So he kind of runs down

00:58:03.220 all of the evidence for this phenomenon that it's just harder to get ahead than it used to be. 0.52

00:58:07.980 But then the article uses the sandwich anecdote to say it's not really, really fucking obvious

00:58:14.920 things like jobs don't pay as much as they used to. Housing costs more than it used to. College

00:58:19.200 cost more than it used to it's not that stuff it's the aesthetic stuff fucking names of fucking 0.99

00:58:23.820 sandwiches it's like no david it's it's the housing no it's the jobs and shit yeah it's the 0.96

00:58:30.080 jobs and shit right it just it's like such a metaphor for his whole kind of project yeah just 0.93

00:58:35.940 like no no look away from the really obvious and like measurably devastating stuff and look at this 0.99

00:58:42.140 like dumb bullshit that i have a made-up anecdote about i mean it it is remarkable how many times 0.97

00:58:49.080 he can write these pieces that tout the unreasonableness of like liberal coastal cosmopolitan 0.99

00:58:58.520 aesthetics and in the process he is just insanely condescending towards the people that he believes

00:59:04.760 that he's boosting unbelievable i know this woman cannot read a menu and he notices her the her

00:59:11.260 sheer terror at the prospect of like a type of ham she does she hasn't had before and he's like

00:59:18.620 do you want to leave like and she's like yes please like i don't feel safe here

00:59:24.280 david what's capicola but on the bright side at least nobody offered her a free slice of bread

If Books Could Kill - November 17, 2022

David Brooks's ＂Bobos in Paradise＂

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