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David Brooks where do we find a Bobo in paradise Bobo's are spread across upscale America if you're looking for the hunting signs of them I suppose what you do is you look for people who've renovated their kitchen so big it looks like an aircraft hangar with plumbing if you see these big kitchens with islands in the middle of them they've got a big refrigerator so big you know a sub-zero it looks like you could fit an in-law suite in one side of them they've got the six burner dual fuel Viking ranges so basically Bobo's are across upscale America they're in left-wing towns like Berkeley California Burlington Vermont in right-wing towns Wayne Pennsylvania where I went to high school Orange County California and basically what the Bobo's are is their bushwa Bohemians there are people who have taken the sixties ethos of Bohemia and the eighties ethos of bushwa yuppie money-making and they've jammed it all together they're creating a new synthesis culture for our country can you remember when he invented the phrase I can't exactly I know when at first stuff 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 main line outside of Philadelphia it's ranked number eight in the country and the number of families where members of the Social Register so it's very Protestant establishment sort of place if you ever saw that Katharine Hepburn movie The Philadelphia Story he was set in a place like Wayne so I come back in the mid 90s and suddenly you know the place was an espresso desert now there are six fancy coffee shops cappuccinos stands there there's a whole fancy bread store where they spell sell spinach fade a loaf for four bucks and seventy five cents and if you ask them to slice the bread in the store they look at you like you haven't risen to the higher realm of bread consciousness there's one of these organic fresh field supermarket stores which is like upscale suburban hippie dim they've got vegetarian dog biscuits basmati rice all natural hair coloring and it occurred to me that they you know they've taken all the stuff from the 60s that was of interest to teenagers like nudity and love and taken that away but kept all the things from the 60s of interest in middle-aged hypochondriacs like whole grains so you get to Wayne and the culture is transformed and I'm seeing it all with European eyes because I really been away for four and a half years and I realized the Information Age has not only transformed 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 concept that was the moment when I thought something's going on here I have at least a series of articles maybe a book how much of a Bobo are you well my joke is that I consider myself a Bobo with bad grades if I'd studied more I would have gone 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 I I consider myself a writer and I live for ideas and things like that but I also want a big house so I'm caught between money and spirituality well in the chapter on the intellectual life I just found a you know a couple of sentences in a relationship doing this interview in this book that I want to read back to you you say for intellectuals who do not possess this gift the next step up the latter involves writing a book how many books have you written this is my first real book aside from the obvious paramount thing about a book who the author can get to blurb it you've got Christopher Buckley EJ Dionne PJ O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe well get them to burbot I did I asked all except for Tom Wolfe my publisher asked him I don't know him there are three important factors the author needs to concern herself with and I want to stop there and ask you every reference to the other person is a she in your book in that chapter just in that Jen just in that chapter and others I sort of flip-flop why'd you do that for the sake of gender equity and and I go back to if I find the word again to be imported at the pub the publishing has the title and the one phrase people will remember from right so and here I have a book with a neologism Bobo which is bushwa bohemian so I'm guilty of the thing I'm writing about I write in the introduction that sometimes I think I've made self-loathing into a career and you know there are some of me in the book that chapter is sort of an acerbic look at as the intellectual as social climber arrest career climber the other thing you talk about in that chapter is participating in conferences right I know we carried it reference that you were like the the moderator way along with EJ Dionne when you talked about Al Gore and George Bush and other candidates for the presidency tell us about the conference world well the conference were that you know it's hard to imagine a hundred years ago that like Andrew Carnegie and john d rockefeller sitting on a panel on the corporate responsibilities of the corporation with mark twain is 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 there's evenly separated bottles of mineral water and we're all sitting between them we've got our five minute prepared remarks and the odd thing for academics especially conferences 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 how are you on the same panel with the people with big names big name professors are you the the most famous person on the panel of 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 they're all these coffee ER and said in the hotel conference area in the in the aisle wherever the panels are being held and people rush out to the coffee area and they're all schmoozing and if you look at academic newsletters you see these pictures they'll be half a dozen people clutching wine glasses or coffee mugs to their chests and they all look so happy because they're all in this career schmooze together and it's always the big-name professors who are schmoozing with the other big-name and the foundation officials are doing a little political waves here and up and down the alleyway and it really is people measure their status by how they perform at conferences is it true that if you're really well-known you you can be dull and if you're not well-known at all you got to be good yeah in fact if you're really well-known you're supposed to be dull there's some there the idea is you're so important you don't need to be interesting so you speak in the higher institutional mode so if you're like a secretary of state and you come to a conference you should really put people to sleep but if you're a young person and you presume to use words that are dull and if you presume a dullness beyond your measure then you're really overreaching yourself it's very off-putting when don't when young people are dull then you say here intellectuals on a book tour will need a catch phrase a talk interviewers can scan seconds before a segment and then used to start a conversation why do you need that well uh because the most of the talk shows you've actually read the book and I've actually had good luck with the people I've spoken to reading the book but you most talk show TV hosts have not read the book and they're just there to fill their 6 minutes of airtime and one of the things they do the publishing houses actually send out FAQ sheets with the questions they're supposed to ask and one of the things they like to do is they'll ask you beforehand what do you want to say and you may say it and then they'll they'll say what you meant to say so they can look smart and then you're left yep so have you had the experience that you show up and someone hasn't read the book and what's the catch phrase that they go for well people ask what Bobo is in this in this case because that is the the center of my theory I mean part of this chapter it's a very acerbic chapter at what's happened to the intellectual life it starts with a description of intellectual life in the 1950s with Edmund Wilson and Lionel trilling and khana or rent an intellectual life which was really austere were very removed from the cop the world of Commerce very removed from politics people just sitting with their Heidegger and there Hegel and theorizing and writing for very small circulation magazines like partisan review and making grand sweeping statements so I take that pull it at that intellectual world which is really you know portentous and then I compared it to the intellectual world of today where we have phrases like intellectual capital and marketplace of ideas where elections are really much more game players much more naked ly ambitious and I weigh the pros and cons of the two intellectual worlds and I'm telling jokes about how this imagined intellectual could rise through the world and become the next Henry Kissinger and it's supposed to be funny but but I tried away seriously what's a better intellectual style because the 50s they really had a sense of intellectual as vocation the Russian intelligentsia the 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 how that he wrote in 1954 where he said some intellectuals we know have written for The New Yorker and worse far worse well now we're not shocked if anybody writes for The New Yorker and it's a sign of how different li we look at intellectuals than they did 50 years ago what is s ID that's a status income disequilibrium that is what people who suffer who have high status and low income people in the media tend to suffer at congressman suffer from it it's sort of a jokey malady for people who during the day they're sort of the gods of the career world if you're a senator or congressman or a top-notch journalist in this town you you know people are asking you favors all day the messages pile up on your desk you're 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 MacLean or in the Upper East Side of Manhattan or into the North Shore of Chicago and you're stuck going to your dinky little apartment where you're cleaning your own toilet because you don't have the money you've got status but no but no money so it's a it's sort of this perversity that you feel like a god during the day in a slump at night and so I have a jokey chapter about people who suffer from this you wrote in there about being at the Drake Hotel along miss you gonna happen in there in Chicago right and then somebody going to Hyde Park and the rest of them going up to Lake Forest or someplace like that do you have that actual experience no no this is sort of an imagined I mean I it's like a lot of things in the book it's something you're familiar with you write about the world you know and I'm in this world but on the one hand you exaggerate for comic effect and then you hear a lot of stories as you're doing your reporting you try to get all the the reality in there how old are you I'm 38 married yes how many kids three how old are they nine six and one and where do they live with right here in the district what is a man at your age with a book and a column and all that and appearing on Jim Lehrer show and other places what's your ambition where you go as a Bobo huh well I don't know where I go as a Bobo I'd like to go out to the 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 I mean a lot of people I have this perverse attraction to books which really doesn't make any sense because the money I suppose is in speeches and TV but to me you know people say do you some people write books just so they can get on TV but I appear on TV so I can write books that this is the most fun thing I've ever done I'm reasonably proud of it and I'd like to do well enough with the book so I could write more and more books because working on a book for two or three years at a time really was tremendously satisfying you you could just get to know a lot more and think a lot more and you can work on the prose a lot more even than a magazine article you know I work at an opinion magazine where it's not like a newspaper there is you 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 who reads books very few people I mean if my book sells 50,000 copies that's fantastic I mean that'll be tremendous but if I write for Newsweek or The Wall Street Journal you're getting millions so in some sense if you want to reach people it really is better to write articles the other hand you hope if they read a whole book of yours they'll remember it and they'll see a lot more depth to the argument than they would in an eleven hundred word op-ed piece but you know Adam you know I'm 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 it's obvious you don't matter that only the TV cameras matter and you're just a prophet in the way for that so I must say in my line of work I don't 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 I had this you 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 in that history's moving off in some opposite direction what do you think they think about their lives the people in Silicon Valley yeah I think they're thrilled I mean listen the only people I know who really feel that they're changing the world and that they are at the center of the action are these people in Redmond Washington these people who were in Silicon Valley they really feel you 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 that's gonna change everything and they could be right you know this bow-bow reconciliation I talked about is really a product of the Information Age what they're creating because in this in this economy ideas and information or is important to creating wealth as natural resources in 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 that's what's reconciled this 150 year old culture war between the Bohemians in the bush was a who is not a member of the blue jersey well in the old days it was artists and rebels the Bohemia started as a rejection of the bush huazi the bush was he came say in the early 19th century late 18th century in Paris and they were the shopkeepers the merchants 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 decided they looked at these shopkeepers and they said these people are repulsive flow Barre 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 at he thought the the grocer's and the shopkeepers were plotting in avaricious flow bearer signed his letters bourgeoisie Fobus to show how much he hated these people and those Bohemians in the early 19th 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 a 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 prankster a humor that the hippies I grew up with in New York consent in 1960s they would have gone for that prankster humor and so for 150 years you had a culture war you had the Bohemians who were anti-materialistic the bourgeois were materialistic the Bohemians worth work experience oriented the bourgeois were career oriented the Bohemians pretended to be promiscuous because it seemed free and the bourgeois pretended to be chaste and so you really had a cultural war for a hundred and fifty years and when I got back and went to Wayne after living in Europe it really seems to me that culture war was over and that the information age had melded the two forces Marx taught us that class is always conflict but it seemed to me in this case they had just blurred together the people who are half hippy half 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 where's the word Bohemia come from well Bohemia is 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 were free floating where is it physically do you know it's I'm not sure exactly it's a region I think I shouldn't guess I'm not exactly sure what about the word bourgeois or bourgeoisie where does that come who's first start you yeah that's a good question you know I don't know it's uh it's certainly a word Marx used but I don't either get predates in Karl Marx probably is mentioned in the book as often as anybody yeah I think because even you know I work for a conservative magazine so not exactly shaped by Marxist thought I don't think but I think Marx has really influenced all of us in a number of ways one to teach us that class is conflict as I was saying when in fact I think in this case they blur and second to 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 we're actually defined by our means of consumption at least today how we shop is how we identify ourselves and if you're looking for Bobo's it's the consumer choices they make which say the most about them you know do they buy vulgar things like Corvettes or do they buy high-minded practical things like Range Rovers and those so 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 you're above money and material things I'm still on the chapter and intellectual life and I wanted to read this to you ask you to expand these Booker's meaning that people have booked people on television shows cable shows are caught between the demands of their vein and temperamental host and the crotchety male retirees who are the bulk of their viewers well as young people we have crotchety male retirees here we are why crotchety male retirees well again the whole this whole chapter is done in a high arch style so I'm exaggerating for comic effects but I think it is true well it's certainly true that people who run talk networks are cranky and overbearing on their staff but it I 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 that's certainly reflected in the mail I get and the people who pay attention to these things it's also true by the way of opinion magazines like mine it's true of the Wall Street Journal where the average reader I think is 57 or so so we have a large senior citizen population book buyers and they're very they're influential in this talk media why do you think you're interested in writing for that crowd then I'm not sure I'm writing for any crowd I'm writing for myself or what I find interesting what's in the discussion in the air and you know you really can't imagine an audience niche to write for because if you try to write for it you'll mess up are many other people like you interested in what you're writing about I mean in other words that you're 38 and you're talking about people who are 60s and above I mean do you find many of your yeah well they're sort of the Bobo's the classic Bobo's are baby boom and younger because I think it's important to have gone through the experience of the 60s and have these anti commercial attitudes built in and then have them mixed with the 80s these attitudes of money-making 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 I'm describing this book are 15 below and people who are older than that who have read it say yeah you've helped me understand why my 30 year old kids are spending money the way they're spending money you mentioned not being out in Redmond Washington while you're out there you went to REI what is it yeah REI is well REI is a chain store of outdoor equipment and one of the things that occurred to me is that Bobo's have an achievement ethos this is a meritocratic group of people and it shows in the way they go to work it shows in the way they practice religion everything is achieving even sex life I have a chapter in there you know you can't just have an orgasm you have to achieve an orgasm you have to do it the right way and then in vacation terms you don't just go sit on the beach you go in an environmental vacation that the kalapa goes Island or one of these educational vacations and and Minsk and then the highest status vacation is one where you're suffering all the time you're climbing Mount Everest or Mount Rainier and if you go out to Redmond Washington and go to dinner with these Microsoft executives you'll be at a dinner table and suddenly words like Basecamp and whiteout will be floating across the table and you realize some executives 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 clad a millionaire clad in magenta with a North Face Park on facing the elements and REI is the store where you can if you don't climb the Himalayas you can dress like you do it's this big massive store tens of thousands of square feet in Seattle and it's like first they've got a museum to the equipment when you first walk in the door which is to show you that it's edifying you're not just buying stuff and then they've got acre upon acre of outdoor gear ice axes up front and then water filters and to buy stuff in this store you need a chemistry degree from MIT you can't understand you know there's a performance underwear section where they've you know they've got all these high-tech I've forgotten all the name of the chemical fabrics that are made and you it's 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 bobo's are really based their ethos is based in the university and they turn everything into graduate school so you can't just by hiking equipment you have to understand all the different boots and things like that and you walk around this place and everyone looks like their escapees from the Norwegian Olympic team or something they've got these thick calves because they're walking everywhere they've got the $200 hiking boots they've got you know two ounce parkas that are beautifully tested for all kinds of weather and it occurred to me they're very wholesome you know when the Bohemians thought about leisure they thought about getting wild and getting naked and just enjoying and living for the moment but these people are working out they're very utilitarian almost Protestant in the way they view their vacation because they're working out their training and they're undergoing ordeals they can achieve some spiritual fulfillment I sometimes wonder why they don't just go to a Minnesota road crew in the middle of the wintertime if they really want a tough ordeal that'll help them though at least they'll fill in some potholes but they want the IMAX experience they want the Himalayas did you have any interest in buying any of the things you found there and I bought a pair of hiking boots there I was going hiking so I bought a pair and hiking boots but this you know I travel around this world and I have some tangential connection to parts of it I like when I like the big kitchens I can't afford it but what I write about is no it's not an autobiography I'm writing about a world I'm reporting on it's not all me Burlington Vermont and other Lotte towns yes that Burlington Vermont is a fantastic place is possibly the most left-wing city in America they've sent us our only socialist or independent Congressman Bernie Sanders and it is filled with aging hippies Homer University of Vermont University of Vermont Ben and Jerry's ice cream his most famous place there Ben and Jerry are everywhere in Vermont they're like big brother they've got signed pictures of these two guys all over the place but if you go to Burlington Vermont this haven for social left-wing ideas it's 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 the mentioning socially conscious investing it was sort of the left-wing 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 that's possible and then they've sold it and then they're selling it and marketing it all over the world so you walked I was sitting in a cafe called Unix 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 what's happened that former right-wing towns like Wayne Pennsylvania I described have become more bohemian in the way they shop but former left-wing bohemian towns have become more bourgeois because they've invested in business and one of the things that's happened is that now everyone's accepts business you know this debate between the bushwa and the bohemian this 150 year old 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 you'll just be rotted inside but these people think it's great to you know capitalism is great so long as you can wear a black t-shirt to work and they really have accepted commerce and that's a major shift for our age that there really are very few mortal enemies to capitalism anymore and people have accepted the judgments of the marketplace Serdar you 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 they're 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 you mentioned Northampton Massachusetts and Boulder Colorado and Missoula Montana what do they have in common yeah well they're all university towns and lot a towns if you were in a lot a town there should be like a feminist lingerie store there should be a bunch of software firms in an old factory warehouse that they've refurbished there should be a Marxist bookstore there should be plenty of open air activities because they're deep into community life I knew I was in a strange lot a town in Burlington because I was walking across the street and I'm from New York and my instinct is when I see a car coming I'm gonna stop and let the car come at the crosswalk but the car knew he was the drivers of the car in Burlington know that they are burning fossil fuel and that is pedestrian I am morally superior to they are so they stop and make sure they give you right-of-way so I'm walking along and I stop at a corner seeing a cart on my or corner of my eye and I'm watching some hippies play frisbee over there and I stand there and I realized there's a car waiting for me ten seconds go by he's still waiting so finally I realized that I've got the moral upper hand because I'm using a 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 realized there's 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 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 this cover I do everything doing it I had a little to do with it the first idea we we thought Paradise is a great word I didn't come up with a title my editor Alice may you 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 a Brousseau image and then I just filled in help them fill in the icons like the trowel the Range Rover the laptop in the coffee mug I'm really happy that the Simon & Schuster did the cover and I'm really happy with it now Alice may you as your editor this is a new for you to have her in an editor more or less it was signed the book was signed by an editor named Marion moniker but the rule in publishing is if you're at the same house for more than six months it seems you have to move on except for Alice Alice may you is the Dean of publishing perhaps early nonfiction publishing and when my first editor left I was honored to have her take it over and she did a great job at she read through every word and seemed to concentrate on every little word made notes throughout the manuscript and really helped does she have a political bias that you had to deal with not really I'd say you know I'm a conservative and there were biases in publishing and one confronts them but Simon & Schuster is a very broad-minded place they have George will bill Bennett I think publishes their Irving Kristol they have they're used to people who they don't necessarily agree with them that's not true of all houses the thing it was interesting you you write up this proposal and my agent takes you around he says you meet with these publishers so I met with 14 publishers and worked to you every go around not that they all were interested in the book but you go around over a two or three-day period talking to them all and some of them ask for a video clip which was new to me I sent them a clip up from the Washington journalist c-span appearance funny they didn't sign me and then and then you go around and you're supposed to do a little shtick for them of how you will promote the book but Simon & Schuster was different you walk in there first of all on the they have some of the posters of the previous books they've done and it was early crystal and people like that company I would be proud to be associated with but my meeting at Simon Shuster was just a bunch of smart people talking so but there was no preset I'm on performance it was just talking and I felt like I feel that energy really meeting of the Weekly Standard I felt comfortable and I just realized this was a class organization I was very happy when they were interested in it Wayne Pennsylvania how long do you live there I live there mostly through high school and my folks still live there and I go back quite a lot so what did your parents do my my parents still work my father's a college professor at West Chester University and my mother was a professor at Drexel and st. John's st. Joe's she was one of these itinerant academics who teach Western Civ courses that people who were horribly mistreated by the universities and she got sick of it and she went to work for a SmithKline Beecham the pharmaceutical company helping with their construction which is a bit different from Western Civ but she likes it and how much did their professorial atmosphere I have to do with what you're doing today you think well somebody once wrote that it takes three generations to make a career and I certainly think that's true in my case my grandfather who's dead obviously um was very interested in my writing and I wish he could have been alive to see the book as he was very proud of his writing you were briefs he was a lawyer and he inculcated the reading and writing and then my parents my father's written a couple of books and we had books around the house and so that was that goes into one's upbringing but my parents being academics write more seriously I'd say than I do and this is a book of what I call comic sociology it's meant to be filled with jokes and their style of writings you know has more gravitas than mine does where did you go then from Wayne to University of Chicago why did you pick Chicago because I didn't have the grades to get into Harvard like everyone else no I my parents being academics sort of respected academic institutions and I applied to for and I got into a couple but Chicago was a first-rate school and it was a tremendous education it wasn't much fun but I think it's improved recently in that regard why not fun we all work too hard we really studied you know every weekend night we were study 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 good parties and I think that's fair I mean it introduced me to a broader world to the world of Alan 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 loved him I just wanted to rip up the book every page why because I was sort of personal left and here was someone telling you that using reason and creating new ideas was not something that was very productive was like likely 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 who was Burke Edmund Burke was a Irish philosopher and statesman a member of parliament one of the great speakers of all time of very great support 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 what was wrong with the French Revolution that they were they were trying to remake society anew that they had decided that we know we can through 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 we'll 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 revolution since and so it was that idea of looking to the past and seeing what we've inherited and appreciating that which led eventually to my conservatism your parents were they people who left they are people they were liberals they were sort of scoop Jackson Democrats and they're still Democrats they were not certainly not of the stripe by now and what's their reaction to your stripe today I think they've gotten used to it it was a shock I'm sure at first it took a few years after I left Chicago and I went to work a National Review which was my first job worked for Bill Buckley and I'm sure that was not the world they envisioned for me and they disagree with me on many issues I'm sure and sometimes caustically but I've become a little less conservative actually recently so maybe there's a meeting there based on what based on the idea that I 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 the Republican Party was too viciously anti-government for my tastes I think if you're 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 think because our government is the foundation of our country of our idea of America and when people start telling you government is evil government is the problem we've just got to tear it down then that puts your back up and they did put my back up and I looked for a style of conservatism which was respectful of the institutions of government that we've inherited and I actually I think the Republican Party is coming back to that John McCain tried in George W Bush has done that explicitly and how about your colleagues at the Weekly Standard first of all who owns the magazine um Rupert Murdoch any impact from him on what you have to do never I've no I think I've spoken to once in my life I don't think he's 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 he's involved in it a bill kristol the editor and our Barnes Andrew Ferguson how do they all do you all think alike on this conservatism thing no we think violently differently in fact that's one of the hallmarks of the conservative movement is that people who used to think alike now disagree on everything and that that's a function of the end of the Cold War and the end of liberalism really because liberalism conservatism is in disarray but liberalism is really in disarray so we've lost our two common enemies when could you get a good fight going among the four of you sitting down just talking about any issue 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 he he thought George W Bush was a better candidate on intellectual grounds not just who would win in November and Andy Ferguson's ideas were as usual very subtle and secretly forceful secretly yeah and he's not someone who comes out as much as some of the rest of us and just boldly declare something his his writing he's a much better writer than I am a more supple writer and his writing leads you in different faints and the power of the writing is sometimes not clear until you read it carefully so what's a conservative today then that's a good question it used to be someone who hated the 60s that's 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 paleo conservatives were happy with big social security Gary Bauer was he's certainly conservatives who are happy with big government's gonna clamp down on immigration so I used to think the only thing that unites conservatives is that they hate the sixties and love the 80s but now I really think the sixties in the 80s emerged into this new culture which both Al Gore and George W Bush are have inherited this mushy anti ideological culture this Bobo culture and so it's really unclear what unites conservatives except for the habit of thinking of each other as conservatives and that's 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 ourselves 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 yeah I probably shouldn't ask you this but just your instincts today about who will win in the fall if nothing changes between now and then yeah my instinct is that Bush will win the last chapter that this book is about politics and I wrote it a year ago so it's not specifically about the campaign but the the bobo life is a reconciliation between this mostly left-wing ideas a bohemian 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's done some of that Bush's compassionate conservatism is is some of that but one of the things that has happened to the Bobo's is they've become conservative and old-fashioned sense meaning distrusting change disliking confrontation and anger and I really think in terms of temperament george w bush is closer to the bobo sensibility because he's not a confrontational guy he's a lover not a fighter as he would say he's a uniter not a divider and so he's in a very anti ideological person in 1968 he graduated from Yale College 68 very tumultuous times he wasn't for the ante he wasn't for Vietnam he wasn't against it he really sat out because he was so anti ideological 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 anti ideological which are conservative and which are this mushy left-right synthesis Gore is there on policy grounds but he himself is a strident individual and I think people will eventually be put off by that you say in that chapter they are generally disenchanted with national politics many bobos they tend not to see it as a glorious our capital our romantic field of endeavor the way so many people did earlier in the century yeah one of the things running through the book is comparison between the 1950s Protestant establishment which was one elite from the industrial age and the bow-bow establishment which is the sort of elite we get in the Information Age and you ask yourself well which is better well the wasp establishment the Protestants has from people like John McCloy Dean Acheson people like that they had many virtues one of them was the sense of public service the Protestant establishment the sons of that establishment died in large number in World Wars 1 and 2 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 they were raised with a sense of noblesse oblige they too much you know you have tremendous privileges so I have to give back and that is not a sense I don't think the Bobo's have because the Bobo's are an elite trained to think that they're not an elite there an establishment trained to be anti-establishment Aryan so I haven't seen the level of national involvement in national service the other great wasp virtue is reticence where certainly the Bobo's have when George Bush the elder ran for president in 1988 his mother who was then still alive said George you're talking about yourself too much which was an old wasp lady saying one doesn't talk about oneself but of course in our day and age one does little else and the Bobo's don't have that at the same time the problem with the Protestant establishment which killed it was that they were too restrictive if you didn't have the right skin color or the right family background you couldn't join this establishment and that sort of restrictive establishment that didn't put great emphasis on blunt brains but put it on bloodlines could never survive in an Information Age when you need brains you went to the Arts in Chicago graduated what year 1983 then what then I went went 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 about 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 sometimes which is a wire service report wire service where you really are out there covering rapes and murders in the South Side west side of Chicago then what well during college as a junior I wrote a parody of Bill Buckley's book overdrive called the greatest story ever told fortunately maybe the funniest thing I've ever written I peaked at age 19 and he came to campus and said David Brooks if you're in the audience I want to offer you a job I wasn't in the audience because actually I was out in Stanford California debating Milton Friedman I was a left-wing debater and a TV show the Milton Friedman was do Milton Friedman's talks to the young that sort of thing he's destroyed me half the shows me sitting with my mouth hanging open trying to think of what to say that whatever he had just said but anyway I consider myself a person 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 an astral view for a year and a half and met Buckley became very friendly with him sister Priscilla many of those people and from there on my course into right-wing media was was said I went to The Wall Street Journal editorial page Washington Times before that and then the Weekly Standard what did you learn from each one of those institutions Buckley just teaches you well Buckley's great gift is friendship and in his ability to form friends with many people and including with myself and I mean I learned about conservatism and Russell Kirk and people like that from Buckley but Buckley's great gift is his personal gift to create loyalty and to really it's a show that 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 met Jackie Gleason Burt Lancaster Kirk Douglas that was a thrill and then I 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 op-ed editor and from Bartley you learned some well you learn a lot about economics and things retired didn't know as much about but you also learned how to be a brave journalist Bartley's very reticent guy his meetings The Wall Street Journal editorial page meetings are really dominated by him and he's a Midwestern guy from Iowa Minnesota and I'm from New York I'm a Jewish guy I like to talk and I'm sorry usually surrounded by talk but at the editorial meetings a Midwestern ethos reigns so it'll be long silences and I would sit in my chair which was just like this chair and I'd stare at my shoes and I'd 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 supremely uncomfortable with it but so it really was a different culture than what I was used to but Bartley understands how to run an editorial page which is a phrase he has muzzle velocity you attack people you attack ideas not people you attack ideas you're strong in your your your arguments you're not wishy-washy you are gonna be your for something and you're gonna be for it and that's a way you know it's a crowded media world and the Wall Street Journal editorial page has influence because it attacks ideas it believes in certain ideas and it's vociferous in support of them and I think that's really useful you know I think too many a territorial pages are wishy-washy they make to guide just a connection here in Robert Bartley's book that we did on book notes he talked about FA Hyack the Road to Serfdom and the importance of that for conservative thinking right did you know him at the University of Chicago no no I didn't study any economics of the history major as I say I was more into the politics of Athens than today did you know that he was around out there was it I knew about Friedman I didn't know about Hayek I knew about the Strauss ian's which are the school that I was loom Leo Strauss Allan bloom my colleague now Bill Kristol was sort of a Strauss ian harvey mansfield at harvard it's a school of political theory most of whom are conservative though in a very rarefied four along the way Washington Times Wall Street Journal National Review when did you begin to feel a sense of either power or position or people paying attention to what you're doing the only other the only time I've ever in my life had imposter syndrome was when I was editing the Wall Street Journal op-ed page imposter syndrome and so you walk into the office and you think this can't be me I don't belong here and at the journal editorial at the op-ed page you'd get a hundred and fifty 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 had hired a view beautiful view of the Hudson River to have which helps and I really sent thought well this can't be me and actually I left that job after a very short time because it was fun but I'm a writer not an editor and I had to find a place I could write so how long have you been in this current position and what else do you do besides write for The Weekly Standard that journal is the Weekly Standard is about almost five years old now and I've been here since the inception really Murdoch funded the magazine but crystal John portraits and Fred Barnes started it and it was most of my friends Chris Caldwell David from crowd ham Charles Krauthammer PJ O'Rourke Robert Kagan was most the people I really admire and like all at one magazine so I thought what could be more fun and it's 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 I'm a contributing editor at Newsweek and I write for The New Yorker periodically and various things mostly non-political mostly on this stuff which is cultural one of the things that comes through in your book is that people who are Bobo's watch PBS and listen to NPR yeah well I think Bobo's and c-span I should say though it's more fun to make fun of PBS and NPR than c-span you don't have as much a precious sensibility but Bobo's are highly educated that that's the essence of the Bobo that the old Protestant establishment were formed in the country club or in the cradle by the bloodlines but the the Bobo's went through the university system and consider themselves University people that's why they turn everything into graduate school and so the PBS and NPR the just as a fact the people they have an audience among the more highly educated you say that there are nine million people in this country making more than $100,000 a year yeah and I'm just I'm not describing the whole country in this book of the whole country doesn't eat whole you know mung bean pizza and spend nine dollars on a or ninety dollars on designer mulch but I'm describing upscale America the people who live in the suburbs shop at Restoration Hardware Crate and Barrel go to Starbucks spend four bucks for a cup of coffee you mentioned Restoration Harbor Hardware in your book and that's in Marin County in California that's in quarter Madeira which is in Marin County and what is it and what did you see there it's a she shoe hardware store which was founded on the idea it was founded by a guy who went up to Northern California and needed tools to restore a house couldn't find them so he opened a hardware store and the the intellectual basis of the idea is that we opportunistic highly educated Merida Kratz have left something behind we we 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 are of a certain age and you walk into Restoration Hardware you go ah there's the pencil sharpener I had in school there's the lunch tray I had in school and it says a sense of nostalgia and this is a very common Bobo sensibility that there's some simple thing we left behind there's this book simple abundance that does fit meant tremendously well I thought I should write a book called complicated poverty but that probably wouldn't sell is God God is an important part of the bobo life it's it's important part of all I assume you're talking about the chapter on religion yes that I haven't many words God fit in with a bobo well as I say the bobo was a reconciling ethos between left-wing bushwa or left-wing bohemian right-wing bourgeois the bohemian approach to religion was self religion throw off organized religion and all that custom and ritual that the the bourgeois likes all that traditional values and enter a realm of pure freedom just have these experiences on the beach at dawn sort of New Age self exploration 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 and looking at the Pacific Ocean but it doesn't add up to a whole lot and they discover there's 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 it's 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 the organized religion you're gonna obey I ran into a rabbi in Montana who they asked him well what sort of Judaism do you practice is it conservative Orthodox and Reform and he said flexo doxy which is a perfect Bobo word for flexibility and freedom on the one hand and orthodoxy on the other and in the book I'm I'm very I praise the way Bobo's have changed our commercial life I think our stores are much more interesting our our companies are much more interesting than they used to be but religious life and political life I think they've had a bad effect on because this idea to have it both ways to say well I'm gonna rejoin Orthodox religion but I'm gonna choose what parts of the Orthodox religion I'm gonna follow you know I just want a little community and a little custom and a little you know nice ritual but I'm not going to defer to God I'll do I'll overrule God when I disagree with them I think that's ultimately an unworkable way to have a religion if you can't defer to the authority of God then you're ultimately gonna have a problem so I dedicated to Jane that's my wife where did you meet her I met her at the University oh she was a student there with me what was she studying she was studying anthropology what does she do now she is raising our three kids I could think the biggest change in her life is that she converted to Judaism - despite my pressure and has become very serious about it and we sent her kids through school and I'm one of those people who were mostly secular but it found myself getting dragged kicking and screaming back into religion the most abstemious time in history well the most up steamiest time in recent history I think the bow if you look at Bobo leisure time and you compare it again to the 1950s the 50s were really were gin-soaked it was the last great great age of drinking I mentioned in the book I happen to see in on cable TV a game called match game 73 which was done in 1973 where the guests are the the contestant had to pick complete a phrase and then match it with six celebrities who had 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 thought well that's weird nobody had none of those six celebrities will also say half drunk but four out of the six said half drunk this is 1973 now we'd say half and half the amount of boozing that went on in American life then really in all through American life was high but now you've got an elite based on brain power and not connections so we've got to show how mentally alert we are all the time and therefore coffee has overtaken booze as the social drink of status and that's that's another shift you get when you go get away from an elite based on blood to analyse based on brain bail back to your chapter on politics you say we have allowed our political views to be corroded with an easy pseudo cynicism that holds that all politicians are crooks and all public Endeavour is a sham yeah well that's not only true of the Bobo's that's true of everything I mean that why is this has it happened that's 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 or just our populism has run run amok there's something always consistent in American history that says politics you know these politicians they're all scoundrels and we all distress authority figures and so you have a populist distrust of authority figures and then excuse me the New Left came along distrusting authority figures which sort of left-wing version of the same populism and that triumph so now everybody all authority figures they're all full of it congressman they all do it and nobody is willing to admit the truth as you have people in Washington who are outstanding individuals who are as good statesmen as you know one normally gets henry hyde or robert rubin people who really do an outstanding job but instead you get what is really an easy cynicism it's easy to say ah they're all scoundrels they're all crooks it's simply not true though if you had to have a couple of books on your shelf that would define what you really think about everything and he's kind of your guiding light well we're doing that's a good question Burke's reflections on the revolution of France an essay by Oakshott called on rational it's always okay Michael Oakshott is an English philosopher of this century died not too long ago and he echoed Burke in saying these ideas to rationally transform society are doomed to failure it's 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 could figure it all out just by Pure Reason Hayek also wrote many of the same things by the way saying you can't plan an economy because we can't understand at all Isaiah Berlin had a great essay called the Hedgehog in the Fox about Tolstoy understanding of wisdom and it was the same thing you should be sensitive to the world around you and then a book I make a big deal of in my book which is Jane Jacobs the rise and decline of guerrilla the brides in decline of great American cities which is really the proto Bobo book because she took there were two views of order the bourgeois were a view of order of society which was stab orders you need to have rigid rules everything has to be hyper organized that was the one way of looking at the world and then the Bohemian idea that you shouldn't have order you should have disorders everything should be emancipated and anarchy was wonderful she looked around at her City Street in Greenwich Village where she was living and so all these people these shopkeepers are going about their way and it seems kind of as disorderly 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 see something another shopkeeper comes out books for something and then suddenly there's a man trying to coax a young girl into a car and suddenly the whole street stops it seems disordered but it stops because they're 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 it's a series of individual decisions which coherent to form an order and that is really the reconciliation between the emancipated freedom and the rigid order so many old authoritarian regimes next book I have ideas for the next book but they're all half-baked right now any subject 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 don't have a good sense of what that is because our sense of patriotism is outdated it's based on war I'd like to figure out what makes us Americans today our guest David Brooks first book Bobo's in paradise thank you for joining us thank you