Booknotes

Mr. DAVID BROOKS (Author, "Bobos in Paradise"): Bobos 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. You see these big kitchens with islands in the middle of them. They've got a big refrigerator so big--you know, subzero. It looks like you could fit an in-law suite in one side of them. They've got the six burner, duel-fuel Viking ranges.

So basically, bobos 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, New--California. And basically what the bobos are is they're bourgeois Bohemians. They're people who have taken the '60s ethos of Bohemia and the '80s ethos of bourgeois, yuppie money-making, and they've jammed it all together. They're creating a new synthesis culture for our country.

Mr. BROOKS: I can't exactly. I know when it first--the 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. It's ranked number eighth in the country in the number of families who are members of the social register. So it's 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 mid-'90s, and suddenly, you know, the place was an espresso desert. Now there are six fancy coffee shops, cappuccino stands there. There's a whole--a fancy bread store where they spell--sell 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 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 hippiedom. 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 this stuff from the '60s that was of interest to teen-agers like nudity and f--love and taken that away but kept all the things from the '60s of interest to 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, 'cause I'd 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 e--concept. That was the moment when I thought, `Something's going on here. I have at least a series of articles, maybe a book.'

Mr. BROOKS: Well, my joke is that I consider myself a bobo with bad grades. If I'd 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, 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.

Mr. BROOKS: This is my first real book.

Mr. BROOKS: Well...

Mr. BROOKS: I did. I asked all of them except for Tom Wolfe. My publisher a--asked him. I don't know him.

Mr. BROOKS: In that chapter.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, just in that chapter.

Mr. BROOKS: I sort of flip-flopped.

Mr. BROOKS: For the sake of gender equity.

Mr. BROOKS: Right. So--and--and here I have a book with a--a neologism bobo, which is bourgeois Bohemian. So I'm guilty of the thing I'm writing about. I--I s--I write--write in the introduction that sometimes I think I've made self-loathing into a career. And, you know, there is some of me in the book. That chapter is sort of an ascorbic look at--as the intellectual, as social climber...

Mr. BROOKS: ...or as career climber.

Mr. BROOKS: Right.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, the conference world--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 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 there's evenly bo--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-named professors? Are you the--the 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 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. There'll be half a dozen people clutching wine glasses or coffee mugs to their chest and they all look so happy 'cause 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 little political waves here and up and down the--the al--alleyway, and it really is--people measure their status by how they perform at conferences. And...

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. If 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 te--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 dull--when young people are dull.

Mr. BROOKS: W--because th--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 six minutes of air time. And one of the things they do--the publishing houses actually send out fact 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--and then they'll--they'll say what you meant to say, so they can look smart. And then you're left to gab now.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, people ask what bobo is in this--in this case, because that is the mu--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 Hannah Arendt, an intellectual life which was really austere, very removed from the con--the 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 polit--that 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 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 try to weigh seriously what--what's a better intellectual style, because the '50s, they really had a sense of intellectual as vocation.

The Russian intelligencia--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 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 we're not shocked if anybody writes for The New Yorker. And it's a shine of how differently we look at intellectuals than they did 50 years ago.

Mr. BROOKS: That's 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. 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 a congressman or--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 McLane or in the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in 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 and a schlump at night. And so I have a jokey chapter about people who suffer from this.

Mr. BROOKS: Right.

Mr. BROOKS: No. No. This is sort of an imagined--I mean, I--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.

Mr. BROOKS: I'm 38.

Mr. BROOKS: Yes.

Mr. BROOKS: Three.

Mr. BROOKS: Nine, six and one.

Mr. BROOKS: We live right here in the District.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, I don't know where I go as a bobo. I'd 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 people--I just have this perverse attraction to books which really doesn't make any sense because the money, I suppose, is in speeches and--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. This is the most fun thing I've ever done, and 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--a book for two or three years at a time really was tremendously satisfying. You--you 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 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.

Mr. BROOKS: 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. On 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 1,100-word op-ed piece.

But, you know, it--out on--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 prop in the way for that. So I must say in my l--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--I have the--you know, I have this vague sense and a lot of people I work with have the vague sense that we're sort of a receding force and that history is moving off in some opposite direction.

Mr. BROOKS: The people in Silicon Valley?

Mr. BROOKS: I think they're thrilled. I mean, it--listen, the only people I know who really feel that they're changing the world and that they are s--at the center of the action are these people in Redmond, Washington, these people who are 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 and it's 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 they're creating, because in this--in 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 that's what's reconciled this 150-year-old culture war between the Bohemians and the bourgeoisie.

Mr. BROOKS: 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 decided--they 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 at--he thought the--the grocers and the--the 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 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 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 ce--in 1960s--they would have gone for that pranksterous 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 were a--were c--experience-oriented; the bourgeois were career-oriented. 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 in--information 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 yipp--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.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, Bohemia's 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 ha--were free-floating individuals.

Mr. BROOKS: It's--I'm not sure exactly. It's a region--I think the--I--I sh--shouldn't guess. I'm not exactly sure.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I don't know. It's--it's certainly a word Marx used, but I don't--I think it predates him.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. I think--I think because even--you know, I work for a conservative magazine, so I'm 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 classes conflict, as I was saying, when, in fact, I think in this case, they blur; and second, to--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 bobos, 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 th--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.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, as you know people who...

Mr. BROOKS: There goes half of my viewership just now.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, I--again, the whole--this whole chapter is done in a hierarch style, so I'm exaggerating for comic effect, 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--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.

Mr. BROOKS: I'm not sure I'm writing for any crowd. I'm writing for myself, from 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, 'cause if you try to write for it, you'll mess up.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. Well, the--the--the c--the bobos--the classic bobos 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 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 in this book are 50 and 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.'

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, REI is--well, REI is a chain store of outdoor equipment. And one of the things that occurred to me is that bobos have an achievement ethos. This is Ameritocratic group of people. And it--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 on an environmental vacation at the Galapagos Island or one of these educational vacations in Meonmar and Minsk. And then the highest status vacation is one where you're suffering all the time. You're climbing Mt. Everest or Mt. 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 `base camp' and `whiteout' will be floating across the table, and you realize some executive is 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 parka on facing the elements.

And REI is a 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.

Bobos are really based--their ethos is based in the university, and they turn everything into graduate school. So you can't just buy hiking equipment, you have to understand all the different boots and things like that. And you walk around this place and i--everyone looks like they're 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 tau--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, they're training and they're undergoing ordeals so they can ha--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. At least they'll fill in some potholes. But they want the Imax experience. They want the Himalayas.

Mr. BROOKS: I found a pair of hiking boots there. I was going hiking, so I bought a pair of hiking boots. But the--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 not--it's not an autobiography. I'm writing about a world I'm reporting on. It's not all me.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. Burlington, Vermont, is a fantastic place. It's 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.

Mr. BROOKS: The University of Vermont. Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream is the most famous place there. Ben & Jerry are everywhere in Vermont. They're like Big Brother. They've got si--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 them 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 walk--I was sitting in a cafe called Leungs 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 shopped. But former left-wing Bohemian towns had become more bourgeois because they've invested in business.

And one of the things that's happened is that now everyone accepts business. You know, this debate between the bourgeois 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 be just 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 marketplace.

Sort of--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.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. Well, they're all university towns and latte towns. If you're in a latte 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 latte 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 going to stop and let the car come at the crosswalk, but the car knew he was--the--the drivers of the car in Burlington know that they are burning fossil fuel, and that as a 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 car out of my--corner of my eye and I'm watching some hippies play Frisbee over there. And I stand there. And I realize 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 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 realize 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 and 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.

Mr. BROOKS: I had a little to do with it. The first idea--we--we thought po--`paradise' is a great word. I didn't come up with the title. My editor, Alice Muno, 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 the Brusso image and then I just filled in--helped them fill in the icons, like the trowel, the Range Rover, the laptop and the coffee mug. I'm really happy. Simon & Schuster did the cover. And I'm really happy with it.

Mr. BROOKS: Right.

Mr. BROOKS: More or less it was signed--the book was signed by an editor named Mary Manicker, 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 Muno is the dean of publishing, perhaps, certainly non-fiction publishing. And when my first editor left, I was honored to have her take it over. And she did a great job. She read through every word and seemed to concentrate on every little word, made notes throughout the manuscript and really helped.

Mr. BROOKS: Not really. I'd say--you know, I'm a conservative and there were biases in publishing and one f--confronts them. But Simon & Schuster is a very broad-minded place. They have George Will. Bill Bennett, I think, publishes there, Irving Kristol. They have--they're used to people who they don't necessarily agree with. And 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 you...

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. And you 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 of--from "The Washington Journal," a C-SPAN appearance. Funny, they didn't sign me. And--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 wall they have some of the posters of the previous books they've done and it was--Irving Crystal and people like that, company I would be proud to be associated with. But on--my meeting at Simon & Schuster was just a bunch of smart people talking. So w--there was no pre-set, `I'm on performance.' It was just talking, and I felt like I feel at editorial meetings at The Weekly Standard. I felt comfortable and I--I just realized this was a class organization. I was very happy when they were interested in it.

Mr. BROOKS: I lived there mostly through high school, and my folks still live there and I go back quite a lot, so...

Mr. BROOKS: My--my parents still work. My father is a college professor at Westchester 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, the people who are horribly mistreated by the universities, and she got sick of it and she want to work for SmithKline Beecham, the pharmaceutical company, helping with their construction, which is a bit different from Western civ, but she likes it.

Mr. BROOKS: 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, was very interested in my writing and I--I wish he could have been alive to see the book because he was very proud of his writing--he wrote briefs; he was a lawyer--and he inculcated the reading and writing, and then my parents--my father's written a couple books, 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. I mean, this is a book of what I call comic sociology. It's meant to be filled with jokes, and their style of writing is--you know, has more gravitas than mine does.

Mr. BROOKS: I went to University of Chicago for four years.

Mr. BROOKS: 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 four 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.

Mr. BROOKS: We all worked too hard. We really studied s--you know, every weekend night we were studying, 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 par--good parties, and I think that's fair. I mean, it--it introduced me to a broader world, to the world of Allan 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 loathed him. I just wanted to rip up the book, every page.

Mr. BROOKS: Because I was sort of a person of the 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.

Mr. BROOKS: Edmund Burke was an Irish philosopher and statesman, a member of Parliament, one of the great speakers of all time, a very great supporter 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."

Mr. BROOKS: That they were t--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 ever--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.

Mr. BROOKS: They were people--they were liberals. They were sort of Scoop Jackson Democrats, and they're still Democrats. They were not--certainly not of the stripe I now am.

Mr. BROOKS: I think they've gotten used to it. It was a shock, I'm sure, at first, beca--it took a few years after I left Chicago and I went to work at 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--I've become a little less conservative, actually, recently, so maybe there's a meeting there.

Mr. BROOKS: 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--the Republican Party was too viciously anti-government for my taste. 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 a--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 that--it 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 actually, I think the Republican Party is coming back to that. John McCain tried and George W. Bush has done that explicitly.

Mr. BROOKS: Rupert Murdoch.

Mr. BROOKS: Never. I've ne--I think I've spoken to him 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. We're against free trade for China; he's involved it.

Mr. BROOKS: He's the editor. Fred Barnes.

Mr. BROOKS: Andrew Ferguson.

Mr. BROOKS: 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.

Mr. BROOKS: 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.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, Andy's not someone who comes out as much as some of the rest of us and just baldly declares something. His--his writing--he's a much better writer than I am, a more supple writer, and his writing leads you in different feints and the power of the writing is sometimes not clear until you read it carefully.

Mr. BROOKS: 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 paleoconservatives who are happy with big Social Security--Gary Bauer was, he's certainly conservative--who are happy with big government's going to clamp down on immigration. So I used to think the only thing that unites conservatives is that they hate the '60s and love the '80s. But now I really think the '60s and the '80s have merged into this new culture which both Al Gore and George W. Bush are--have inherited, this mooshy anti-ideological culture, this bobo culture.

And so I--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 our--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.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, my instinct is that Bush will win. The last chapter of the--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, of Bohemia, 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 has done some of that. Bush's compassionate conservatism is--is some of that.

But one of the things that has happened to the bobos is they've become conservative in an old-fashioned sense, meaning distrusting change, disliking confrontation and anger. And I--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--as he would say. He's a uniter, not a divider. And so he's an an--very anti-ideological person. In 1968, he graduated from Yale college--'68, very tumultuous times. He wasn't for the anti--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 mooshy left-right synthesis. Gore is there in policy grounds, but he himself is a strident individual and I think people will eventually be put off by that.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, one of the things running through the book is a comparison between the 1950s Protestant establishment, which was one elite from the industrial age, and the bobo establishment, which is the sort of elite we get from the information age. And you ask yourself, `Well, which is better?' Well, the WASP establishment, the Protestant establishment--people like John McCloy and Dean Acheson--people like that, they had many virtues. One of them was a sense of public service. The Protestant establishment, the sons of that establishment died in large number in World Wars I and II. 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 s--they were raised with a sense of noblesse oblige. They--to much--you know, you have tremendous privileges, so you have to give back.

And that is not a sense, I don't think, the bobos have, because the bobos are an elite trained to think that they're not an elite. They're an establishment trained to be anti-establishmentarian. So I haven't seen the level of national involvement and national service. The other great WASP virtue is reticence, which certainly the bobos don't 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 bobos 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 bl--brains, but put it on bloodlines, could never survive in an information age when you need brains.

Mr. BROOKS: 1983.

Mr. BROOKS: Then I wer--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 of 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 Sun-Times, which is a wire service repor--wire service where you really are out there covering rapes and murders in the South Side--West Side of Chicago.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, during college, as a junior, I wrote a parody of Bill Buckley's book, "Overdrive" called "The Greatest Story Ever Told"--fortunate--may--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 on a TV show that Milton Friedman was do--"Milton Friedman Talks to the Young," that sort of thing. He s--destroyed me. Half the show was me sitting with my mouth hanging open trying to think of what to say to whatever he had just said. But anyway, I consider myself a person of 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 at National Review for a year and a half and met Buckley, became very friendly with him and his sister Priscilla, many of those people. And from there on my course into right-wing media was--was set. I went to The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Washington Times before that and then The Weekly Standard.

Mr. BROOKS: Buckley just teaches you--well, Buckley's great gift is friendship and--and his ability to form friends with many people, 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--to show the 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 f--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 learn some--well, you learn a lot about economics and things, which I didn't know as much about. But you also learn how to be a brave journalist. Bartley's a 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--I'm su--usually surrounded by talk. But at the editorial meetings, a Midwestern ethos reigns. So there would 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 extremely uncomfortable with it, but--so it really was a different culture than wh--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 going to be--you're for something and you're going to be for it. And that's a way--you know, it's a crowded media world. And The Wall Street Journal's 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 editorial pages are wishy-washy.

Mr. BROOKS: Right.

Mr. BROOKS: No. No, I didn't study any economics. I was a history major. As I say, I was born into the politics of Athens and not of today.

Mr. BROOKS: I knew about Friedman, but I didn't know about Hayek. I knew about the Straussians, which are those schooled at--Allan Bloom...

Mr. BROOKS: Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom. My colleague now, Bill Kristol was sort of a Straussian, Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. It's a school of political theory, most of whom are conservative, though in a very rarified form.

Mr. BROOKS: 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 edge. Imposter syndrome is you--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 150 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 h--I had a veauti--beautiful view of the Hudson River to h--which helps. And I really said--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.

Mr. BROOKS: The 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 Kristol, John Podhoretz and Fred Barnes started it. And it was most of my friends, Chris Caldwell, David Frum, Krautham--Charles Krauthammer, P.J. O'Rourke, Robert Kagan. It was mostly 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, on various things, mostly non-political, mostly on this stuff, which is cultural.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. Well, I think bobos--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 of a precious sensibility. But bobos 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 bobos went through the university system and consider themselves university people. That's why they turn everything into graduate school. And so the PBS and the NPR, the--just as a fact, the people--they have an audience among the more highly educated.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, and I'm des--I'm not describing the whole country in this book or the whole country doesn't eat whole--you know, mung bean pizza and spend $9 on a--or $90 on designer mulch, but I'm describing upscale America, the people who live in the suburbs, shop at Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, go to Starbucks, spend 4 bucks for a cup of coffee.

Mr. BROOKS: That's in Corte Madera, which is in Marin County.

Mr. BROOKS: It's a chichi 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--a house, couldn't find them, so he s--opened a hardware store. And the--the intellectual basis of the idea is that we opportunistic, highly educated meritocrats 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 were of a certain age and you walk into a 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's a s--ser--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, "A Simple Abundance," that does fam--tremendously well. I thought I should write a book called "Complicated Poverty." But that probably wouldn't sell as well.

Mr. BROOKS: God is an important part of the bobo life, as it's an important part of all. I assume you're talking about the chapter on religion...

Mr. BROOKS: ...that I have in there.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, as I say, the bobo is a reconciling ethos between left-wing bourgeo--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 liked, all the 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 looking at the Pacific Ocean, but it doesn't add up to a whole lot.' And they discover that it'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 of the organized religion you're going to obey.

I ran into a rabbi in Montana who--they asked him, `Well, what sort of rel--Judaism do you practice? Is it conservative, Orthodox and reform?' And he said, `Flexodoxy,' 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 bobos 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 that they've had a bad effect on, because this idea to g--have it both ways--to say, `Well, I'm going to rejoin Orthodox religion, but I'm going to choose what parts of the Orthodox religion I'm going to 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 d--I'll overrule God when I disagree with him,' I think that's ultimately an unworkable way to have religion. If you can't defer to the authority of God, then you're--you're ultimately going to have a problem. So I...

Mr. BROOKS: That's my wife.

Mr. BROOKS: I met her at the University of Chicago. She was a student there with me.

Mr. BROOKS: She was studying anthropology.

Mr. BROOKS: She is raising our three kids. I g--I think the biggest change in her life is that she converted to Judaism, de--despite my pressure, and has become very serious about it and we send our kids to a Jewish school, and I'm one of those people who are mostly secular, but have found myself getting dragged kicking and screaming back into religion.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, the most abstemious time in recent history, I think, the bo--if you look at bobo leisure time and you compare it again to the 1950s, the '50s real--really were gin-soaked. It was the last grage--great age of drinking. I mention in the book I happened to see in--on cable TV, a game called "Match Game '73," which was done in 1973, where the guest or the--the contestant had to pick--complete a phrase and then match it with six celebrities who would 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 though, `Well, that's weird. Nobody--none of those six celebrities will also say "Half drunk."' But four of the six said `Half drunk.' This is 1973. Now we'd say `half-and-half.' The--the amount of boozing that went on in American life then--or 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 t--go--get away from a--an elite based on blood to an elite based on brain power.

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah. Well, that's not only true of bobos, that's true of everything. I mean, that...

Mr. BROOKS: 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 just our populism has rung a--run amok. There's something always consistent in American history that says politics--you know, these politicians, they're all scoundrels and we all distrust authority figures. And so you have a populous distrust of authority figures. And then--excuse me--the new left came along distrusting authority figures, which is sort of a left-wing version of the same populism, and that triumphed. So now everybody--`Oh, the authority figures, they'll all full of it. Congressmen, they all do it,' and nobody is willing to admit the truth. There's--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, `Oh, they're all scoundrels. They're all crooks.' It's simply not true, though.

Mr. BROOKS: Hmm, that's a good question. Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution of France," an essay by Oakshot called "On Rationalism."

Mr. BROOKS: Michael Oakshot is an English philosopher of this century--died not too long ago--and he--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 can 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 it all.' Isaiah Berlin had a great essay called "The Hedgehog and the Fox," about Tolstoy's understanding of wisdom and it was the same thing, `You--you should be sensitive to the world around you.'

And then a book I--I make a big deal of in my book, which is Jane Jacobs' "The Rise and Decline of Gr--The Rise and Decline of Great American Cities," which is really the proto-bobo book because she took--there were two views of order. The bourgeois were--were a view of order, of society which was to have orders, you need to have rigid rules, everything has to be hyperorganized. That was the one way of looking out at the world. And then the--the bohemian idea that you shouldn't have order, you should have disorder, you should--everything should be emancipated and anarchy was wonderful.

She looked around at a city street in Greenwich Village, where she was living, and said, `All these people, these shopkeepers are going about their way and it seems kind of dis--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, sees something. Another shopkeeper comes out, looks 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 cohere to form an order. And that is really the reconciliation between the emancipated freedom and the rigid order of so many old authoritarian regimes.

Mr. BROOKS: I have ideas for the next book, but they're all half-baked right now.

Mr. BROOKS: 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 re--based on war. I'd like to figure out what makes us Americans today.

Mr. BROOKS: Thank you.