There are two places in American culture where you can get the temperature of the new elite, the people who are really shaping society. One is the dining room of AEI, but the other is the New York Times wedding page, in many ways a perfect encapsulation of upper-class, upscale America.

Back in the 1950s, the page rarely listed jobs of the people getting married. Instead, it mentioned their connections, and ancestry was greatly important.

Today the page is very different. Its devotees call it the mergers and acquisitions page. Harvard marries Princeton, Fulbright marries Rhodes, Skadden Arps marries Salomon Brothers, magna cum laude marries magna cum laude.

These people may work eighty hours a week, and they may pull in a couple hundred thousand or million dollars a year, but of course they are not ambitious. Their success just sort of fell upon them from the sky as a freak of chance. They’re always described as wild spirits, originals.

A New Elite

What we have is a new elite, one based on education and not bloodlines. We’ve got vineyard-touring doctors, novel-writing lawyers, tenured gardening buffs, and literary realtors, and they form a new establishment.

The most striking characteristic of the new elite is that the old categories that once divided American life no longer make sense within this upscale community.

It used to be relatively easy to tell a bourgeois from a bohemian. The bourgeois were the square, practical ones. They lived in suburbs, went to church, worked in corporations. The bourgeois virtues are the shopkeeper virtues, the ones explicated by Benjamin Franklin. They are useful, prosaic virtues: self-discipline, frugality, order, punctuality, moderation, industry, temperance, fidelity, and faith. They have always been opposed by the bohemians, who loathed the bourgeois and thought them soul-destroying and tepid. So the bourgeois were materialists, and the bohemians were antimaterialists. The bourgeois were career-oriented, and the bohemians were experience-oriented.

But if you look around today, those old categories are blurred, and you find everywhere the same culture. It goes deeper than consumption, into intellectual life, religion, business, pleasure, and work. And what you find are bourgeois and bohemian values intermingled in all of them, down to the way politics is practiced.

This is a cultural consequence of the information age. The keystone of the age is that ideas and creativity are as important as finance capital and natural resources to producing wealth, and therefore the people who really succeed in this world are people who can take ideas and emotions and turn them into products. Such people have one foot in the world of creativity, which is the world of bohemia, and one foot in the world of the marketplace. They are designing webpages or magazines or advertising campaigns, or what have you. But they have a university-based ethos, and they are now selling stuff and getting rich off of that.

Who Won the Culture War?

Well, then, who won the culture war: the bourgeois or the bohemians? You can drive yourself crazy talking about that, because the outcome of that conflict is a synthesis, a blurring, and there are bourgeois and bohemian notions mixed up in many of us.

Conservatives have tended to look on the dark side and to think that the bourgeois, the
great ally of conservatives, lost the culture war and that the bourgeois virtues, which were the mainstay of America, have been swept away.

But could America really be as productive today as it is if that were so? I think probably not. And I argue in the book that, at the core, the bourgeois actually won the culture war, because the core of the bohemian complaint was that commercial life, that business life, was soul-destroying.

But now the people who were most vociferous about how soul-destroying it was think it’s fantastic, so long as you can go to work in blue jeans and hiking boots and glacier glasses—as if a giant wall of ice was about to come down in the parking lot in the middle of lunch hour. And now people in places like Berkeley and Burlington, Vermont, have embraced worldly ambitions. They have accepted the wisdom and judgments of the marketplace about who succeeds and who doesn’t.

Business has unprecedented prestige today. I think there are fewer mortal enemies of capitalism today then there have been at any time in the past hundred years.