david brooks articles about the middle east

Mounk : If we think of the old fashioned bourgeois as somebody who's proud to be part of an establishment, who thinks it is, in certain ways, an ancestral right, who perhaps has a sense of noblesse oblige and certain moral responsibilities that come with it (but that would have been true to varying extents), and who is willing to spend money in a somewhat ostentatious way because that's part of their social position and then you have this new bobo, who may be, structurally, in the same position, who’s a partner at a law firm or management consultancy firm and so on how have they evolved over the couple of decades since your book was published? What does the bobo of today look like and what role do they play?īrooks : I should say, first, that I would never want to go back to the WASP establishment. So it was really a story about the replacement of one elite, based on money and blood, with another based on education. They had created this code of financial correctness, ways to spend money to show you reject money and material things: it's bad to spend money on a yacht, but you can spend $90,000 on a stove, or a sub-zero refrigerator (because zero just wouldn't be cold enough). What I saw was the replacement of one old elite, which is based on bloodlines, with a new elite which combined ‘60s values and ‘90s monies-in other words, bohemian values with bourgeois aspirations.

In the early 1990s, I spent five years living in Europe, and I came back to a culture that was utterly transformed: the old WASP clothing stores, which were checkered pants and duck ties, had been replaced by Anthropologie. And it's part of where the old WASP elite used to live. And it came about because I went to high school in a town called Wayne, Pennsylvania, which is 13 miles west of Philadelphia. And Le Monde wrote a front page editorial saying it's a French concept, not an American concept it stands for “Bolshevik Bonapartist.” But le bobo has carried on in France.

And French Vogue wanted to take a picture of me naked in a bathtub full of milk, which I said no to. And so when that book came out, it had this big impact in France.

But I was genuinely shocked to realize that you are, in fact, the originator of this concept.ĭavid Brooks : Yeah, I'm like Engelbert Humperdinck-I'm bigger in France than I am at home. Yascha Mounk : I have always heard this term “bobo,” which is shorthand for “bourgeois-bohemian.” When I learned that you had written a book called Bobos in Paradise, I assumed that, like me, you had imbibed this concept in France, that it was an old French concept, and then somehow applied it to America.

David brooks articles about the middle east