And third, they've taken over the Democratic Party, and the working class has tended to leave left-wing parties.Īnd so they've done three things to spark a counterreaction against us, and that reaction takes the form of what a French anthropologist called the boubours, who are boorish bohemians. Second, they moved to a few wealth-generating cities, and that's both jacked up housing costs in those cities. One, they've invested massively in their kids, so their kids have a huge advantage in getting into these colleges. That turned out to be the most naive sentence I've ever written because over the last couple of decades, Bobos - or creative class is another name for them - have done three things. You go to college, you get a degree, and you're in. And one of the things I said in there was that anybody can join the Bobos. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And you wanted to update this now why?īROOKS: So the book I wrote in 2000 was largely quite positive. And it was basically people with '60s values and '90s money who thought it was gauche to spend money on a yacht but supercool to spend money on a $20,000 AGA stove.

Back in 2000, I wrote a book called 'Bobos In Paradise,' and I noticed a whole code of conduct, and it had replaced the old WASP code. It's sort of the group I grew up in, people who are defined by high education. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So we know of whom we speak because you are talking about the cultural elite, right?īROOKS: More or less. David Brooks is also a contributing writer to The Atlantic, and his latest column is called 'How The Bobos Broke America.' And he joins us now to talk about it. To use a word they like to use, he thinks they have become very problematic.

They flock to urban metropolitan areas and performatively lean towards more liberal values.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says one group of people shares a huge part of the blame. If you look around you in America today, you can see the problems everywhere - right? - political polarization, economic inequality, dysfunction on how to tackle the big issues of our time, be it COVID, climate change, racial justice.

David brooks column about mark shields