Bobos Busted
Twelve days to go….
On a flight back to the US from Europe several weeks ago, the man sitting beside me struck up a conversation when he noticed I was reading an article on conservativism in the US. He made it clear he considered himself a conservative, and traditionally a Republican, but right now, he said, “I don’t have a party.” This Republican dilemma is acute right now, yet this is a dilemma Democrats find hard to understand: Why would you feel you faced a dilemma when Donald Trump is on the ballot?
But let’s look at this. The margin between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has hardly shifted in recent weeks. In a race where one candidate is a convicted felon with a record of sexual molestation and a refusal to respect the results of a fair presidential election, the close margin suggests that the United States is a country dramatically separated by other concerns. Indeed, two unshifting mindsets define us. They supply people with a strong sense of social identity and command loyalty at the level of a family or church. The decline of religion has definitely contributed to this state of affairs. So has the emergence of a liberal university-educated elite that has shifted the Left’s emphasis away from its trade union and working-class roots to focus on cultural inclusion and a morality of “choice.” While the substance of the Left’s positions does not sit well with the American right, the bigger problem, according to several commentators on the right, is that the Left is condescending and insular.
In yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Bret Stevens posed the question [H]ow can we fashion a liberalism that doesn’t turn so many ordinary people off?
Back in 2001, another New York Times columnist who tilts to the right, David Brooks, coined the term Bobo - Bohemian-Bourgeois - to describe the meritocracy that has become the elite of our time. Brooks’s book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, examines the influencers of the baby-boom generation, a group who started out as university-based rebels in the 1960s, then linked elements of bohemian behavior with capitalism to create an impression that they stand outside any typical social stratification. This group was smart at school, gained college degrees, and became thought leaders through professional jobs such as college professors, journalists, physicians, civil servants, and politicians. Richard Florida’s 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, describes this elite class similarly, underlining how engineers, mangers, researchers, as well as artists, have used their creativity to redesign the workplace. Now they are the arbiters of which enterprises succeed or fail, and, as a result, which cities thrive or decline.
Unlike the previous dominant class, says Brooks, this group does not assume that the traditional mores of elitism are necessary to secure their position. Many do not come from families with money. They wear funky clothing, are attracted to rough materials rather than smooth, gravitate to open-plan homes and an open lifestyle. They rely on their success in the university framework to get ahead. Brooks calls them out for shunning long-standing indulgences of the wealthy, but at the same time spending their cash (of which some have a good deal thanks to the rise of tech) on their own status symbols. Says Brooks: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. They drink lattes purchased at coffee shops, drive Volvos and Lexus’s, and go to considerable lengths to get their children into elite schools and universities.
Bobos embrace principles of fairness and diversity in education and employment and support higher taxes to help the disadvantaged. In other ways they have not shown themselves to be attuned to genuine egalitarianism because they lack the traditional left’s emotional connection to the disadvantaged. They do not recognize that their preoccupations have pushed the blue-collar, trade union left out of the Democratic Party, privileging, as they do, college education and an intellectual egalitarianism where code words like Latinx and intersectionality have become cultural markers.
In the minds of their critics, Bobos’ compassion for immigrants constellated in the 1980s if not before when the US government was supporting right-wing, intolerant regimes in Central America, and US Sanctuary Movements welcomed and protected refugees whose lives were threatened. Even if the politics and economics of Central and South America have now evolved, compassionate Bobos have perpetuated a response to potential immigrants that assumes we in the US owe them something and therefore should allow them in with no discerning criteria.
American conservatives hold Bobos responsible for the challenge to traditional morality and the relevance of religion that have spread since the 1960s. Bobos have promoted the notion that sexual mores should be a matter of choice as long there is consent, that women have been marginalized in a multi-millennial power-system, and that, therefore, traditional family life must give way to a system where women’s primary focus is outside the home.
Conservatives look for consistent standards that undergird a moral order. What they see coming from Bobos is a mishmash of ideas about inclusion and identity that fail to hold people accountable in ways that they should. They see a feminization of culture where feeling has become the arbiter of experience.
When it comes to civil rights, Bobos have shown more interest in power imposed through culture (a view of things that emerged from the New Left in the 1960s which leads naturally to a focus on inclusion at the table of power) than to promoting a culture-neutral policy of resource sharing that allows all to draw on their interior resources to get ahead.
Bobos assume that they are conducting a righteous crusade against racism and other forms of oppression, particularly oppression of women. The right to decide for oneself about the appropriateness of abortion is central to the Bobo mindset. They discount the importance of religion if it opposes abortion. They lump all those on the right together as people who stand in the way of these values. Their intellectual self-confidence creates an unwillingness to consider the validity of other ways of viewing the world.
According to Brooks, the first book to highlight the Bobo phenomenon came out in 1983. Literary critic Paul Fussell, in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, describes, in parallel to other American social groups, a group he calls “X people.” Says Brooks, paraphrasing Fussell, these people were “highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural. X people tend to underdress for social occasions, Fussell wrote. They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility.” By giving these people the X designation, Fussell suggests such people operate outside of class designation, and have created a way of life free of class assumptions. But forty years after Fussell’s book was published, we recognize he was describing the elite of our time, and captured the naivete of that elite for believing they had come up with some universal stance towards life that could only be designated by “X.”
The arrogance of this assumption is what stares us in the face right now, in October 2024. Bobo self-satisfaction has considerable responsibility for the anti-Left stance of the American Right. Bobos lost a grasp of the concerns of the blue-collar people who would never expect to go to university, who relied on trade unions to assure their future. That group has found solider ground in the rejection of the Bobo elite. Bobos do not know how to honor the values of those who find abortion an affront to their faith. Bobos speak of social justice, know how to be polite and pleasantly interactive with supermarket cashiers, and treat domestic workers with respect when they enter their homes. But they have no expectation of being genuine friends with such people, and do not reflect on the way they have alienated them.
Now Bobos have become something close to an identity group. David Brooks commented on this state of affairs in 2021 by pointing out how he himself had been misled by the Bobo phenomenon two decades earlier:
The educated class, in spite of its homage to openness, turns out to be more closed than elite classes of the past, because it hides behind the idea that anyone can get in if they have what it takes. In fact, it is rigged to advantage people who have learned their hidden cultural cues from elite schools and pretend these cues do not exist. Shamus Rahman Khan, whose book Privilege is a sociological study of St. Paul School in New Hampshire, emphasizes that these cues, signifying accepted codes of behavior, can only be absorbed through long association with elite institutions.
The right has its own elite. Traditional Reagan Republicans, who value their hard-earned individual wealth unapologetically and maintain their right to enjoy it, ally with a property-owning right-leaning gentry who hang onto family property over generations. But in our current alignment of mindsets, the elite of the right finds no common ground with the elite of the left, indeed they feel belittled by them. As a result, they tilt to Trump who at least delivers scorn to the group that derides them.
When Republicans look at Kamala Harris, they see someone whose trajectory has been assisted, indeed infected, by Bobo values. Their dislike of this set of assumptions is a huge obstacle to voting for her that operates separately from her objective merits. We see Kamala Harris attempting to shift this view of her by her choice of Tim Walz as running mate, and by playing down identity politics - not harping on the fact she is a woman and a person of color. Most importantly, she expresses her position on abortion as “your religious or ethical values might cause you to decide not to have an abortion, but the government should not be making this decision for you.” Last night on CNN, when asked by one questioner what faults she has, she spoke of herself as a “nerd.” She underlines that she wants to be a bridgebuilder.
But Kamala needs help. How can Bobos move beyond their insularity to create a cultural space where more people are honored and respected? As a highly intelligent segment of the population, surely they have the capacity to re-examine assumptions and propose a realignment of language and values. A key piece of this, according to Brooks, will be to shift the system away from over-valuing university education so that it confers dignity on vocational schools and service professions.
Whoever wins on November 5, we will have to grapple with this issue.