[corp-focus] Bobo Paradise and its Discontents

[Robert Weissman]

Boby Paradise and its Discontents
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Real changes are taking place in the U.S. ruling class, and conservative
David Brooks is one of the first to grapple with the transformation in his
new book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
(New York: Simon and Schuster).

It is by now cliche to note that the jeans and no-tie look of new money
Silicon Valley represents a visible shift from the more formal attire of
old money manufacturing and finance circles.

But in his provocative and humorous book, Brooks suggest something more
far-reaching is afoot. The information age elite, he says, "are highly
educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and
another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The
members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to
take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos." They mingle
"1960s rebellion with 1980s achievement," making it "impossible to tell an
espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker."

Brooks categorizes his method as "comic sociology," and he pokes fun as he
describes the ethic of the Bobos (among whom he counts himself). 

The old elite announced marriages on the pages of the New York Times,
listing "pedigree and connections" -- the groom's social clubs, the
bride's debutante history, the couple's illustrious ancestry. Today's
elite uses the same forum, but with a new focus on resume and achievement.
"An amazing number of them seem to have first met while recovering from
marathons or searching for the remnants of Pleistocene man while on
archeological digs in Eritrea."

Returning to his upper crust hometown of Wayne, Pennsylvania, Brooks
reports the takeover of the Preppy Establishment with "a new culture
[that] has swept into town and overlaid itself onto the Paisley Shop, the
Neighborhood League Shop, and the other traditional Main Line
establishments." Noting the proliferation of gourmet coffee shops, he
writes, "there probably still aren't a lot of artists and intellectuals in
Wayne, but suddenly there are a lot of people who want to drink coffee
like one."

A new set of values pervades the new elite, Brooks writes. In the Code of
Financial Correctness, Rule 1 is "Only vulgarians spend lavish amounts of
money on luxuries. Cultivated people restrict their lavish spending to
necessities." In practice, that means "you can spend as much as you want
on anything that can be classified as a tool, such as a $65,000 Range
Rover with plenty of storage space, but it would be vulgar to spend money
on things that cannot be seen as tools, such as a $60,000 vintage
Corvette."

And, he argues, countercultural values have infused the business world --
the one sphere of life in the United States where people still talk about
fomenting "revolution" and are taken seriously.

Although he sometimes overstates and exaggerates, and though some of his
jibes cut deep, Brooks is mostly an enthusiast for the Bobo ascendency.
Bobos believe in tolerance, moderation, community, meritocracy,
decentralization, what Brooks calls the bonds of intimate authority
(family and community control, not power to centralized bureaucracies).
They stand against confrontation and extremism. They have made homes less
formal and more comfortable, and communities tighter knit. Brooks offers
some cautionary notes -- about disengagement from politics, an undemanding
spiritual life, a loss of the blue blood notion of service -- but he is by
and large optimistic about the Bobo-led future.

The primary limit in Brooks' enjoyable book is what he does not discuss.
The Bobos represent a reconciling of different cultural strands, brought
together by the growing power of a new class fragment or fragments.

But this reconciliation does not eradicate real class conflict. The
majority of the U.S. population that remains working class (estimated at
62 percent of the population in another interesting new book, Michael
Zweig's The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (Ithaca:
ILR Press)) are missing from Brooks' story.

It is not really fair to criticize Brooks for this -- after all, he is
self-consciously describing changes in the ruling class.

But it is fair to note that there is a dangerous tendency toward
universalization among Bobos -- a sense that "We are the World" -- even
though most people in the United States (let alone the world) in fact do
not share their expanding wealth and may have markedly different view on
important issues, including concepts of "deservedness," fairness,
government regulation and equitable distribution of wealth. 

For this majority of the population, more confrontation, not less, could
be just what is in order.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press, 1999).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman