from In These Times:
The Babbitt of the Bobos
Is David Brooks America’s most misguided pundit?By Chris Lehmann
No matter how many times I espy New York Times columnist David Brooks patiently explaining the deeply antipopulist, economically astute and mildly amusing features of the American character, I somehow always picture him in a straw boater and a striped jacket, affecting the jaunty mien of Harold Hill, the charming-huckster protagonist of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. That’s because, like Hill, Brooks keeps up a steady, wisecracking patter meant to lull his eager auditors into a state of calm reassurance about the social order surrounding them. There’s really just one salient difference: Hill was drumming up civic enthusiasm for the blandishments of school band class; and Brooks is pitching the stalwart myth of pseudomeritocratic worth, a system by which all just rewards spontaneously waft upward to the talented knowledge elite.
Brooks staked his claim as new millennial social seer with his breakout 2000 bestseller, Bobos in Paradise, which purported to gently mock the bohemian pretensions of the new American power elite. (These were, in Brooks’ waggish telling, the “Bobos”—a lazy conflation of “bourgeois” and “bohemian” that Brooks claimed was a signature new formation on the American social landscape, even though bohemians have always been drawn from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, and rarely harbor any serious ambition to forsake their socioeconomic birthrights.)
But as with many works of pseudomeritocratic propaganda, Brooks’ labored puckishness proved on closer inspection to be the sincerest form of flattery. For all its consumer excesses, the Bobo class was, in his account, brilliantly adaptive and surprisingly resourceful. Instead of lurching into cataclysmic hedonism, Brooks’ affluent Bobos embarked on rigorous regimes of physical and spiritual self-improvement, practicing an enlightened “Modernism for the shareholders” and possessing a “Midas touch in reverse,” whereby everything they touch “turns to soul.”
Behind Brooks’ gentle scoffing at the Bobo vogue for distressed furniture and overpriced cave-aged cheese at Whole Foods, was a tacit bid to extort a very old kind of social deference on behalf of this allegedly new social class—provided, of course, that its members summoned forth the right sort of nationalist fettle. In the book’s closing pages, Brooks exhorted the feckless Bobo class to step up to the bar of history and claim its proper role of stage-managing the world-defining American civilizing mission. Sounding very much like his own imperialist hero Theodore Roosevelt, Brooks fretted:
We may become a nation that enjoys the comforts of private and local life but that has lost any sense of … a unique historical mission. The fear is not that America will decline because it overstretches, but because it enervates as its leading citizens decide that the pleasures of an oversized kitchen are more satisfying than the conflicts and challenges of patriotic service.
Christopher Lasch, a keen critic of Theodore Roosevelt’s brand of imperial adventurism, astutely dubbed it “the moral and intellectual rehabilitation of the ruling class”—and that is very plainly what Brooks had in mind in his bid to marshal the home-happy Bobo elite into a gauzy ethos of national service. But of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can appreciate how deeply misguided this reckless conflation of ruling-class rehabilitation and national mission can be. Following the spirit of the Brooksian playbook to a tee, the United States became mired in a disastrous and illegal imperial mission in Iraq—a project that Brooks enthusiastically cheer-led from his perches at The Weekly Standard, the New York Times and “All Things Considered.” And of course the whole rickety debt-based fantasia that permitted countless Bobo homeowners to leverage out their mortgages into upscale kitchen upgrades has collapsed into a smoldering ruin. ...........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6729/the_babbitt_of_the_bobos
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