DAVID BROOKS CALLS FOR A MILLION BOBOS MARCH! Or as Matt Taibbi writes, Yuppies of the World, Unite: Is David Brooks Imitating Lenin the Funniest New York Times Column Ever?
David Brooks in 2000 wrote Bobos in Paradise, a seminal work of aristocratic self-congratulation declaring the epoch of the “Bourgeois Bohemian,” or bobo. “All societies have elites, and our educated elite is a lot more enlightened than some of the other elites,” Brooks quipped. The bobo was a delicious confection in which “You got your countercultural sixties in my high-achieving eighties!” The resulting admixture was part rebel, part establishment pillar whose mere presence would radiate fabulousness. “Wherever we educated elites settle,” Brooks wrote, “we make life more interesting, diverse, and edifying.”
The book was a tribute to the superior looks, taste, and romantic strategies of America’s elites, who’d not only won the Cold War but conquered the problem of power itself, by being so chill and amazing that no one would ever think to resent their authority. They wore jeans and sat on purposefully downscale furniture, being utterly casual, unlike previous ruling classes (in one upper-class suburb, “the restaurant La Fourchette has changed its name to the less pretentious Fourchette 110”).
Don’t be fooled, though: underneath that jeans-and-coffee exterior, the Bobo cultivated what the Greeks called metis, loosely equivalent to savoir faire, a type of extrasensory knowing. “This trait cannot be taught or memorized. It can only be imparted and acquired,” Brooks proclaimed, adding: “People sharing metis do not lecture; they converse… To acquire metis, a person must not only see but see with comprehension. He or she must observe minutely to absorb the practical consequences of things…” The yuppie version of the all-seeing Third Eye was a wonder, departing bobos just once — well, twice — in the small matter of populist voter revolts they failed to detect that were fueled by a mass desire to pitchfork them.
In his column, Brooks writes: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.
This struck me as essential advice for Americans today. We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. They have to show that they are democratically seeking to reform their institutions. This is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.
Let’s take the universities. I’ve been privileged to teach at American universities off and on for nearly 30 years and I get to visit a dozen or two others every year. These are the crown jewels of American life. They are hubs of scientific and entrepreneurial innovation. In a million ways, the scholars at universities help us understand ourselves and our world.
I have seen it over and over: A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.*
People flock from all over the world to admire our universities.
But like all institutions, they have their flaws. Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter. Through admissions policies that favor rich kids, the elite universities have contributed to a diploma divide. If the same affluent families come out on top generation after generation, then no one should be surprised if the losers flip over the table.
So Brooks is calling for a Bobo-fied version of fin-de-siecle French leftist Georges Sorel’s General Strike:
[Lee Harris] seems to be working from the assumption that Sorel believed the General Strike would in fact bring down capitalism and bring about true socialism if it were successful. He writes, for example, that “Sorel argued that the general strike was the utlimate weapon in the arsenal of revolution, one that would lead to an apocalyptic transformation from capitalism to socialism.” It’s my understanding — subject to correction — that Sorel did not actually take a firm position on whether or not a General Strike would, in fact, work. Rather he argued that it was the Myth of the General Strike which was all important. The Myth was a form of Plato’s noble lie. The masses needed to have a religious faith that the General Strike would usher in utopian socialism, but whether or not it would in fact be successful in doing that he remained at best agnostic. He rejected “social scientific” Marxism as a fool’s errand and was generally unconvinced by literal Marxist prophecy. Rather, he wanted such prophesies to be seen through a secular religious prism.
“[T]o concern oneself with social science is one thing and to mold consciousness is another” he wrote. Sorel had contempt for socialists who wanted to make their case with facts and reason. Sorel called the prominent Italian socialist Enrico Ferri, one of those “retarded people who believe in the sovereign power of science” and who believed that socialism could be demonstrated “as one demonstrates the laws of the equilibrium of fluids.” True revolutionaries needed to abandon “rationalistic prejudices” in favor of the power of Myth.
But different versions of Sorel’s General Strike are what the American left now does every year. In 2024, Jon Gabriel wrote: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.
In 2017, the Women’s March was launched in reaction to the #MeToo revelations, while in 2018, the anti-gun March for Our Lives dominated headlines. Neither attracted much violence; you could find that at anti-Trump protests.
In 2019, Greta Thunberg grimaced at the United Nations over climate change, which apparently was solved by blocking traffic and throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh paintings. This Monday was Earth Day, but it didn’t get much coverage. Environmentalism is so five years ago.
The pandemic put the kibosh on public gatherings, which made mass protests a bit hypocritical. So, the anger went online. In 2021, it was COVID masks and vaccines, while in 2022, anyone skeptical of funding Ukraine was labeled a Putin devotee.
But those annoying COVID restrictions were put on hold back in 2020, just as the virus was at its peak. Black Lives Matter protests swamped cities from coast-to-coast, often peaceful during the day but turning ugly by night.
Downtown Seattle was turned into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone while Portland burned for months.
What uproar are we planning for 2025?
One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox.
It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
It is curious to see Brooks brandishing his hammer and sickle freak flag, particularly after describing his beloved bobos as far too evolved to bother with doing a bit of rabble rousing 25 years ago. But that’s also because of when he wrote the first draft of his encomium to them. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2003’s “Latte Town Revisited:”
When Brooks visited Burlington, Bill Clinton was at the height of his popularity, just a couple of months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. The ’90s economy was booming and for whatever reason liberals believed that, unlike the 1980s, Wall Street-generated “excess and greed” under a Democratic president were hunky-dory. If terrorists attacked, Leftists tended to blame America for forcing the delicate hands of peace-loving al Qaeda. And while most Leftists didn’t like it when we responded with force, at least President Clinton did so “proportionately” (refusing to highlight our military advantages too much, which might harm the self-esteem of backward countries and the leftists who infantilize them).
Now George W. Bush is president. And as numerous folks have noted, the Left hates George W. Bush. (See Jonathan Chait’s and Ramesh Ponnuru’s debate, for example.) President Bush doesn’t mind demonstrating that when it comes to things military the third world isn’t ready for adult swim. He cuts taxes. He talks funny–and not Garrison Keilor funny or Al Franken funny either. He mentions God in a non-kitschy way without using quotation marks or a lowercase “q.” You get it. The fact is upscale and downscale liberals alike loathe the man.
And, like the savages who riot when you leave the toilet seat up, they have no problem making that known. I flatly refuse to believe that if Brooks visited Burlington today–or any other Latte Town–he would still think the locals are “apolitical.”
So that’s what has changed.
In his Substack essay pushing back against Brooks’ fussy, pretentious Street Fightin’ (Park Avenue) Man rhetoric, Taibbi writes:
In the piece he notes sadly that the “only real hint” of organized resistance has been “the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” but what self-respecting ex-establishment figure has faith in the earnest left? The moment requires people of quality:
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
It’s genuinely touching to see Brooks, the AFLAC duck of elitism, a man who wrote an actual book on being a snob, forced to consider the question of raising mass support. Adding to the pathos is the fact that it’s mere months after this same coalition of academics, lawyers, “nonprofits,” and scientists tried and failed at throwing up every legal and illegal obstacle to Trump’s election. In other words, “civic uprising” flopped when the folks in whom Brooks places faith held every lever of authority. Now they’re going to lead a grassroots revolt?
If the last ten years are any indication, there will of course be a fair amount “fiery but mostly peaceful” rioting, protesting, looting and arson this summer. Somehow, I doubt though that Generalissimo Brooks will be leading the charge.
* And quite likely, a raving antisemite, which curiously doesn’t seem to phase Brooks very much.
