Revisiting David Brooks

My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and in fact we must have been among the last people ever to have a rabbit ear antenna on top of a tube TV. This meant we mostly watched PBS, The News Hour, and thus inevitably David Brooks. When we finally got cable ten years ago, we quit watching any news, and we forgot about David Brooks. The last I heard of him, he was admiring the crease of Obama's trousers, and Obama was courting him and George Will as influential conservatives whom he could coax over to his side.

Somewhere yesterday I saw a link to an essay by him in the Atlantic, "The Terrifying Future of the American Right". I went to look at it and discovered he's a contributing writer who publishes there regularly. I guess this says something about The Atlantic, the New York Times, and PBS. I guess it also says something that I'd been ignoring him all this time and don't feel like I've missed a thing.

I did read his Bobos in Paradise when it came out, and my memory of it is a troubling cognitive dissonance -- how could someone who, about the year 2000, was so respected, write such a silly book? For those who haven't read it, its premise is that after World War II, elite universities dropped their Jewish quotas, began using the SATs. adopted selective admissions, and became true meritocracies, which they continue to be today. As evidence of this, we need look no farther than Brooks himself, from a Jewish family, who made it into the University of Chicago on merit.

This is a self-congratullatory premise that also flatters its audience, the Ivy-educated book buying public. Brooks makes it plain that by bobos -- bourgeois bohemians -- he means principally suburban Jews. But this contradicts Alan Dershowitz, a much more prominent figure, who maintained in Chutzpah that Jewish quotas still exist, along with more recent quotas for Asians, that serve to limit the rise of talented and hard-working groups in favor of -- wait for it -- existing elites.

Indeed, admission of "Episcopalian Jews" into upper-crust society was a phenomenon that took place decades before the postwar period, and families like the Guggenheims worked in close colaboration with the Morgans. They were elites and had full admission to elite schools on that basis. Quotas always apply to a different group.

Last August, Brooks revisited Bobos in Paradise in The Atlantic, "How the Bobos Broke America".

“The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.

. . . [W]e’ve come to hoard spots in the competitive meritocracy that produced us. , , , the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.

In other words, nothing changed, the bobos as some sort of new creative class that rose on its merits is a chimera. But Brooks clings to his theory and sees the Trump phenomenon as primarily a reflexive working-class rebellion against the bobo meritocacy:

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls. In revolt, populist Trump voters sometimes create their own reality, inventing absurd conspiracy theories and alternative facts about pedophile rings among the elites who they believe disdain them.

At the start of his essay, he cites boat parades of Trump supporters as a key indicator:

During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in great clusters. They festooned their boats with flags—American flags, but also message flags: don’t tread on me, no more bullshit, images of Trump as Rambo.

. . . How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden?

He clearly views such people with contempt. And his essay just published in the current Atlantic expands on this:

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.

This is what Brooks finds "terrifying": the fact that Trump hasn't gone away. The specter Brooks sees is what commentators are slowly recognizing: the Biden counter-revolution against Trump has been a disaster, and Trump is still hovering in the wings. Brooks is effectively acknowledging that the new elite is the old elite, and now they're frightened.