People often ask me, "Well, how did you come to write about these people, these superelites, super-affluent people?" And of course the answer is, "I came to work at the Weekly Standard, which is on the fifth floor of this building, and I started riding the elevator with these AEI people, and if you’ve ever been in the parking lot, the parking garage down in the building here, it’s just one SUV after another, and that one stretch SUV. I think Chris’s Mustang is prominently displayed down there. So suddenly I realized there was this new elite class, and I thought I should start writing about them.

There are, of course, two places in American culture where you can really get the temperature of the new elite, the people who are really shaping society: one being the dining room of AEI, but the other being the New York Times wedding page, which I begin the book with a description of, because in many ways it’s a perfect encapsulation of upper class, upscale America.

I went back and read the New York Times wedding pages of the 1950s, where there the page really did exude the protestant establishment, the world of John J. McCloy [ph], The Philadelphia Story. They rarely listed jobs of the people getting married in those days. Instead it mentioned their connections. So, for example, the men, it would list their prep school connections, what clubs they belonged to, what Union League membership, Metropolitan Club. For the women, their debutante history, what cotillion ball they came out, the junior league they belonged to.

And ancestry was greatly important to the New York Times wedding page in the 1950s, and I’m going to read you a sentence that was drawn from a wedding announcement in 1958. "She is descended from Richard Warren, who came to Brookhaven in 1664. Her husband, a descendant of Dr. Benjamin Tredwell, who settled in Old Westbury in 1767, is an alumnus of Gunnery School and a senior at Colgate University."

So these were the sorts of thing—1958, not so terribly long ago, and yet you can’t imagine that sentence appearing today. Today the page is very different, and I’m sure anybody who looks at the page on any given Sunday sees it. Its devotees call it the mergers and acquisitions page.

It’s a great clash of resumes, the two resume gods coming together. It’s Harvard marries Princeton, Fulbright marries Rhodes, Skadden Arps marries Salomon Brothers, magna cum laude marries magna cum laude. You never actually see a magna cum laude marrying a summa cum laude because the tensions in such a wedding would be too great.

And then there’s a vows column, which is the news story. These are all news stories. You can’t just apply to be on the page. You have to be selected. And there’s a news story that describes one of the weddings in great detail. And the message of these news stories—it’s called the vows column—is always the same, that these people may work eighty hours a week, and they may pull in a couple hundred thousand or million dollars a year, but they are not ambitious. Their success just sort of fell upon them from the sky as a freak of chance. They are free spirits. They’re always described as sort of berserk, wild spirits, original. The wacky wrinkle in the wedding ceremony will always be loved over, so somebody will have hired the band Devo to play the Jeopardy theme song as they walk up the aisle. The bridesmaids will have gone and gotten drunk in a Russian bath. The groom will have carried a snowboard with his favorite Schiller quotation up to the altar with him.

And then there will be a history of the relationship in this vows column. These people always seem to have met while recovering from marathons.

Or else on a dig in Kenya for a place to see man remains, and they took a series of joint vacations together, always to highly educational places like Myanmar and Minsk. And then they broke up because each of them felt a need for more space, and one of them went on, during their breakup, to arrange the largest merger in Wall Street history, and the other settled for a career in neurosurgery after dropping out of sommelier school. But then they got back together, usually in a summer house with people with cheekbones similar to their own, and they decided to get back together and share an apartment.

Now, we don’t know what their sex lives are like because the Times doesn’t yet have a fornication page.

But it will, and it will say "Jane Smith, Harvard ‘67, Yale, LD, ‘73, is now sleeping around with John Doe, Amherst ‘47."

And then they get married. The proposal, it’s always the man tends to do the proposing, interestingly enough, but it’s always in some adventurous way, at the top of Mount Rainier, or the bride-to-be opens up her diving mask in the Seychelles, and there’s a diamond ring in it or something.

And so what we have, looking at the page every given Sunday, is an elite that’s based on education and not bloodlines. You’re got your vineyard-touring doctors, your novel-writing lawyers, your tenured gardening buffs and your literary realtors, and these form a new establishment. So I spent—thanks in part to the Standard, thanks to my own research, I spent the better part of the last few years doing a lot of reporting in these places, in Aspen, Marin County, East Hampton, because that’s the sort of journalist I am. If there’s a story there, I don’t care what it takes, I’m going to report about it.

And the most striking characteristic, it seemed to me after a while, was that the old categories that divided American life no longer made sense among this upscale community. Now it used to be relatively easy to tell someone who’s a bourgeois from someone who’s a bohemian. The bourgeois were the square, practical ones—and I apologize in advance, it’s pronounced bourgeois with the "r" sound, but I don’t say it that way. They were the ones who lived in suburbs, went to church, worked in corporations. And the bourgeois virtues are the shopkeeper virtues, the ones explicated by Benjamin Franklin, and they’re useful, prosaic virtues: self-discipline, frugality, order, punctuality, moderation, industry, temperance, fidelity, and faith.

Now they’ve always been opposed by the bohemians, who loathed the bourgeois and thought them soul destroying and tepid. And the subtheme of my talk today is going to be constant references to the Kristol family. I work for one of them, so that’s not stupid. But I was at a lunch here sponsored by Christina Sommers, and I mentioned, was talking about this, and Irving mentioned a book I hadn’t come across, called Bourgeois versus Bohemian by Cesar Graña [spelling?], a Peruvian. And he had this great description of the cultural war in the 1830s or 1820s in Paris, where the bohemians really rose up, now that the middle classes had really displaced the aristocracy as the moving group in society, and he described, say, Flaubert, who looked at the stupid grocers and their ilk and found them plodding and avaricious. Flaubert signed his letters "bourgeoisophobas [spelling?]," to show how much he loathed these people. Stendhal said, "Hatred of the bourgeoisie is the beginning of all virtues, and they make him want to weep and vomit at the same time." And, so, shocking the bourgeoisie became their mode, as it would for people in this tradition for the next 150 years. They wore the long hair, they had the free sex, they engaged in mysticism, talk of suicide, altered consciousness, romanticizing peasant groups, the sort of pranksterish humor that was familiar to me as a kid from the hippies, one of the poets of the age walked through the gardens with a lobster on a leash, and he said, "It does not bark, but it knows the mysteries of the deep," which is just the sort of humor the hippies would have gone in for.

So the bourgeois were materialists and the bohemians were antimaterialists. The bourgeois were polite; the bohemians were raw. The bourgeois were career-oriented, so the bohemians were experience-oriented. The bourgeois pretended to be chaste, and the bohemians pretended to be promiscuous.

And this culture war really lasted for—since then. You know, every novel and movie you’ve ever gone to attacks the bourgeois, arid businessman who lives in the suburbs, right down to American Beauty. A hundred years ago if you loved Horatio Alger you were probably bourgeois. If you hung around Greenwich Village talking with John Reed, you were probably a bohemian. In the ‘50s, if you liked Ike, you were probably bourgeois. If you liked Allen Ginsberg, you were probably bohemian.

In the 1960s the bohemian movement, as many people in this room have written, became a mass movement with the hippies and Woodstock and the whole counterculture, and it was an assault on bourgeois values, not only about the war and civil rights and everything else, but it was an attack on that. Theodore Roczak wrote quite a good book about it, The Making of the Counter Culture, and here’s how he summarized the counterculture assault on the bourgeois: "The bourgeoisie is obsessed by greed. Its sex life is insipid and prudish. Its family patterns are debased. Its slavish conformities of dress and grooming are degrading. Its mercenary routinization of life is intolerable." So it was a broad critique, it wasn’t just niggling around the corner.

And then something happened in the 1980s. Usually, the bourgeois just ignored the bohemians. They followed the advice on their throw pillows that "Living well is the best revenge." And there were all these artists and novelists out there complaining about them, the Babbittry, but they didn’t seem to mind. You know, gold was fine, the drinks were fine. But by the ‘60s it became such a mass phenomena, such a frontal assault on bourgeois values, that even the bourgeoisie, slow to rile, were finally riled, or at least people speaking in part in their name.

And my second reference to Irving Kristol was an essay he wrote in the ‘70s or ‘80s, I think, where he wrote really a defense, one of the important defenses of bourgeois virtues, and it started out with a concession, and here’s what Irving wrote: "Bourgeois society is the most prosaic of all possible societies. It is a society organized for the comfort of common men and common women." So that’s words like "prosaic" and "comfort." So it’s not inspiring the way aristocratic virtues are, or the way religious or military virtues are, but it’s decent. It’s a good moral context for capitalism. It encourages self-discipline and hard work, wholesomeness, respect for authorities. And bourgeois eras, unlike bohemians eras, do actually lead to a fair bit of family stability, low crime, orderly neighborhoods, whereas bohemianism, as many people in this room have written, can turn into a self-indulgent nihilism and really destructive of order.

So there was something of a bourgeois revival intellectually, many conservative writers mostly, but also on Wall Street, when I was then working for the Wall Street Journal, the yuppies emerged, who were sort of bourgeois on steroids. They went around in yellow ties. I had a friend who came over from Russia and said, "What club is the yellow tie club," because he couldn’t understand—and now nobody wears yellow ties all of a sudden. They had their ridiculous suspenders, the moussed hair—do you remember there was a phrase "mousse abuse" in the ‘80s? And so we had the yuppies and the hippies, and it was sort of a debate. If you were a bourgeois, you probably liked the Reagan ‘80s and loathed the 1960s. If you were a bohemian you loved the ‘60s and hated the ‘80s. You could walk from Wall Street up to SoHo and there would be people with "Die Yuppie Scum" tee shirts. I’m still waiting for the "Die Yahoo Scum" for the anti-Internet sentiment, but that’s not quite risen.

And it was pretty easy to tell which side you were on, whether you were for guns or granola, Falwell or feminism, beads or a buzz cut, and this was a very effective political tool for the Republicans in particular. George Bush, whom you wouldn’t have thought of as a great culture warrior, but he learned the language and how effective it could be, and my friends at the Standard who worked on the Bush campaign talk about—I forget how many days in a row he went to a flag factory, but he went to a lot of flag factories against Dukakis—talked about the pledge of allegiance. And the subtext of that was: "This guy is one of those countercultural lefties from the northeast; we don’t really trust him."

And Arthur Finkelstein did a series of ad campaigns, whatever his democratic opponent would be, "So-and-so’s a liberal, dangerously liberal, scarily liberal." And it wasn’t so much—some of that was policy, "He’s going to raise your taxes," but some of it—"He’s one of these McGovernites. He’s one of the cultural guys, and you know what they’re like."

But if you look around today, those old categories are blurred. For this trip, I went to some left-wing towns like Berkeley or Burlington, Vermont. I went to some right-wing places where I went to high school, a place called Wayne, Pennsylvania, on the main line outside of Philadelphia, to Orange County. And you found everywhere the same culture. You have the same arty coffee shops.

My favorite one was in Wayne, which ranks number eight in the country in number of social register families in this zip code. Well, there’s a coffee shop there—five years ago there were no coffee shops there—now it’s like coffee Utopia, and the one is called Cafe Procopio [ph], just across from the train station, the commuter train station. And Cafe Procopio—and you know, there are always texts in all these places—and in the take-out cups at Procopio it says, "Cafe Procopio is named after an eighteenth-century Parisian Left Bank cafe, where artists, rebels, and intellectuals would get together to discuss the issues of the day." Well, in Wayne, Pennsylvania there are still not a lot of artists, rebels, and intellectuals, but there are people who want to drink coffee like one and who have adopted the manners of one.

So in Wayne and in these left-wing towns or right-wing towns, there’s the gourmet bread stores. In Wayne it’s called the Great Harvest Bread Company, which is a Montana chain, which is here. And I made the mistake the first time I went in there of asking them to slice the bread in the store, and they look at you like you haven’t risen to higher bread consciousness, like you’re killing this bread.

And there are distressed furniture stores in Wayne; there are now four of them. And it’s so distressed, it looks like it’s decomposing. It’s just this furniture that’s been stripped bare. And I sometimes wonder whether the Asian workers who build this stuff think they have this new furniture come off the assembly line, and then there’s one final step where they’re scraping it up and beating it, and you know, I don’t know what they think of us.

And then in Wayne, as in here where I live, in Washington, there’s a Fresh Fields, which you walk through; you’ve got your vegetarian dog biscuits, your Basmati rice and your all-natural hair colorings, because if you’re going to artificially color your hair, you want the all natural ingredients. And they’ve taken all the things that were from the ‘60s of interest to teenagers, like free love and nudity, and gotten rid of them, and kept all the things that are of interest to middle-aged hypochondriacs, like whole grains and fancy rice.

And then you go to the left-wing places that were formerly anticommercial, and I just actually ran into a sociologist in Boston who was a big ‘60s radical and hated commercialism and consumerism and read Veblen and all the right books about it. And he described to me his kitchen, and of course, his kitchen is the kind I describe in loving and envious detail in my book, which is the size of an aircraft hangar with plumbing, with, you know, one of these six-burner, dual-fuel stoves, 20,000 BTUs, that sends up heat like, you know, a space shuttle rocket, the Viking and Aga—there are apparently in England entire books called Aga sagas about these stoves. The big Sub-Zero refrigerator. Sub-Zero is actually in Madison, Wisconsin, very appropriately. I toured their assembly line. You know, there are two big doors, one of them is big enough for an in-law suite, and the other has just got the freezer stuff.

And in the book I go a little deeper at least than consumption, but into intellectual life, religion, business life, pleasure, work, success. And what you find, I argue, bourgeois and bohemian values intermingled in all of them, down to the way politics is practiced.

And I concluded, or at least theorized, that this is a cultural consequence of the information age, that the age has—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. And so they have one foot in the world of creativity, which is the world of bohemia, and one foot in the world of the marketplace, and they are designing web pages or magazines or advertising campaigns, or what have you, but they have a university-based ethos, and they’re now selling stuff and getting rich off of that.

And so then Marx was wrong. He told us that classes always conflict or usually, but in these two cases, at least in this cultural war, the classes have just blurred, and that this new elite has replaced the old one, these people in the New York Times wedding pages, and they’re doing what establishments always do, which is setting rules for what’s prestigious and what’s not, determining debate, setting a new pecking order, and sort of shaping the cultural tone of the country.

And one of the things I start out at is describing how they’ve transformed consumption, because consumption was the classic bourgeois activity. That’s buying and selling stuff. And yet now, if you go to places like Wayne, as I described, these distressed furniture stores, you’ve got people who are spending millions of dollars to show how unmaterialistic they are. And one of the ways they do this is taking advantage of an Aristotelian distinction between needs and wants, that it’s okay to spend lasciviously on needs, so long as you don’t spend any money on wants. So, for example, a luxury like a media center is considered vulgar, but spending $20,000 on your slate shower stall is a sign that you’re at one with the zen-like rhythms of nature.

Spending money on caviar is vulgar and sort of old-fashioned rich, but now people have become cognoscenti of the lettuce world, and they’ve got these bad-tasting lettuces from Northern Italy that they can discourse on at great length. Spending money on a Corvette would be vulgar, but a practical Range Rover is something that seems virtuous, because you know, you can actually haul stuff in a Range Rover.

I actually once started writing a screenplay called Rebel without a Camry, about an English professor who bought a Cadillac, and all the social opprobrium that would fall upon him.

One of the fascinating things about the transition of this bourgeois world, and especially in places like Wayne or Orange County, is the way they’ve adopted the bohemian manner so thoroughly. There’s a great book called The Refinement of America by a Columbia historian named Bushman, Richard Bushman or Philip Bushman—Richard Bushman. And he describes the transition, what gentility did to American furnishings in the early part of the nineteenth century, or even the early part of the eighteenth century, which is they took everything that was rough, and they made it smooth. So people at the time had broad floor planks, so they made them narrow and genteel. They had big stone fireplaces. They made them small and delicate. They had rough-hewn beams in the ceiling, and the people who are creating this refined American ethos made them—covered over the ceilings, and they created parlors, which was the center of refinement in the home.

You go into a bourgeois house today that’s just being developed—and I’m doing a story on these $10 million tract mansions in California—they’ve taken everything the genteel people did two hundred years ago, and they’ve reversed it. So now broad, thick floor planks are in fashion, and people literally have workers come in with ballpeen hammers and hammer dents into them to give it that authenticity. And big stone fireplaces are in fashion, rough-hewn beams are the ceiling, brick faces. Everything is textured and rough. It’s the exact opposite of the way the bourgeois, who were trying to refine themselves above the working class. Now you’re trying to refine yourself spiritually above the money class—and spending great gobs of money in doing it.

The other thing I noticed—well, the other great sweep of bohemianism is into the business world, which was the other epicenter of bourgeois activity. In the 1950s, you go back to the business magazines, and the businessmen—men mostly in those days—were dressed in white shirts, dark paneling, and they just wanted to be seen as boring and not interesting. The phrase "fiduciary responsibility" sort of wafts up above them. But now if you look at the business magazines, every businessman, like Jeffrey Katzenberg, wants to be pictured with his wacky accoutrements. He’ll have his Super Soaker Water Cannon, or he’ll have maybe a collection of ashtrays, he’ll be dressed like an aging rock star.

There was a fellow from Microsoft, Myhrvold—I think he was number two at Microsoft—was on the cover of Fortune with a beanie propeller hat on his head, which—can you imagine a businessman in the 1950s posing that way on the cover of Fortune? In fact, the business world is the last place in America where the Age of Aquarius, liberated rhetoric is still going at full bore. Apple Computer uses the slogan: The crazy one, the misfits, the rebels. Lucent Technologies uses "Born to be wild." Burger King, which you don’t think of as the great countercultural institution, their slogan is, "Sometimes you’ve got to break the rules."

And it goes into the management philosophy as well. Tom Peters, one of the best-selling management consultants, talks about "Think revolution, not evolution. Destruction is cool." And this is what you hear if you listen to those headphones on the plane, the Management Channel, over and over again. And if you visit the companies, first of all, among the young people who are in their twenties, they look exactly like the people I saw getting arrested out here during the IMF/World Bank meeting. They have the red hair. They have the tattooed noses. And they have the same attitudes and language as the people getting arrested out here, which made me think those people who are getting arrested are going to be working at Microsoft in about ten years or five or two.

But secondly, they talk like they’re younger than they are, even the fifty-year-olds. If you ask them, "How did the IPO go?" "Oh, it cratered", like a sixteen-year-old. "How’s the product pipeline?" "It’s insanely great!" They talk as if somehow it’s cooler to be young and part of the youth culture than it is to be part of the mature culture, which again is something, you know, countercultural infecting the world. And the countercultural critique of bureaucracy and technocracy, which was so much in the air in the ‘60s, has now been adopted wholesale in management theory. So they would talk about rigid bureaucratic hierarchies reducing people to cogs in a machine. And now that’s utterly standard in corporate America. The idea is to develop teams where people can have loose, personalistic relationships, exactly the sort of thing that many people were talking about in the 1960s. So if you look at consumer taste and the business language, you think the bohemians have taken over, taken over America, because their values have swept across, at least the surface, of commercial and business life.

So I ask in the book, "Well, who won the culture war?" And I talk about this in the Standard in the last issue, and you can drive yourself crazy talking about that, because it is a synthesis, a blurring, and that there are bourgeois and bohemian mixed up in many people, in many of us. And conservatives have tended to look on the dark side, thinking that the bourgeois, the great ally of conservatives, lost the culture war. But in fact, well, for example, George Gilder argued—here’s a quote from him: "Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtues in sexual mores and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, and the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery." So that was an article written in Commentary about five years ago, that the bohemians have just swept it all, and 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 think—I argue a bit 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. And now the people who were most vociferous about how soul-destroying it is think it’s fantastic, so long as you can go to work in, you know, blue jeans and hiking boots and glacier glasses, you know, as if a giant wall of ice was about to come down the parking lot in the middle of lunch hour, so you need all this high-tech parka equipment. And now they have embraced, in places like Berkeley and Burlington, Vermont, they’ve embraced worldly ambitions. They’ve accepted the wisdom and judgments of the marketplace of 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.

You look at magazines like Wired magazine, Red Herring or Fast Company, and they have the countercultural patina, they’re all—you know, they have the orange and the bright greens, as if they’re a Jefferson Airplane poster, but in fact, they are business magazines, and they celebrate the virtues of business, which are the virtues of hard work and productivity. And so I argue in the book that Daniel Bell wrote, in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, that the ethos of modernism with its emphasis on immediate gratification, immediate pleasure, he argued that would undermine the productive ethos of American capitalism, but in reality it seems the exact opposite has happened, that you find people who when they conceive of themselves as artists and rebels, when they think of their work as part of their self-expression, rather than just their job, they’ll work twenty hours a day. You know, they’ve got the sleeping bag under the desk, which you see in the high-tech firms. And they’ll devote great energies to working incredibly hard, and once you accept the bourgeois values, all sorts of other things come into play. For example, you accept the idea that society should be ordered and calm. The bohemians were all about throwing off the fetters of society, emancipating themselves and going into a realm of pure freedom. But now if you look around American culture and American discussion, there’s very little call for that. If you looked, you know, thirty or forty years ago, there were people really calling for nonconformity, rebellion, extreme individualism.

But now I just got in the mail a book by Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, based on his famous essay. Now, I have trouble imagining a 1960s radical, or many people in the 1960s, holding up bowling leagues as a symbol of healthy community. I mean bowling leagues would have seemed like bourgeois and boring, you know, just the height of reactionary dumb culture. But now they seem sort of calm and—Amitai Etzioni is in the room—so an example of the emphasis on community, on social cohesion, on civil society, which is now I think the dominant mode of the way people talk on both right and left. It comes in right- and left-wing versions now.

Meanwhile, universities are cracking down there, reestablishing their in loco parentis authorities on the students with rules on drinking, cohabitation, fraternity hazing, sexual concept, most famously. Legislature seems to want to control everything: control on guns, Internet porn, tobacco, campaign spending, violent television, anything that might upset parents.

In the 1970s Summerhill School by A. S. Neill, a British educationalist, was quite popular. He was a guy who created a school in England that had no rules except for those the students created themselves, and the idea was the romantic idea that students would naturally, you know, educate themselves. And his book in the 1970s sold two million copies in the U.S. alone. It’s hard to imagine an idea quite as out of fashion, at least among mainstream discourse. Who knows what’s happening in the education schools? But that idea is out of fashion. If you look to the response of the Columbine massacre, there were many different—you know, people used it for their own purposes, but on one issue there seemed to be unanimity, which is that parents needed to impose more authority on their kids, and that’s sort of where the ethos is.

You look at towns, there’s stricter zoning control to clamp down, to make the towns more orderly against tear-downs, against new kind of restaurants, against this, against that. You look at the consumption patterns and the vacation patterns of the people I describe. It’s not Utopian, it’s not futuristic. The word "modern" is never used except for in its old-fashioned sense. Modernist is now something we’re nostalgic for. It’s always looking back to the past. There are bumper stickers: "Save the theater," "Save the Bay," variants of preservation. I get Preservation Magazine, something I recommend to salivate over the real estate ads, and the preservation ethos is such a backward-looking ethos, such an ethos that rejects the future, rejects the idea of a new Utopia, but is based on the idea there was some wisdom that the past possessed that we have lost.

In fact, Restoration Hardware—it’s not too much in the book—but I did a story on Restoration Hardware, and that is the explanation they use for their store, which is that people feel they’ve left something behind with their mobility, and they want to look back longingly at that, and they want to surround themselves with stuff that the people who had the wisdom had, and maybe the wisdom will come later.

And then you look at political life, and what you see is small-scale politics in Washington today. You know, people pull back from Hillary Clinton’s ambitious effort to expand public health care. People pull back from Newt Gingrich’s ambitious effort to radically reduce the size of government. Many thought when the boomers came into political power when they were in their 50s, they’d bring their youthful ideological style with them. In fact, the exact opposite has happened. They brought an anti-ideological style.

One of the interesting things that was of interest to some of my colleagues at the Standard who wrote State of the Union addresses was the way Clinton totally revolutionized State of the Union addresses, that they no longer had any theme, they no longer had an ideological content. They were just a series of modest proposals designed for that constituency, that constituency, just a laundry list which you’ve become familiar with, and that’s politics exactly the way the bourgeois likes it, anti-ideological, ideological mush, really, but concrete, modest, not too grand, but somehow vaguely activist. Clinton pioneered this third-way approach, which draws from the Right—sometimes school uniforms—draws from the Left—sometimes condoms in school—and he mushes it all together. There’s no ideological coherence to it. There’s no there there. It’s just a mush and a blur, which is a reconciliation of the two.

So there’s sort of a discussion in the conservative world over whether the cultural war still exists. It’s sort of—I’ll label it sort of crudely—Himmelfarb versus Fukuyama. Bea Kristol [a.k.a. Gertrude Himmelfarb] wrote a piece in the Commentary, reminding us that if you look at the South Carolina primary, you see that religious conservatives who really are the center for mainstream culture still exist. Fukuyama writes in The Great Disruption that the disruption’s over and that the rift is healed. And I guess, very nervously, I side more with Fukuyama, and I would say about South Carolina even that is a sign that the cultural war is over, that what those people were responding to when they hated McCain—and they really did hate him—was less cultural politics and more identity politics, that when McCain attacked their leaders, it wasn’t over abortion or even over a cultural matter; it was, "He was attacking one of us." And George W. Bush, when asked who his great favorite philosopher was, he didn’t say, you know, someone who actually is a conservative philosopher; he said, "Jesus Christ," which was a sign, "I’m one of you." And I think he played that as identity politics rather than as cultural politics, that the culture has sort of evaporated and what’s left is sort of the identity.

So what you see is what old-fashioned or maybe Bagehot-style conservatives would have called modest conservatives, distrustful of grand plans, distrustful of radicalism of Left and Right, just wanting to stay with the stupid status quo, being against ideology. Burke said, "The great property owners are the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth," and if you look at these bobos, they are the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth. They are the ones who oppose change. The upscale suburbs I described—and they are mostly suburbs—send people like Connie Morella, John Porter, Tom Campbell to Congress. They are the last of the true moderates who don’t want any change. They just sort of go along in the middle.

And the National Journal did a study a few years ago about how these richest seventeen congressional districts are trending. In every election over the past six, they’ve trended more and more Democratic, so now they’re almost evenly Democratic with Republican. And they’re for moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans. And the people from these districts like Morella, Campbell, and Porter spend their time fighting against the people from poorer districts who want a little more ideological fire in their politics. So really it is a boring, very concrete, very anti-ideological, very modest political style that this group brings in. It is bourgeois politics.

And you’d think, just to wrap up, that the conservatives would be riding high. The conservatives have always been the great defenders of bourgeois politics and the bourgeois style and the bourgeoisie, and it seemed for a while they would be. But over the past couple of years it’s become clear that conservatives were allied with the bourgeoisie but were not the same as the bourgeoisie. And there have been a series of ruptures between the conservatives and Middle Americans. The most famous was over the Clinton scandals. Conservatives were outraged by the Clinton scandals. The Middle Americans said, "Well, the economy is going great; you know, why make a change?" which is a classic bourgeois attitude, you know. "Let’s not get excited by abstractions, you know? Things are okay. Nothing’s bothering me."

There have been a whole series of issues like this, Elian Gonzalez being a recent one, many conservatives at my magazine hyperventilating about Elian getting sent back to a communist place. Well, the country didn’t seem too aroused by it. And it becomes clear that conservatives have a set of ideals, whether you’re a libertarian (an ideal about freedom), religious conservative (about why the country should cohere with the God-made order), or if you’re one of the three National Greatness conservatives (an idea that there’s a certain patriotic ideal of America that the country should approximate). But these people with ideas are always introducing abstractions, which Middle America is in no mood for, and certainly not the bobos I’m writing about.

And so one is beginning to see on the right exactly what one saw on the Left, which is attacks on Middle America, attacks on the bourgeoisie.

At the height of the Clinton scandals Bill Bennett wrote a book called The Death of Outrage. Why aren’t people getting excited? Why are they so fat and happy? Why are they so concerned about the economy? Well, that’s the problem with the bourgeoisie; they never get excited. But that was the sort of thing Flaubert hated them for, too, because they just are sunk deep in their own fat, as he would have said it.

So it’s the Democratic Party under Clinton with his third-way ideological mushy style, which has actually become a more bourgeois party than the conservative part of the Republican Party has become, and it’s that third-way ideological style which prevails across the Northern Hemisphere. It’s a reconciliation between two things, you know, half countercultural—you know, the Clintons are a perfect example; they were marching in the ‘60s, they were selling futures in the ‘80s, and they put it all together, and that’s the third way. It’s ideologically mushy. It’s unsatisfying.

And Bush, I think, is going some way to trying to replicate that; compassionate conservatism is a bit of a musher. He talks about being a uniter, not a divider. He’s not an ideological person. He was at Yale, Yale class of 1968. There was a lot of turmoil going on, some pro-war, some antiwar, and he sat it out. And this is really an unfair quote to him, but it’s something he did say, which is, "I wasn’t going to let all that ruin my good time at Yale."

Which I think is not fair to him. It’s not quite fair. But one thing it’s indicative of is his deeply anti-ideological nature. It put him out of step with the times when there really was ideological conflict, but it puts him perfectly in step with the times now, which I think is one of the reasons he may win.

So we’re in this mushy world that—for people like me, on the Right and the Left, it drives people batty, because you hit the mushy middle people and they never fight back. They’re like the old bourgeois. They don’t argue. They don’t have ideological coherence. They don’t have an intellectual front. They just absorb, they co-opt, they drain radicalism out of it, and they just—you know, they just go on co-opting, absorbing, being modest, not being for, not being against, just going on.

I came back from Belgium, which trained me in looking at things bourgeois, warning of the menace of Belgian cultural hegemony, which is the triumph of everything dull and small scale and modest, and in many ways that bourgeois style has triumphed here.

And just a one-minute plug for national greatness, it’s an attempt to show some ideals above the life of Fresh Fields and Starbucks, that there is actually something grander about America than the fact that we produce really good software, and it’s an attempt to remind people of that. But in the meantime, we’re stuck in this bland bobo age.

And as I was writing the book, I had a chapter on religion, and I was thinking, "Well, what does the last judgment look like to these people?" I mean, they’re so—I mean, will there be a moment when time ends and the recyclers will be sent up to heaven, and the non-recyclers will be dispatched down to hell? And I tired to imagine the end of all of this, the last judgment for the bobos. And I imagine that the quintessential bobo may be a law school professor from San Francisco State or something, off at her hillside in her Montana summer home. And she’s looking over the valley on her hill, and she’s got her fox fiber shirt, and she pulls it around her, and she’s got her dogs, Dylan and Joplin by her side. And she looks over the hillside, and there are B&Bs, you know spread across the miles, some little home factories, somebody making chutney over here and pesto over there. And she goes down the hill because dusk is coming on, and she goes down to her renovated farmhouse, which she has tripled the size of the windows since she moved in, and she pats her little woodpile she has on the porch. She doesn’t burn the wood, but she’s become a devotee of woodpile aesthetic since she came up to Montana, and she has a beech wood pile that’s just a thing of beauty to her.

And she goes into the house and she’s greeted by the Horse Whisperer soundtrack, which is going on the sound system. And her partner is in the corner. He’s doing—he’s discovered all sorts of things that he didn’t really have time for before they moved up to Montana. He’s reading the feminist novelists of Southeast Asia and rewatching the Merchant-Ivory movies. And she pats her ladle collection, because she’s going to go into the kitchen for some coffee.

And there inside the kitchen, which she has just recently renovated, sits the Angel of Death. And it’s a special bobo Angel of Death, so he’s got a parka, North Face parka, on instead of a big black robe, and a gardening trowel instead of a scythe. And he apparently has been there a while because he’s found a ceramic mug that she got at the crafts fair in Santa Fe the year before, and he’s made himself a cup of coffee. And he starts asking her about the kitchen renovation, and he particularly admires the way they tripled the size of the kitchen while keeping its fundamental integrity at stake. And he admires the door handles and the cabinet fixtures, which squeak intentionally when you open them. And he tells her in the middle of all of this that, "Unfortunately, you’re dead, but you’re not going to heaven and you’re not going to hell, because heaven would be too grand and hell too much of a downer, too contentious—I don’t know what the phrase is—too judgmental, I suppose. You’re just going to get to stay in this kitchen forever with all the materiality you’ve surrounded your life. And there will be California casual chairs, and every station on the radio will be set to NPR." And then he will go off into the distance, taking her Range Rover with him as he goes, and that will be all eternity.

So thank you.

David Brooks is the senior editor of The Weekly Standard.