Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes 20140913

David brooks appeared on booknotes to talk about bobos in paradise the new upper class and how they got there. As people who combine the attitudes of the bohemian counterculture of the 1960s with the conservative 1980s attitudes regarding finance and family. This is about an hour. Cspan david brooks, were do we find a bobo in paradise . Guest bobos are spread across upscale america. If youre looking for the hunting signs of them, i suppose what you do is you look for people whove renovated their kitchen so big it looks like an aircraft hangar with plumbing. You see these big kitchens with islands in the middle of them. Theyve got a big refrigerator so bigyou know, subzero. It looks like you could fit an inlaw suite in one side of them. Theyve got the six burner, duelfuel viking ranges. So basically, bobos are across upscale america. Theyre in leftwing towns, like berkeley, california, burlington, vermont; in rightwing towns wayne, pennsylvania, where i went to high school, orange county, newcalifornia. And basically what the bobos are is theyre bourgeois bohemians. Theyre people who have taken the 60s ethos of bohemia and the 80s ethos of bourgeois, yuppie moneymaking, and theyve jammed it all together. Theyre creating a new synthesis culture for our country. Cspan can you remember when you invented the phrase . Guest i cant exactly. I know when it firstthe ethos first came to me. I was actually in brussels for four and a half years in the first half of the 90s, and i came back to wayne, pennsylvania, where my folks still live. And wayne is on the mainline outside of philadelphia. Its ranked number eighth in the country in the number of families who are members of the social register. So its a very protestant establishment sort of place. If you ever saw that Katharine Hepburn movie, the philadelphia story, it was set in a place like wayne. So i come back in mid90s, and suddenly, you know, the place was an espresso desert. Now there are six fancy coffee shops, cappuccino stands there. Theres a wholea fancy bread store where they spellsell spinach faux de loaf for four bucks and 75 cents. And if you ask them to slice the bread in the store, they look at you like you havent risen to the higher realm of bread consciousness. Theres one of these organic, freshfield Supermarket Stores which is like upscale suburban hippiedom. Theyve got vegetarian dog biscuits, basmati rice, allnatural hair coloring. And it occurred to me that theyyou know, theyve taken all this stuff from the 60s that was of interest to teenagers like nudity and flove and taken that away but kept all the things from the 60s of interest to middleaged hypochondriacs like whole grains. So you get to wayne, and the culture is transformed. And im seeing it all with european eyes, cause id really been away for four and a half years. And i realize the Information Age has not only transformed our economy but our culture. And so i set out to write a book how has the Information Age transformed our culture . And that was the econcept. That was the moment when i thought, somethings going on here. I have at least a series of articles, maybe a book. cspan how much of a bobo are you . Guest well, my joke is that i consider myself a bobo with bad grades. If id studied more, i would have gotten into harvard and i could afford the big kitchen and all that. But i am a bobo in some sense. You know, the essence of bobo life is people who consider themselves sort of artistic or writers or intellectuals but find themselves in the world of making money, in the world of commerce. And so i certainly am in that. You know, ii consider myself a writer, and i live for ideas and things like that. But i also want a big house, so im caught between money and spirituality. Cspan well, on the chapter on intellectual life, i just found, you know, a couple of sentences in relationship to doing this interview in the book that i wanted to read back to you. You say, for intellectuals who do not possess this gift, the next step up the ladder involves writing a book. how many books have you written . Guest this is my first real book. Cspan aside from the obvious paramount thing about a book, who the author can get to blurb it, youve got christopher buckley, e. J. Dionne, p. J. Orourke and tom wolfe. Guest well. Cspan did you get them to blurb it . Guest i did. I asked all of them except for tom wolfe. My publisher aasked him. I dont know him. Cspan there are three important factors the author needs to concern itherself with, and i wanted to stop there and ask you every reference to the other person is a she in your book. Guest in that chapter. Cspan just in that chapter . Guest yeah, just in that chapter. Cspan i thought i picked up. Guest i sort of flipflopped. Cspan whyd you do that . Guest for the sake of gender equity. Cspan and let me go back toif i can find the word againfor impodadadah, dadadahthe pubthe publishing house, the title and the one phrase people will remember from it. guest right. Soandand here i have a book with aa neologism bobo, which is bourgeois bohemian. So im guilty of the thing im writing about. Ii si writewrite in the introduction that sometimes i think ive made selfloathing into a career. And, you know, there is some of me in the book. That chapter is sort of an ascorbic look atas the intellectual, as social climber. Cspan well. Guest . Or as career climber. Cspan . The other thing you talk about in that chapter is participating in conferences. Guest right. Cspan and i know we carried a conference that you were, like, thethe moderator, well, along with e. J. Dionne, when you talked about al gore and george bush and other candidates for the presidency. Tell us about the conference world. Guest well, the conference worldyou know, its hard to imagine a hundred years ago thatlike, Andrew Carnegie and john d. Rockefeller sitting on a panel on the Corporate Responsibility of the corporation with mark twain as your celebrity moderator, but now i have a chapter on business life, how businessmen are all more like intellectuals, just as intellectuals are more like businessmen. And so now we all have to conference. We all sit on panel discussions, you know, where theres evenly boseparated bottles of mineral water, and were all sitting between them. Weve got our fiveminute prepared remarks. And the odd thing for academics especiallyconferences are, like, sort of a status stock exchange. You can judge how many people showed up to sit in the audience for your panel discussion, howare you on the same panel with the people with big names, bignamed professors . Are you thethe most famous person on the panel or the least famous . Do they ask you questions at the end of the discussion or do they ask the other people . There are all these status markers going up and down. And then at the end of the panel discussion, there are all these coffee urns set in the Hotel Conference area in thein the aisle wherever the panels are being held and people rush out to the coffee area, and theyre all schmoozing. And if you look at academic newsletters, you see these pictures. Therell be half a dozen people clutching wine glasses or coffee mugs to their chest and they all look so happy cause theyre all in this career schmooze together. And its always the bigname professors who are schmoozing with the other bigname, and the Foundation Officials are doing little political waves here and up and down thethe alalleyway, and it really ispeople measure their status by how they perform at conferences. And. Cspan is it true that if youre really wellknown, you syou can be dull, and if youre not wellknown at all, youve got to be good . guest yeah. If fact, if youre really wellknown, youre supposed to be dull. Theres sometherethe idea is youre so important, you dont need to be interesting, so you tespeak in the higher institutional mode. So if youre, like, a secretary of state and you come to a conference, you should really put people to sleep. But if youre a young person and you presume to use words that are dull, and if you presume a dullness beyond your measure, then youre really overreaching yourself. Its very offputting when dullwhen young people are dull. Cspan then you say here, intellectuals on a book tour will need a catchphrase that talk show interviewers can scan seconds before a segment and and then use to start a conversation. why do you need that . Guest wbecause thmost of the talk showsyouve actually read the book, and ive actually had good luck with the people ive spoken to reading the book, but youmost talk showtv hosts have not read the book. And theyre just there to fill their six minutes of air time. And one of the things they dothe publishing houses actually send out fact sheets with the questions theyre supposed to ask. And one of the things they like to do is theyll ask you beforehand, what do you want to say . and you may say it. Andand then theylltheyll say what you meant to say, so they can look smart. And then youre left to gab now. Cspan soso if you had the experience that you show up and somsomeone hasnt read the book and whats the catchphrase that they go for . Bobo . Guest well, people ask what bobo is in thisin this case, because that is the muthe center of my theory. I mean, part of this chapterits a very acerbic chapter at whats happened to the intellectual life. It starts with a description of intellectual life in the 1950s with Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling and hannah arendt, an intellectual life which was really austere, very removed from the conthe world of commerce, very removed from politics; people just sitting with their hidiger and their haggle and theorizing and writing for very small circulation magazines like partisan review and making grand, sweeping statements. So i take that politthat intellectual world which is really, you know, portentous and then i compare it to the intellectual world of today where we have phrases like intellectual capital and marketplace of ideas where intellectuals are really much more game players, much more nakedly ambitious. And i weigh the pros and cons of the two intellectual worlds. And im telling jokes about how this imagined intellectual could rise through the world and become the next henry kissinger, and its supposed to be funny. Butbut i try to weigh seriously whatwhats a better intellectual style, because the 50s, they really had a sense of intellectual as vocation. The russian intelligenciathe idea was you were a secular priesthood above the mere commerce. Speaking of universal truths, i open the chapter with a great essay by irving howe that he wrote in 1954 where he said, some intellectuals we know have written for the new yorker and worse, far worse. well, now were not shocked if anybody writes for the new yorker. And its a shine of how differently we look at intellectuals than they did 50 years ago. Cspan what is sid . Guest thats status income disequilibrium. That is what people who suffer who have high status and low income. People in the media tend to suffer it. Congressmen suffer from it. Its sort of a jokey malady for people who during the day, theyre sort of the gods of the career world. If youre a senator or a congressman oror a topnotch journalist in this town, youyou know, people are asking you favors all day. The messages pile up on your desk. Youre treated like a god when you walk into the palm restaurant, but then at night, all the people who kissed up to you who are businessmen, lawyers and lobbyists, they go off to their big house in mclane or in the Upper East Side of manhattan or in the north shore of chicago and youre stuck going to your dinky little apartment where youre cleaning your own toilet because you dont have the money. Youve got status but nobut no money. So its aits sort of this perversity that you feel like a god during the day and a schlump at night. And so i have a jokey chapter about people who suffer from this. Cspan you wrote in there about being at the drake hotel along Michigan Avenue there in chicago. Guest right. Cspan . And then somebody going to hyde park and the rest of them going up to lake forest or some place like that. Haddodo you have that Actual Experience . Guest no. No. This is sort of an imaginedi mean, iiits like a lot of things in the book. Its something youre familiar with. You write about the world you know, and im in this world, but on the one hand, you exaggerate for comic effect. And then you hear a lot of stories as youre doing your reporting. You try to get all thethe reality in there. Cspan how old are you . Guest im 38. Cspan married . Guest yes. Cspan how many kids . Guest three. Cspan how old are they . Guest nine, six and one. Cspan and where do they live . Guest we live right here in the district. Cspan what is a man at your age with a book and a column and all that and appearing on jim lehrers show and other placeswhats your ambition . Where do you go as a bobo . Guest well, i dont know where i go as a bobo. Id like to go out to suburbs, i suppose, as a bobo and get a house with a playroom so my kids can go off and play. But my ambition is to write books. I mean, a lot of peoplei just have this perverse attraction to books which really doesnt make any sense because the money, i suppose, is in speeches andand tv, but to me, you know, people say, do yousome people write books just so they can get on tv. But i appear on tv so i can write books. This is the most fun thing ive ever done, and im reasonably proud of it. And id like to do well enough with the book so i could write more and more books, because working on aa book for two or three years at a time really was tremendously satisfying. Youyou can just get to know a lot more and think a lot more, and you can work on the prose a lot more. Even in a magazine articleyou know, i work at an opinion magazine where its not like a newspaper. There isyou can refine your writing and try to do a good job with it. But for some reason, i have this archaic notion that books are really what matters more than anything else. Cspan who reads books . Guest very few people. I mean, if my book sells 50,000 copies, thats fantastic. I mean, thatll be tremendous, but if i write for newsweek or the wall street journal, youre getting millions. So in some sense, if you want to reach people, it really is better to write articles. On the other hand, you hope if they read a whole book of yours, theyll remember it and theyll see a lot more depth to the argument than they would in an 1,100word oped piece. But, you know, itout onyou know, im a print journalist, and out on the campaign trail, in the very beginning of every campaign, you really feel like you matter. But then the primary season starts, and its obvious you dont matter, that only the tv cameras matter, and youre just a prop in the way for that. So i must say in my lline of work, i dont feel the wind of history at my back the way these people in Silicon Valley really feel that history is pushing them forward, propelling them. Ii have theyou know, i have this vague sense and a lot of people i work with have the vague sense that were sort of a receding force and that history is moving off in some opposite direction. Cspan what do you think they think about their lives . Guest the people in Silicon Valley . Cspan yeah. Guest i think theyre thrilled. I mean, itlisten, the only people i know who really feel that theyre changing the world and that they are sat the center of the action are these people in redmond, washington, these people who are in Silicon Valley. They really feelyou know, they were working in some Little Company that had five people six months ago; now they have 500 people. And they really feel technology is a tremendous force in this society and its going to change everything. And they could be right. You know, this bobo reconciliation i talk about is really a product of the Information Age, what theyre creating, because in thisin this economy, ideas and information are as important to creating wealth as Natural Resources and finance capital. So the people who thrive are the ones who can take ideas and emotions and turn them into products. So they really do have one foot in the world of bohemia which is ideas and emotions and creativity and one foot in the world of the bourgeoisie which is the world of the marketplace and thats whats reconciled this 150yearold culture war between the bohemians and the bourgeoisie. Cspan who is not a member of the bourgeoisie . Guest well, in the old days, it was artists and rebels. The bohemia started as a rejection of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie came, say, in the early 19th century, late 18th century in paris, and they were the shopkeepers, the merchant middle classes who really took over from the aristocracy as the most important force of society. And pretty soon thereafter, a group of artists and intellectuals decidedthey looked at these shopkeepers and they said, these people are repulsive. flaubert said that hatred of the bourgeoisie was the beginning of all virtue. Stendhal, another french writer from the early 19th century, said that he looked athe thought thethe grocers and thethe shopkeepers were plotting and avaricious. Flaubert signed his letters, bourgeois sofobious, to show how much he hated these people. And those bohemians in the early 19tth century started the bohemian lifestyle we all know. They wore long hair, flamboyant dress. They talked about suicide, altered states of consciousness one of them took a lobster and put him on a leash and had him march through the gardens, and he said of his lobster, he does not bark and he knows the mysteries of the deep, which is exactly the sort of pranksterous humor that the hippies i grew up with in new york in cein 1960sthey would have gone for that pranksterous humor. And so for 150 years, you had a culture war. You had the bohemians who were antimaterialistic; the bourgeois were materialistic. The bohemians were awere cexperienceoriented; the bourgeois were careeroriented. The bohemians pretended to be promiscuous cause it seemed free, and the bourgeois pretended to be chaste. And so you really had a culture war for 150 years. And when i got back and went to wayne after living in europe, it really seemed to be me that culture war was over and that the inInformation Age had melded the two forces. Marx taught us that classes always conflict, but it seemed to me in this case they had just blurred together, that you had people who were half yipphalf hippy, half yuppie; half bohemian, half bourgeois. And if you asked yourself, well, who sold out to who . it was an almost impossible question to answer. They just sort of blurred together. Cspan wheres the word bohemia come from . Guest well, bohemias a region in central europe, and i think the bohemians who had no ethnic relationship to real bohemians who were from bohemia adopted it because they thought they were gypsies, that they hawere freefloating individuals. Cspan where is it physically . Do you know . Guest itsim not sure exactly. Its a regioni think theii shshouldnt guess. Im not exactly sure. Cspan what about thethethe nword bourgeois or bourgeoisie . Where does that comewhowho first started using it . Guest yeah, thats a good question. You know, i dont know. Itsits certainly a word marx used, but i donti think it predates him. Cspan karl marx probably is mentioned in the book as often as anybody. Why . Guest yeah. I thinki think because evenyou know, i work for a conservative magazine, so im not exactly shaped by marxist thought, i dont think. But i think marx has really influenced all of us in a number of waysone, to teach us that classes conflict, as i was saying, when, in fact, i think in this case, they blur; and second, toto teach us that we are defined by our means of production, that what we do determines our identity, our role in society. And i have a chapter on consumption, and i think were actually defined by our means of consumption at least today. How we shop is how we identify ourselves. And if youre looking for bobos, its the Consumer Choices they make which say the most about them. You know, do they buy vulgar things like corvettes or do they buy highminded practical things like range rovers . And thso i have a section in the book called the code of financial correctness which was about how to spend lots of money in ways to show that youre above money and material things. Cspan im still on the chapter inintellectual life and i wanted to read this to you and ask you to expand. these bookersmeaning the people who book people on television shows, cable showsare caught between the demands of their vain and temperamental host and the crotchety male retirees who are the bulk of their viewers. guest well, as you know people who. Cspan now you gotyou probably have crotchety male retirees whoim not. Guest there goes half of my viewership just now. Cspan . You know, i mean, here we are. I mean, i. Guest yeah. Cspan . Why crotchety male retirees . Guest well, iagain, the wholethis whole chapter is done in a hierarch style, so im exaggerating for comic effect, but i think it is truewell, its certainly true that people who run talk networks are cranky and overbearing on their staff. But ititi think it is certainly true that the people who watch most political talk, in particular, are older than average. I think retirees make up a disproportionate number. Thats certainly reflected in the mail i get and the people who Pay Attention to these things. Its also true, by the way, of opinion magazines like mine. Its true of the wall street journal where the average reader, i think, is 57 or so. So we have a large Senior Citizen populationbook buyers and theyre verytheyre influential in this talk media. Cspan why do you think youre interested in writing for that crowd then . Guest im not sure im writing for any crowd. Im writing for myself, from what i find interesting, whats in the discussion in the air. And, you know, you really cant imagine an audience niche to write for, cause if you try to write for it, youll mess up. Cspan are many other people like you interested in what youre writing about . I mean, in other words, ityoure 38 and youre talking about people who are60s andand above. I mean, do you find many of your peers or anything . Guest yeah. Well, thethethe cthe bobosthe classic bobos are baby boom and younger, because i think its important to have gone through the experience of the 60s and have these anticommercial attitudes built in and then have them mixed with the 80s attitudes of moneymaking, 90s attitudes of, you know, the potential to get wealth. And not only to get wealth by working on wall street but to get wealth while improving the world, by making software or something. So i think most of the people im describing in this book are 50 and below, and people who are older than that who have read it say, yeah, youve helped me understand why my 30yearold kids are spending money the way theyre spending money. cspan you mentioned notbeing out in redmond, washington. While you were out there, you went to rei. What is it . Guest yeah, rei iswell, rei is a chain store of outdoor equipment. And one of the things that occurred to me is that bobos have an achievement ethos. This is ameritocratic group of people. And itit shows in the way they go to work. It shows in the way they practice religion. Everything is achieving, even sex lifei have a chapter in there. You know, you cant just have an orgasm; you have to achieve an orgasm. You have to do it the right way and then in vacation terms, you dont just go sit on the beach; you go on an environmental vacation at the galapagos island or one of these educational vacations in meonmar and minsk. And then the highest status vacation is one where youre suffering all the time. Youre climbing mt. Everest or mt. Rainier. And if you go out to redmond, washington, and go to dinner with these microsoft executives, youll be at a dinner table. And suddenly, words Like Base Camp and whiteout will be floating across the table, and you realize some executive is telling you about his trip to the himalayas and the tough ordeal he had and how spiritually enriching it was to go up there at the top of the mountain, you know, clada millionaire clad in magenta with a north face parka on facing the elements. And rei is a store where you canif you dont climb the himalayas, you can dress like you do. Its this big, massive store, tens of thousands of square feet in seattle, and its likefirst, theyve got a museum to the equipment when you first walk in the door which isto show you that its edifying, youre not just buying stuff. And then theyve got acre upon acre of outdoor gearice axes up front, and then water filters. And to buy stuff in this store, you need a chemistry degree from mit. You cant understandyou know, theres a performance underwear section where theyveyou know, theyve got all these hightechive forgotten all the name of the chemical fabrics that are made. And youits impossible to understand it. But to be a serious person and a serious person in your athletic or in your leisure time, you need to study all this. You need to become an expert. Bobos are really basedtheir ethos is based in the university, and they turn everything into graduate school so you cant just buy hiking equipment, you have to understand all the different boots and things like that. And you walk around this place and ieveryone looks like theyre escapees from the Norwegian Olympic Team or something. Theyve got these thick calves because theyre walking everywhere. Theyve got the 200 hiking boots. Theyve got, you know, twoounce parkas that are beautifully tested for all kinds of weather and it occurred to me theyre very wholesome. You know, when the bohemians thought about leisure, they tauthought about getting wild and getting naked and just enjoying and living for the moment, but these people are working out. Theyre very utilitarian, almost protestant in the way they view their vacation because theyre working out, theyre training and theyre undergoing ordeals so they can haachieve some spiritual fulfillment. I sometimes wonder why they dont just go to a minnesota road crew in the middle of the wintertime if they really want a tough ordeal thatll help them. At least theyll fill in some potholes. But they want the imax experience. They want the himalayas. Cspan did you have any interest in buying any of the things you found there in rei . Guest i found a pair of hiking boots there. I was going hiking, so i bought a pair of hiking boots. But theyou know, i travel around this world and i have some tangential connection to parts of it. I likewheni like the big kitchens. I cant afford it, but what i write about is notits not an autobiography. Im writing about a world im reporting on. Its not all me. Cspan burlington, vermont, and other latte towns. Whats that . Guest yeah. Burlington, vermont, is a fantastic place. Its possibly the most leftwing city in america. Theyve sent us our only socialist or independent congressman, bernie sanders, and it is filled with aging hippies. Cspan home of the university of vermont. Guest the university of vermont. Ben jerrys ice cream is the most famous place there. Ben jerry are everywhere in vermont. Theyre like big brother. Theyve got sipictures of these two guys all over the place. But if you go to burlington, vermont, this haven for social leftwing ideas, its a fantastic business center. When i went up there, there were four business magazines based in burlington. And you could read, like, three paragraphs in a row without them mentioning socially conscious investing. It was sort of the leftwing capitalism that you have now. People have left boston, left new york, gone up there to form their own chutney companies, their own pesto companies to make the best organic maple syrup thats possible. And then theyve sold it. And then theyre selling it and marketing it all over the world so you walki was sitting in a cafe called leungs in burlington, vermont, and there was this guy who looked like he just walked straight from woodstock and another woman in a peasant dress. And they were talking about their ipo. And i overheard them and they knew everything about ipos. And this is whats happened, that former rightwing towns like wayne, pennsylvania, i described have become more bohemian in the way they shopped. But former leftwing bohemian towns had become more bourgeois because theyve invested in business. And one of the things thats happened is that now everyone accepts business. You know, this debate between the bourgeois and the bohemian, this 150yearold culture war, was essentially an argument about commerce does buying and selling stuff destroy your soul . And the bohemians always said it did; that if you think about money all the time, youll be just rotted inside. But these people think its great toyou know, capitalism is great so long as you can wear a black tshirt to work. And they really have accepted commerce. And thats a major shift for our age, that there really are very few mortal enemies to capitalism anymore. And people have accepted the judgments of marketplace. Sort ofyou look at the hip new business magazines like wired, red herring, fast company, and they look sort of countercultural. They look like berkeley in the 60s, Jefferson Starship posters in the way theyre designed, but ultimately they are business magazines. They accept ambition. They accept making money. They accept the judgment of the marketplace. And so in that sense, the bourgeois won the culture war in that sense because capitalism has triumphed even in burlington. Cspan you mention northampton, massachusetts, and boulder, colorado, and missoula, montana what do they have in common . Guest yeah. Well, theyre all University Towns and latte towns. If youre in a latte town, there should be, like, a feminist lingerie store. There should be a bunch of Software Firms in an old factory warehouse that theyve refurbished. There should be a marxist bookstore. There should be plenty of openair activities because theyre deep into community life. I knew i was in a strange latte town in burlington because i was walking across the street, and im from new york, and my instinct is when i see a car coming, im going to stop and let the car come at the crosswalk, but the car knew he wasthethe drivers of the car in burlington know that they are burning fossil fuel, and that as a pedestrian, i am morally superior to they are. So they stop and make sure they give you right of way. So im walking along and i stop at a corner, seeing a car out of mycorner of my eye and im watching some hippies play frisbee over there. And i stand there. And i realize theres a car waiting for me. Ten seconds go by, hes still waiting. So finally, i realized that ive got the moral upper hand because im using Renewable Energy source. So i walk across and then i go down another block, and my mind wanders and i stop at another corner and i realize theres a car. And it takes me like two or three days before i understand the ethos that pedestrians are better than cars because Automobile Society is destroying our atmosphere and leading to sprawl and all sorts of bad things, and that after three or four days, once i got to a cross section, i just walked right on through with my moral superiority as a pedestrian. Cspan this cover, did you have anything to do with it . Guest i had a little to do with it. The first ideawewe thought poparadise is a great word. I didnt come up with the title my editor, alice muno, came up with the title, and paradise is a great word. And we wanted an image that would play off paradise. We thought about american gothic, but that seemed a little trite. And then they came up with the brusso image and then i just filled inhelped them fill in the icons, like the trowel, the range rover, the laptop and the coffee mug. Im really happy. Simon schuster did the cover. And im really happy with it. Cspan now alice muno is your editor. Guest right. Cspan this is new for you to have her as an editor . Guest more or less it was signedthe book was signed by an editor named mary manicker, but the rule in publishing is if youre at the same house for more than six months, it seems, you have to move on, except for alice. Alice muno is the dean of publishing, perhaps, certainly nonfiction publishing. And when my first editor left, i was honored to have her take it over. And she did a great job. She read through every word and seemed to concentrate on every little word, made notes throughout the manuscript and really helped. Cspan does she have a political bias that shyou had to deal with . Guest not really. Id sayyou know, im a conservative and there were biases in publishing and one fconfronts them. But Simon Schuster is a very broadminded place. They have george will. Bill bennett, i think, publishes there, irving kristol. They havetheyre used to people who they dont necessarily agree with. And thats not true of all houses. The thingit was interesting, youyou write up this proposal and my agent takes you around. He says, you meet with these publishers. so i met with 14 publishers. And you. Cspan fourteen different publishers . Guest yeah. And you go aroundnot that they all were interested in the book, but you go around over a two or threeday period talking to them all. And some of them ask for a video clip, which was new to me. I sent them a clip offrom the washington journal, a cspan appearance. Funny, they didnt sign me. Andand thenand then you go around and youre supposed to do a little shtick for them of how you will promote the book. But Simon Schuster was different. You walk in therefirst of all, on the wall they have some of the posters of the previous books theyve done and it wasirving crystal and people like that, company i would be proud to be associated with. But onmy meeting at Simon Schuster was just a bunch of smart people talking. So wthere was no preset, im on performance. it was just talking, and i felt like i feel at editorial meetings at the Weekly Standard i felt comfortable and ii just realized this was a class organization. I was very happy when they were interested in it. Cspan wayne, pennsylvania, how long did you live there . Guest i lived there mostly through high school, and my folks still live there and i go back quite a lot, so. Cspan whatd your parents do . Guest mymy parents still work. My father is a College Professor at westchester university, and my mother was a professor at drexel and st. Johns, st. Joesshe was one of these itinerant academics who teach western civ courses, the people who are horribly mistreated by the universities, and she got sick of it and she want to work for smithkline beecham, the pharmaceutical company, helping with their construction, which is a bit different from western civ, but she likes it. Cspan and how much did their professorial atmosphere have to do with what youre doing today, do you think . Guest well, somebody once wrote that it takes three generations to make a career, and i certainly think thats true in my case. My grandfather, whos dead obviously, was very interested in my writing and ii wish he could have been alive to see the book because he was very proud of his writinghe wrote briefs; he was a lawyerand he inculcated the reading and writing, and then my parentsmy fathers written a couple books, we had books around the house and so that wasthat goes into ones upbringing. But my parents, being academics, write more seriously, id say, than i do. I mean, this is a book of what i call comic sociology. Its meant to be filled with jokes, and their style of writing isyou know, has more gravitas than mine does. Cspan where did you go, then, from wayne to college . Guest i went to university of chicago for four years. Cspan why did you pick chicago . Guest because i didnt have the grades to get into harvard, like everyone else. No, imy parents, being academics, sort of respected academic institutions, and i applied to four and i got into a couple, but chicago was a firstrate school and it was a tremendous education. It wasnt much fun, but i think its improved recently in that regard. Cspan why not fun . Guest we all worked too hard. We really studied syou know, every weekend night we were studying, and that was great. I wrote, you know, 800 papers on hobbes. But i could have used 700 papers on hobbes and a few more pargood parties, and i think thats fair. I mean, itit introduced me to a broader world, to the world of allan bloom. I was not one of his students, but one became interested in that world of aristotle and the greeks and thucydides and burke when i first read burke, freshman year, i loathed him. I just wanted to rip up the book, every page. Cspan why . Guest because i was sort of a person of the left, and here was someone telling you that using reason and creating new ideas was not something that was very productive, was likelikely to lead you astray, that instead you should look to the past and see which ideas have evolved over time, and i thought that was ridiculous. Cspan who was burke . Guest edmund burke was an irish philosopher and statesman, a member of parliament, one of the great speakers of all time, a very great supporter of the American Revolution and a great opponent of the french revolution, which is the right stance. He wrote a great, great book called the reflections on the revolution in france. Cspan what was wrong with the french revolution . Guest that they were tthey were trying to remake society anew, that they had decided that we knowwe canthrough the force of pure reason, we can create a new world and that we will destroy the calendar, we will destroy the inherited institutions of society and well make a new society. And he said this is abhorrent. And he was right, as we learned from the french revolution, from the Russian Revolution and from the chinese revolution, from every everrevolution since. And so it was that idea of looking to the past and seeing what weve inherited and appreciating that which led eventually to my conservatism. Cspan your parents, were they people of the left . Guest they were peoplethey were liberals. They were sort of Scoop Jackson democrats, and theyre still democrats. They were notcertainly not of the stripe i now am. Cspan whats their reaction to your stripe today . Guest i think theyve gotten used to it. It was a shock, im sure, at first, becait took a few years after i left chicago and i went to work at National Review, which was my first jobworked for bill buckleyand im sure that was not the world they envisioned for me. And they disagree with me on many issues, im sure, and sometimes caustically. But iveive become a little less conservative, actually, recently, so maybe theres a meeting there. Cspan based on what . Guest based on the idea thati just think conservatives have been wrong about a number of things and put me off about a number of things, mostly during the gingrich revolution. I thought thethe Republican Party was too viciously antigovernment for my taste. I think if youre an american, if you love america, which you do if you live in belgium for four and a half years, you revere the institutions of government and you thinkbecause our government is athe foundation of our country, of our idea of america, and when people start telling you government is evil, government is the problem, weve just got to tear it down, then that puts your back up. And thatit did put my back up and i looked for a style of conservatism which was respectful of the institutions of government that weve inherited. And actually, i think the Republican Party is coming back to that. John mccain tried and george w. Bush has done that explicitly. Cspan and how about your colleagues at the Weekly Standard . First of all, who owns the magazine . Guest rupert murdoch. Cspan any impact from him on what you have to do . Guest never. Ive nei think ive spoken to him once in my life. I dont think hes ever had any impact on the magazine. We disagree with him vehemently on a number of things, most important of which is china. Were against free trade for china; hes involved it. Cspan bill kristol is the editor. Guest hes the editor. Fred barnes. Cspan . And fred barnes andand. Guest andrew ferguson. Cspan now do they alldo you all think alike on this conservatism thing . Guest no, we think violently differently. In fact, thats one of the hallmarks of the conservative movement, is that people who used to think alike now disagree on everything and thatthats a function of the end of the cold war and the end of liberalism, really, because liberalismconservatism is in disarray, but liberalism is really in disarray. So weve lost our two common enemies. Cspan when could you get a good fight going among the four of you sitting down just talking about any issue . Guest well, during john mccain, that was good enough because bill kristol and i thought john mccain was the better candidate for a number of reasons. Fred barnes did not. Hehe thought george w. Bush was a better candidateon intellectual grounds, not just who would win in novemberand andy fergusons ideas were, as usual, very subtle and secretly forceful. Cspan secretly forceful. Guest yeah, andys not someone who comes out as much as some of the rest of us and just baldly declares something. Hishis writinghes a much better writer than i am, a more supple writer, and his writing leads you in different feints and the power of the writing is sometimes not clear until you read it carefully. Cspan so whats a conservative today, then . Guest thats a good question. It used to be someone who hated the 60s. Thats what i used to think a conservative was, because they disagreed on things like term limits, conservatives disagreed on open immigration or closed immigration, open trade or closed trade. Generally, conservatives want to reduce the size of government, but not always. There are paleoconservatives who are happy with big social securitygary bauer was, hes certainly conservativewho are happy with big governments going to clamp down on immigration. So i used to think the only thing that unites conservatives is that they hate the 60s and love the 80s. But now i really think the 60s and the 80s have merged into this new culture which both al gore and george w. Bush arehave inherited, this mooshy antiideological culture, this bobo culture. And so iits really unclear what unites conservatives, except for the habit of thinking of each other as conservatives. And thats been true in my life, that the people who i used to agree with, say, at the libertarian cato institute, i now rarely agree with. And we consider ourourselves friends, at least i consider them friends. But the old coherence of conservatism as a movement, which started with goldwater, worked through reagan, went to gingrich, i really think that is finished. Cspan i probably shouldnt ask you this, but sjust your instincts today about who will win in the fall if nothing changes between now and then. Guest yeah, my instinct is that bush will win. The last chapter of thethis book is about politics, and i wrote it a year ago, so its not specifically about the campaign but thethe bobo life is a reconciliation between thismostly leftwing ideas, of bohemia, freedom, social freedom, and the bourgeoisie, which is about traditional morality and culture, and the ideas that these two have merged into one social ethos. And the politicians who come out of that have merged left and right. Bill clinton is the ultimate bobo politician. He takes some ideas on the left and some ideas on the right, and blurs them all together. Bush has done some of that. Gore has done some of that. Bushs compassionate conservatism isis some of that. But one of the things that has happened to the bobos is theyve become conservative in an oldfashioned sense, meaning distrusting change, disliking confrontation and anger. And ii really think in terms of temperament, george w. Bush is closer to the bobo sensibility because hes not a confrontational guy. Hes a lover, not a fighter, asas he would say. Hes a uniter, not a divider. And so hes an anvery antiideological person. In 1968, he graduated from yale college68, very tumultuous times. He wasnt for the antihe wasnt for vietnam, he wasnt against it. He really sat out because he was so antiideological. That put him out of step with the times in the 70s and 80s when we had an ideological era. But i think it perfectly puts him in step with these times, which are antiideological, which are conservative and which are this mooshy leftright synthesis. Gore is there in policy grounds, but he himself is a strident individual and i think people will eventually be put off by that. Cspan you say in that chapter, they are generally disenchanted with national politics, meaning bobos. they tend not to see it as a glorious or, capital r, romantic field of endeavor the way so many people did earlier in the century. guest yeah, one of the things running through the book is a comparison between the 1950s protestant establishment, which was one elite from the industrial age, and the bobo establishment, which is the sort of elite we get from the Information Age. And you ask yourself, well, which is better . well, the wasp establishment, the protestant establishmentpeople like john mccloy and dean achesonpeople like that, they had many virtues. One of them was a sense of public service. The protestant establishment, the sons of that establishment died in large number in world wars i and ii. They joined the cia and parachuted behind the cold war, the iron curtain lines, at great personal risk. They sometimes did a lot that was not in their personal interest, but they did it because they were sthey were raised with a sense of noblesse oblige. Theyto muchyou know, you have tremendous privileges, so you have to give back. And that is not a sense, i dont think, the bobos have, because the bobos are an elite trained to think that theyre not an elite. Theyre an establishment trained to be antiestablishmentarian. So i havent seen the level of National Involvement and national service. The other great wasp virtue is reticence, which certainly the bobos dont have. When george bush the elder, ran for president in 1988, his mother, who was then still alive, said, george, youre talking about yourself too much, which was an old wasp lady saying, one doesnt talk about oneself. but, of course, in our day and age, one does little else, and the bobos dont have that. At the same time, the problem with the protestant establishment, which killed it, was that they were too restrictive. If you didnt have the right skin color or the right family background, you couldnt join this establishment. And that sort of restrictive establishment that didnt put great emphasis on blbrains, but put it on bloodlines, could never survive in an Information Age when you need brains. Cspan you went to the university of chicago, graduated what year . Guest 1983. Cspan then what . Guest then i werwent to work at a various set of odd jobs while writing freelance articles. I was a bartender at the faculty club. I wrote a political column for an idealistic venture which was supposed to be a weekly for the black south side of chicago. Most of us were not black, which was something of a hindrance to that newspaper. And then i worked briefly at the City News Bureau of chicago, which is owned by the Chicago Tribune and suntimes, which is a wire service reporwire service where you really are out there covering rapes and murders in the south sidewest side of chicago. Cspan then what . Guest well, during college, as a junior, i wrote a parody of bill buckleys book, overdrive called the greatest story ever toldfortunatemaymaybe the funniest thing ive ever written; i peaked at age 19and he came to campus and said, david brooks, if youre in the audience, i want to offer you a job. i wasnt in the audience because actually i was out in stanford, california, debating Milton Friedman. I was a leftwing debater on a tv show that Milton Friedman was doMilton Friedman talks to the young, that sort of thing. He sdestroyed me. Half the show was me sitting with my mouth hanging open trying to think of what to say to whatever he had just said. But anyway, i consider myself a person of the left. Then over the next two or three years, i became more conservative, not quite in the National Review mold, but more conservative. And so two or three years later i said, you made an offer two years ago. Is that offer still open . and buckley, without ever asking about my politics or anything, said, yep, come on. so i went to work at National Review for a year and a half and met buckley, became very friendly with him and his sister priscilla, many of those people and from there on my course into rightwing media waswas set. I went to the wall street journal editorial page, Washington Times before that and then the Weekly Standard. Cspan what did you learn from each one of those institutions . Guest buckley just teaches youwell, buckleys great gift is friendship andand his ability to form friends with many people, including with myself. Andi mean, i learned about conservatism and russell kirk and people like that from buckley. But buckleys great gift is his personal gift to create loyalty and to reallyto show the friendship is the most important thing. From the Washington Times, i was a movie critic there, so i got to meet all sorts of people i never would have metjackie gleason, burt lancaster, kirk douglas. That was a thrill. And then fi went to work for robert bartley. I was the book review editor at the wall street journal. Then i went abroad and then i was the oped editor. And from bartley you learn somewell, you learn a lot about economics and things, which i didnt know as much about. But you also learn how to be a brave journalist. Bartleys a very reticent guy. His meetingsthe wall street journal editorial page meetings are really dominated by him and hes a midwestern guy from iowa, minnesota, and im from new york, im a jewish guy, i like to talk and imim suusually surrounded by talk. But at the editorial meetings, a midwestern ethos reigns. So there would be long silences and i would sit in my chair, which was just like this chair, and id stare at my shoes and id say to myself in my head over and over again, i will not break this silence. I will not break this silence, because they were comfortable with silence and i was extremely uncomfortable with it, butso it really was a different culture than whwhat i was used to. But bartley understands how to run an editorial page, which is a phrase he has, muzzle velocity. you attack peopleyou attack ideas, not people. You attack ideas. Youre strong in youryouryour arguments. Youre not wishywashy. You are going to beyoure for something and youre going to be for it. And thats a wayyou know, its a crowded media world. And the wall street journals editorial page has influence because it attacks ideas, it believes in certain ideas and its vociferous in support of them, and i think thats really useful, you know. I think too many editorial pages are wishywashy. Cspan you make twojust a connection here. In robert bartleys book that we did on booknotes, you talked about f. A. Hayek, the road to serfdom and the importance of that for conservative thinking. Guest right. Guest right. Cspan did you know him at the university of chicago . Guest no. No, i didnt study any economics. I was a history major. As i say, i was born into the politics of athens and not of today. Cspan did you know that he was around out there . Was it. Guest i knew about friedman, but i didnt know about hayek. I knew about the straussians, which are those schooled atallan bloom. Cspan leo strauss . Guest leo strauss, allan bloom. My colleague now, bill kristol was sort of a straussian, Harvey Mansfield at harvard. Its a school of political theory, most of whom are conservative, though in a very rarified form. Cspan along the wayWashington Times, wall street journal, National Reviewwhen did you begin to feel a sense ofof either power or position or people paying attention to what you were doing . Guest the only otherthe only time ive ever in my life had imposter syndrome was when i was editing the wall street journal oped edge. Imposter syndrome is youyou walk into the office and you think, this cant be me. I dont belong here. and at the journal editorialat the oped page, youd get 150 manuscripts a day, 60 phone calls a day, people desperate to get on the page and you have to choose really one or two. And so there is this sense that you actually can control some important piece of real estate in the american media. And you hi had a veautibeautiful view of the hudson river to hwhich helps. And i really saidthought, well, this cant be me. and actually i left that job after a very short time becauseit was fun, but im a writer, not an editor, and i had to find a place i could write. Cspan so how long have you been in this current position and what else do you do besides write for the Weekly Standard . Guest the journal isthe Weekly Standard is aboutalmost five years old now and ive been here since the inception. Really murdoch funded the magazine, but kristol, John Podhoretz and fred barnes started it. And it was most of my friends, chris caldwell, david frum, krauthamcharles krauthammer, p. J. Orourke, robert kagan. It was mostly the people i really admire and like all at one magazine, so i thought what could be more fun . And its proved that way. So i write for that, and then on the side i write this book and i write a lot of freelance stuff. Im a contributing editor at newsweek and i write for the new yorker periodically, on various things, mostly nonpolitical, mostly on this stuff, which is cultural. Cspan one of the things that comes through in your book is that people who are bobos watch pbs and listen to npr. Guest yeah. Well, i think bobosand cspan, i should say, though its more fun to make fun of pbs and npr than cspan. You dont have as much of a precious sensibility. But bobos are highly educated. Thatthats the essence of the bobo, that the old protestant establishment were formed in the country club or in the cradle by the bloodlines. But thethe bobos went through the University System and consider themselves university people. Thats why they turn everything into graduate school. And so the pbs and the npr, thejust as a fact, the peoplethey have an audience among the more highly educated. Cspan you say that there are nine million in this country making more than 100,000 a year. Guest yeah, and im desim not describing the whole country in this book or the whole country doesnt eat wholeyou know, mung bean pizza and spend 9 on aor 90 on designer mulch, but im describing upscale america, the people who live in the suburbs, shop at restoration hardware, crate barrel, go to starbucks, spend 4 bucks for a cup of coffee. Cspan you mentioned restoration harborhardware in your book and thats in marin county in california . Guest thats in corte madera, which is in marin county. Cspan and what is it . And what did you see there . Guest its a chichi Hardware Store which was founded on the ideait was founded by a guy who went up to Northern California and needed tools to restore aa house, couldnt find them, so he sopened a Hardware Store. And thethe intellectual basis of the idea is that we opportunistic, highly educated meritocrats have left something behind. Wewe seize all these opportunities, we make all this money, but the simple virtues of life, the wisdom of the simple folk is something we have left behind in our search for money and that, therefore, they will sell you the goods that remind you of the simple life. So if you were of a certain age and you walk into a restoration hardware, you go, ah, theres the pencil sharpener i had in school. Theres the lunch tray i had in school. and its a ssera sense of nostalgia, and this is a very common bobo sensibility, that theres some simple thing we left behind. Theres this book, a simple abundance, that does famtremendously well. I thought i should write a book called complicated poverty. But that probably wouldnt sell as well. Cspan god. Guest god is an important part of the bobo life, as its an important part of all. I assume youre talking about the chapter on religion. Cspan yes. Guest . That i have in there. Cspan i mean, where does god fit in with a bobo . Guest well, as i say, the bobo is a reconciling ethos between leftwing bourgeoor leftwing bohemian, rightwing bourgeois. The bohemian approach to religion was selfreligion throw off organized religion and all that custom and ritual that thethe bourgeois liked, all the traditional values and enter a realm of pure freedom, just have these experiences on the beach at dawn, sort of new age selfexploration. But a lot of the people who threw that off in the 60s and 70s discovered, well, you can have a lot of peak experiences at dawn looking at the pacific ocean, but it doesnt add up to a whole lot. and they discover that its very hard to pass that down to your kids, that sort of spirituality so a lot of those people are going back into religion, going back into organized religion. There was a great New York Times headline that captured this, religion makes a comeback belief to follow . And so its an attempt to have the roots and rituals of organized religion at the same time you have the freedom and flexibility to choose what parts of the organized religion youre going to obey. I ran into a rabbi in montana whothey asked him, well, what sort of reljudaism do you practice . Is it conservative, orthodox and reform . and he said, flexodoxy, which is a perfect bobo word for flexibility and freedom on the one hand and orthodoxy on the other. And in the book, imim veryi praise the way bobos have changed our commercial life. I think our stores are much more interesting. Ourour companies are much more interesting than they used to be. But religious life and political life, i think that theyve had a bad effect on, because this idea to ghave it both waysto say, well, im going to rejoin orthodox religion, but im going to choose what parts of the orthodox religion im going to follow. You know, i just want a Little Community and a little custom and a little, you know, nice ritual, but im not going to defer to god. Ill dill overrule god when i disagree with him, i think thats ultimately an unworkable way to have religion. If you cant defer to the authority of god, then youreyoure ultimately going to have a problem. So i. Cspan books dedicated to jane. Guest thats my wife. Cspan where did you meet her . Guest i met her at the university of chicago. She was a student there with me. Cspan what was she studying . Guest she was studying anthropology. Cspan what does she do now . Guest she is raising our three kids. I gi think the biggest change in her life is that she converted to judaism, dedespite my pressure, and has become very serious about it and we send our kids to a jewish school, and im one of those people who are mostly secular, but have found myself getting dragged kicking and screaming back into religion. Cspan the most abstemious time in history . Guest well, the most abstemious time in recent history, i think, the boif you look at bobo leisure time and you compare it again to the 1950s, the 50s realreally were ginsoaked. It was the last gragegreat age of drinking. I mention in the book i happened to see inon cable tv, a game called match game 73, which was done in 1973, where the guest or thethe contestant had to pickcomplete a phrase and then match it with six celebrities who would also complete the same phrase and they were supposed to get the same match. And it was half blank. and he said, half drunk. i though, well, thats weird. Nobodynone of those six celebrities will also say half drunk. but four of the six said half drunk. this is 1973. Drunk. this is 1973. Now wed say halfandhalf. thethe amount of boozing that went on in American Life thenor really inall through American Life, was high. But now youve got an elite based on brain power and not connections. So weve got to show how mentally alert we are all the time, and therefore, coffee has overtaken booze as the social drink of status. And thatsthats another shift you get when you tgoget away from aan elite based on blood to an elite based on brain power. Cspan back to yourthe chapter on politics. You say, we have allowed our political views to be corroded with an easy pseudocynicism that holds that all politicians are crooks and all public endeavor is a sham. guest yeah. Well, thats not only true of bobos, thats true of everything. I mean, that. Cspan why has this hawhy has it happened . Guest thats a good question. It could be because the stakes are lower in political life since the end of the cold war or it could be just our populism has rung arun amok. Theres something always consistent in American History that says politicsyou know, these politicians, theyre all scoundrels and we all distrust authority figures. And so you have a populous distrust of authority figures. And thenexcuse methe new left came along distrusting authority figures, which is sort of a leftwing version of the same populism, and that triumphed. So now everybodyoh, the authority figures, theyll all full of it. Congressmen, they all do it, and nobody is willing to admit the truth. Theresyou have people in washington who are outstanding individuals who are as good statesmen as, you know, one normally getshenry hyde or robert rubin, people who really do an outstanding job. But instead, you get what is really an easy cynicism. Its easy to say, oh, theyre all scoundrels. Theyre all crooks. its simply not true, though. Cspan if you had to have a couple of books on your shelf that would define what you really think about everything and is kind of your guiding light, what would they be . Guest hmm, thats a good question. Burkes reflections on the revolution of france, an essay by oakshot called on rationalism. Cspan who is oakshot . Guest michael oakshot is an english philosopher of this centurydied not too long agoand hehe echoed burke in saying, these ideas to rationally transform society are doomed to failure. Its important to understand the institutions we have all around us and cherish them, and on rationalism was a devastating essay against people who think you can figure it all out just by pure reason. Hayek also wrote many of the same things, by the way, saying, you cant plan an economy because we cant understand it all. Isaiah Berlin had a great essay called the hedgehog and the fox, about tolstoys understanding of wisdom and it was the same thing, youyou should be sensitive to the world around you. and then a book ii make a big deal of in my book, which is jane jacobs the rise and decline of grthe rise and decline of Great American cities, which is really the protobobo book because she tookthere were two views of order. The bourgeois werewere a view of order, of society which was to have orders, you need to have rigid rules, everything has to be hyperorganized. That was the one way of looking out at the world. And then thethe bohemian idea that you shouldnt have order, you should have disorder, you shouldeverything should be emancipated and anarchy was wonderful. She looked around at a city street in greenwich village, where she was living, and said, all these people, these shopkeepers are going about their way and it seems kind of disdisorderly. But it all makes for a coherent order the way a forest is a coherent order. you know, this shopkeeper comes out, looks out on the street, sees something. Another shopkeeper comes out, looks for something, and then suddenly theres a man trying to coax a young girl into a car, and suddenly the whole street stops. It seems disordered. But it stops because theyre not sure is this man really going to kidnap this girl . Then it turns out the man is just her father trying to get her in the car. And what she saw was this organic order, this organic way society organizes itself. Nobody plans it, but its a series of individual decisions which cohere to form an order. And that is really the reconciliation between the emancipated freedom and the rigid order of so many old authoritarian regimes. Cspan next book . Guest i have ideas for the next book, but theyre all halfbaked right now. Cspan any subject . Guest well, the subject i want to ask about is what makes us americans . I think americans, despite the Information Age and the global economy, really are different from everybody else. And we dont have a good sense of what that is because our sense of patriotism is outdated its rebased on war. Id like to figure out what makes us americans today. Cspan our guest, david brooks. First book, bobos in paradise. Thanks for joining us. Guest thank you. Up next from the 14th 14th annual national become stifle in washington, dc, Peniel Joseph discuss his biography of stokley carmichael. So, were here to listen to Peniel Joseph. I had the pleasure of interviewing peniel on cspan on the occasion of the 2010 book, dark days, bright