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A New David Brooks Article Takes A Look At How The Cultural Elite Broke America

LISTEN 5:41 Transcript https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/2021-08-08/david-brooks-new-book-takes-a-look-at-how-the-cultural-elite-broke-america

READ MORE https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

Class as Marx never imagined it

"How we yearn for the days when the propertied classes voted Liberal/Conservative/Republican, the working classes voted Labor/Labour/Democrat, and the two parties competed for the support of the middle classes. It was all so clear cut.

Writing in The Atlantic – How the bobos broke America – David Brooks describes present class divisions in America. He focuses on “bobos” – bourgeois bohemians with “progressive values and metropolitan tastes” – contrasting them with what the French call “bourbours” who “go out of their way to shock [the bobos] with nativism, nationalism, and a wilful lack of tact”. Brooks confesses to being a fully paid-up member of the bobos, and to having not seen the populist reaction against the new elites in his earlier writings.

He outlines how left-leaning parties in America and elsewhere have lost their working class membership bases, and how education now seems to be the main political class marker.  He cites a 2012 study of Americans in the highest 4 per cent income bracket that revealed 44 per cent voted Democrat while 41 per cent voted Republican. (Marx would be shocked.)

“The modern meritocracy is a resentment-generating machine” he writes. It reeks of all the snobbishness, arrogance and detachment of the elites of the old order. In what could pass for a strategy document for Morrison’s re-election, he suggests:

This situation produces a world in which the populist right can afford to be intellectually bankrupt. Right-leaning parties don’t need to have a policy agenda. They just need to stoke and harvest the resentment toward the creative class.

Like Michael Sandel, author of The tyranny of merit, Brooks sees the class divide not in terms of income, financial wealth, material possessions, or access to health care, but in terms of respect. There’s an elite class who do not respect those who do not share the elite’s values. Transfer programs and provision of public goods will not, in themselves, bridge the divide.

Optimistically he sees Biden drawing political strength from the fact that he stands outside this new class system.