Book Review

BoBos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, by David Brooks. Simon & Schuster, May, 2000, ISBN: 0684853779, 288 pp., $14.

David Brooks does not know whether he wants to imitate Lucius Beebe’s The Big Spenders or Vilfredo Pareto’s The Rise and Fall of Élites.

BoBos in Paradise, billed as “comic sociology,” is neither as funny as Beebe, nor as sociologically acute as Pareto. Still, it contains a few striking aperçus.

Brooks tells us that the cultural warfare of the ’sixties has ended. The stodgy old bourgeoisie, with its clubs, cotillions, and suburban respectability, has been replaced by a new élite deriving its status from brains (or at least formal educational credentials) rather than bloodlines and inherited money. This new élite exhibits superficially “bohemian” manners and mores (if not morals), but not bohemian disdain for money and commerce. These people he describes as “bourgeois bohemians,” or BoBos, for short. Their tastes run to slate-tiled shower stalls and trendy coffee shops rather than to gold plumbing fixtures and white-tablecloth lobster palaces á la Delmonico. Brooks’s descriptions of “latte towns,” filled with shops offering

. . . jars of powdered fo-ti root, Mayan Fungus Soup . . . hand-painted TV armoires, fat smelly candles, a Provençal spaghetti strainer . . .

are not quite as entertaining as Beebe chronicling the gilded-age opulence of August Belmont and Evander Berry Wall or the inspired fatuities of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, but are amusing and well-targeted.

Where Brooks falls short is in claiming to discern a Pareto-style succession of élites. The old bourgeoisie has indeed been supplanted long ago. James Burnham told how it happened in The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. The old bourgeoisie was local. It existed in every small town; at its bottom end were mom-and-pop shopkeepers, at its top the mill owner, the banker, maybe the newspaper publisher, and somewhere in between lay the “professional men” (physicians, lawyers, clergymen) who had some sort of academic education. This same structure existed in big cities on a grander scale. The advent of the publicly traded corporation brought about the end of the family firm at this level. It created “market capitalization,” whereby a firm was valued at the trading value of its shares, rather than at the net worth indicated on its balance sheet. This made many owners very rich. It also gave them liquidity, freeing them to diversify holdings and obtain income from sources other than the earnings of family businesses. Increasingly, the management of those businesses became the province of hired managers with the necessary skills, rather than that of owners who no longer needed to know how to manage their businesses. Divorce of ownership from control created a new élite, those who managed and controlled.

This transition was at first masked by graceful absorption of the new élite into the old bourgeois society. As the natural wasting of inheritances by division amongst heirs was accelerated through estate taxation (introduced around the time of World War I), many old families that neglected to cultivate managerial skills declined and disappeared, while new men rose to prominence. The disappearance by the 1960s of the duPont name from the management of E.I. duPont de Nemours & Co., and the appointment of a man named Shapiro to its chief executive post, may not have been as widely noted as the noisy street theater of the period, but it was a far more significant indication of the social and economic change that had been taking place steadily for several decades.

The BoBos Brooks describes are only the most recent beneficiaries of this change. Departures from previous fashions in conspicuous consumption are mainly superficial. Altered attitudes towards religion and towards public service are not—there has been real and alarming change here. Brooks is more optimistic than he should be.

Cropping up throughout the book, as well as in a chapter devoted to the subject, is the spiritual void left by abandonment of the old certitudes. Unsatisfied religious instincts often manifest themselves in devotion to quasi-religious causes such as environmentalism, third-world debt relief, animal rights, etc. There is a desire for the comforting forms and rituals of traditional religion, but not its constricting, old-fashioned views on personal conduct, particularly those involving sex.

Brooks briefly notes the public-service ethic of the old American patriciate. Young men of the class of George H. W. Bush volunteered without a second thought for World War II. The debâcle of Vietnam put an end to this. Middle- and upper middle-class youth of the 1960s may have protested that war loudly, but did so even then from the safety of their college deferments. Since that time the uniformed services have been snubbed by the class that provides the country’s civilian leadership. If the country were again to face a crisis having the proportions of World War II, how long would the public accept the leadership of a civilian élite unwilling to go into harm’s way along with hoi polloi? Previous élites have understood that sacrifice was necessary to the maintenance of élite status. For more than forty years this has been untrue of the managerial élite, and never less so than with the ascendancy of the BoBos. Bill and Hillary Clinton (quintessential BoBos) made no secret of their disdain for the military, which the military repaid in kind. If, as seems to be the case, America must take on the imperial tasks of a world hegemon, this is an important concern. Maybe the remedy is to reinstate the purchase of military commissions. The carriage trade had known for years how to create value by hanging a high price tag on its merchandise. BoBos who go in for “adventure vacations” in malarial rainforests might be ideal customers.

—Michael S. Swisher