III. The Dream of the 90s
A New Ruling Class
“If the liberal should prove realistic in his belief that there is peaceful room for every tendency in American life,” creative nonfictionalist Norman Mailer muses toward the conclusion of his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” “then hip would end by being absorbed as [just another] colorful figure in the tapestry.” This, however, he very much did not want to happen. The self-proclaimed “Philosopher of Hip” believed that the liberal West was headed for a dead end: a totalitarian nightmare of bourgeois rationalism and repression. But there was a way out, he assures. Disaffected white youths need only to embrace the “hipster” lifestyle of black jazz musicians—a sort of free flowing, uninhibited, intuitive naturalism. Because blacks had been excluded from civilization and its discontents, they had not been infected by either its pathos or pathologies. But to Mailer’s discontent, the liberal did prove “realistic.” Despite the mass countercultural upheavals of the following decades, the hipster has now been fully threaded into the technocratic dream coat—in fact, they have been so fully enmeshed, they now constitute its ruling class.
This technocratic hipster is what I have been calling the “Bobo,” or Bourgeois Bohemian. It is a synthesis of the two central archetypal figures of modernity: the businessman and the artist, whose competition for the soul of Western civilization helped fuel much of the creative energy that has so characterized the modern world. But as the self-proclaimed “comic sociologist” David Brooks documents in his 2000 work Bobos in Paradise, in the 1990s this distinction collapsed in on itself.
The hipster was not only absorbed by the liberal order, it became its very foundation; and its open, “on the road” orientation became the modus operandi of the system. With the new borderless movement of ideas, individuals, and capital produced by globalization, a new style of ruling class was needed to dissolve the lingering parochialism that had inhibited the old elite from fully embracing the bourgeois mindset. The Bobo was precisely the instrument needed for this task.
To understand the magnitude of this change, one must first understand what it is that the Bobos replaced: the WASPs, or White-Anglo Saxon Protestants, that were America’s traditional ruling class since even before our founding. “At its core the cultural radicalism of the 60s,” Brooks elaborates, “was an attempt to replace the WASP lifestyle and moral code with a new one that would celebrate spiritual and intellectual ideals” over the old social markers of income, possessions, manners, and respectability. They sought to replace the WASP lifestyle with that of Mailer’s “White Negro.”
As Benjamin Franklin established through his Poor Richard’s Almanack, the Protestant Work Ethic—frugality, honesty, order, moderation, prudence, industry, perseverance, temperance, chastity, cleanliness, tranquility, punctuality, and humility—has historically been the foundation of the American elite’s power. And as everyone knows, “God [only] helps those who help themselves.” America, however, has never really had a true ruling class, which is to say, an aristocracy: a caste set apart and insuperably above the rest of society. Although balanced by many ancient traditions, America has always been a thoroughly modern nation—in that the “commercial republic” of free inquiry, free enterprise, and free trade has been our highest ideal. While it is true that this has never gone unchallenged by a “counterculture” (e.g. our cyclically recurring Great Awakenings, or critiques by thinkers like Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau), the fact remains that the “land of opportunity” primarily offers the opportunity to improve one’s material conditions.
But amidst the mass affluence of the 1950s, an inward turn once again arose amongst the youth. They could not conceive how our supposed Christian nation seemed way more concerned with keeping up with the Joneses than in keeping with Jesus. New questions were brought to the fore: Why, What for, What if, and finally, How? The status quo was challenged from all corners, culminating in the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s and ending with the WASPs’ displacement in the 1990s.
But a system doesn’t just overthrow (nor run) itself. In order to complete this social transformation, the counterculture was forced to make some internal adjustments as well by assuming many of the traits they had formerly denounced. The only way to truly accomplish this was to become the new ruling class—Ecce Bobo. As Brooks summarizes, the culture war between the bourgeois and bohemian has ended, and in its place a “third culture, a reconciliation between the previous two,” has emerged. The price of this new elites’ inner peace, however, has been the intensification of the culture war in the external world.
Although in most ways the bohemian and the bourgeois are polar opposites, they do share two fundamental values: individualism and freedom. Indeed, despite all the sturm und drang of modernity that their quarrel has caused, I would contend that they are in fact two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Each seeks liberation from the traditional structure of society, one consecrated to the common good rather than the individual, that holds stability rather than “creative destruction” as imperative, and places duty and responsibility over rights. Indeed, the chief consequence of the displacement of WASP traditionalism by the Bobos is that bourgeois commercialism has been unbound.
With the synthesis of the bourgeois and the bohemian, the Dialectic of Modernity has exhausted itself. But as the last twenty five years show, this has only intensified the culture war. This is because the true culture war was never actually between the businessman and the artist, but between modern individualism and freedom, on one side, and tradition, on the other—or alternatively put, between liberal relativism and those who believe humans have the right to say that things are right and wrong.
As is often remarked these days, “conservatism” now seems be the new counterculture. Not the ideals of Con Inc. that have held sway over the right for the last seventy years, but a longing for deep sources of renewal through which a common life can once again be reconstructed. While the Bobo likes to talk a big game when it comes to community, neighborliness, love, and localism, their underlying ideology of Think Global, Act Local militates against these desires. The question is: Can Bobos become partners in these new conservative communitarian efforts, or will they remain mortal enemies to all those who strike out beyond the possibilities of modernity?