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, bohemi