Bred for Power (Howard Dean's elitist background)

It's true Bush's grandfather was a Wall Street financier,

That's one way of saying it I guess. Banker, among other things I believe. Interesting connections thru the 40's.

But that culture, which George Bush and Howard Dean were born into, did have a formula for producing leaders. Our culture, which is freer and fairer, does not.

I cannot believe this appeared in the NY Times...

He was one of the four senior partners at Brown Brother Harriman, which is, incidentally, is the oldest company having a seat on the NY Stock Exchange.

Harriman, who was also an ambassador to Russia, was the richest of them all and then joined with the Browns. Prescott Bush joined the combination shortly thereafter, if I remember correctly.

Howard Dean has one advantage for attracting democrat voters: He has his head up his butt.

What is interesting to me about this article, is the fact that is makes a lie of the manner in which the lib press is painting Dean as a populist man-of-the-people, when in fact he is patrician to his teeth. And whereas Bush is portrayed by some (like Maureen Dowd) as a spoiled, entitled rich kid, Dean is given a whole other spin. Typical, but infuriating nevertheless.

"...Brown Brother Harriman..."

When I worked for an CPA firm in NYC one of the accountants told me that Brown Brothers is truly old money. He said "If you won millions of dollars in the lotter tomorrow, they wouldn't let you deposit it there." Fleet better keep its corporate fingers crossed for me.

And as for the author's last remark, he is quite correct. We are now educated by a cadre of marxists who only know how to raise followers, the very aptly nicknamed "sheeple". But you know what, those prep schools are still up and running, and the white men are going to continue to lead for quite a while, for just the reasons given in this article.

My great grandfather arrived from Sweden in 1902. He worked in coal mines, dug wells and was a brick mason.
Guess I won't be getting any Christmas cards from the Deans...

I have a giant "SO WHAT" response to this sham of an article by Brooks. Utterly irrelevant.

But then again, I speak as a modern American, unfazed by the magnificence of WASP prep school traditions.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks
review by Scott McLemee

Recently, Tom Frank—editor of the Baffler, author of One Market Under God, and Hermenaut contributor—and David Brooks—writer for the Weekly Standard and author of Bobos in Paradise—locked horns at Slate's "Breakfast Table." Their wrangle covered bipartisan self-aggrandizement, conservative ascendancy, corporate gentry, and "abstractions on stilts." And it all started with one question about the ideas behind Bobos in Paradise. Confused? Get some background information. What follows is Scott McLemee's take on Brooks's book, in an review originally published in Newsday.

David Brooks, a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, is also an amateur sociologist; which is to say, someone who makes mental footnotes to the New York Times. His field of specialization is the American bourgeoisie. In this much-discussed new book, Brooks demonstrates, to his own satisfaction, that a decisive shift has taken place in the folkways of the ruling class. The old conflict between the stodgy business ethos and the wild-eyes freedom of creative rebels is over; art and commerce have reached a mutually satisfying truce. Yuppie-style consumption is dead. In its place, there now reigns the Starbucks/National Public Radio aesthetic of the "bourgeois bohemians"—or, to use Brooks's coinage, "bobos."

The argument of Bobos in Paradise is simple, and the author restates it every two pages (perhaps as a courtesy to the people he is discussing, who must do their reading between cell phone messages). Half a century ago, ancient issues of the Times reveal, the American ruling class was WASP in its deepest cells. Those whose ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower sedulously mimicked the people who did—conducting their lives with a certain quiet and unpleasant dignity. Meanwhile, downtown, artists and writers and other denizens of bohemia whooped it up, enjoying a liberated existence of self-expression, which often included freedom from hot water or electricity.

Jumping ahead in time—to the roaring whatever-we-call-this-decade—we find that all is changed, changed utterly. Today, the elite is a meritocracy with no use for WASP reserve or vital debutante statistics. Its money and power come from brains, not ancestry. To acquire this status—and to manifest it—members of the new ruling class reject all the boring old virtues of stability, regularity and conformity. They are wild and crazy guys. And gals, too, of course. This cohort is post-feminist, post-modernist, post-everything.

The socio-economic impact has been tremendous—and not just for the man in the gray flannel suit, now compelled to bungee jump. In the information economy, intellectuals are all entrepreneurs, and vice versa. Creativity is the name of the game. And its only rule is that (as a fast-food chains instructs us in its ads) "Sometimes You've Gotta Break the Rules."

The boboisie is the cause of all these changes. Or perhaps their by-product. It isn't too clear which; and insofar as Bobos in Paradise addresses that puzzle, the answer is "Whatever." Bourgeois bohemia includes, in Brooks's estimate, "about nine million households with incomes of over $100,000"—what he calls "the most vocal and active portion of the population." Just how they relate to the rest of society—those above and those below—is not really the author's concern.

Rather, he focuses on the quirks and consumption habits of the most powerful and trend-setting caste. The product is, in effect, a very long magazine article on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (Ivy League division). Brooks counts himself as a bobo; and while tongue may be planted quite visibly in his cheek, social criticism this isn't. He writes about his peers with a certain affection, if not exactly admiration, in tones of unrelenting puckish humor.

Which has the important effect of obscuring what goes on between the lines. "Bobos" is a catchy neologism that will, with luck, die swiftly; yet the phenomenon itself predates this monicker. For example, Paul Fussell sketched the bobos as "the X people" in the final pages of Class (1983)—a funny but more tough-minded book, lacking cuteness.

But to see the context of Bobos in Paradise, you have to look further back in time. Like any writer for the Weekly Standard, Brooks must know that the bobosie is just another name for "the New Class." That quasi-Marxist expression emerged in the late 1930s and got hijacked by the right in the '70s. It refers to those experts, technicians, bureaucrats, and brain-workers who—while vital to the functioning of an advanced industrial society—don't necessarily regard themselves as having the same interests as business owners. Their power comes from the knowledge and/or access to media.

Many neoconservatives regarded the sixties as the dreadful moment when the New Class embraced the counterculture—rejecting ambition, individualism, profit-minded discipline, and sundry other Ben Franklin virtues. There were undermining the West. If they kept it up Soviet tanks would eventually roll down Main Street, cheered on by hordes of welfare mothers and militant homosexuals. Of course, the neoconservatives, who worked mostly as journalists and academics, were members of the New Class themselves, but never mind.

David Brooks belongs to the latest generation of this group; and Bobos in Paradise is, in part, addressed to his elders. The chapter on bobo intellectuals (neocon and otherwise) is particularly telling. Brooks makes clear just how much steak and gravy are available to New Class members who, as the saying has it, "go along to get along." As for the notion that they have any interest in biting the hand that feeds them—it is to laugh. They embody no values at odds with the existing order of things—and in fact provide many useful services to the empire.

As an afterthought, Brooks wonders if this might change. "Indeed," he writes, "it's possible to imagine a coming generation that will grow bored of our reconciliations, our pragmatic ambivalence, our tendency to lead lives half one thing, half another. They may long for a little cleansing purity, a little zeal in place of our materialism, demanding orthodoxy in place of our small-scale morality."

Brooks puts all this in parentheses, and never mentions it again. The prospect is not very worrisome. In dealing with the New Class (he suggests) the best policy is one of indulgent good humor. The new code of hipster gentility means that the closest they will come to upheaval is redecorating. So Brooks winks at the old ideological warriors, saying, Now let us do a little happy dance.

The NY Times seems to have already corrupted David Brooks.
He knows better than to write this smarmy drivel. Can he cite a single instance of a Kennedy man's self-discipline?
This is more class warfare garbage wrapped in a very slightly amusing broadsheet.

Two years from now, only people who are really interested in politics (such as FReepers) will even know who Howard Dean was.

But then again, I speak as a modern American, unfazed by the magnificence of WASP prep school traditions.

Some of out best Presidents have come from entitled backgrounds, some have not. (Lincoln and Reagan for instance.) That's not really the aspect of this that interests me, it's the hypocritical manner in which the press paints Republicans vs. Democrats. And especially Dean.

Wasn't Howard Dean that guy in that movie who yelled about being pissed off as hell and that he wasn't gonna take it...or was he the lead singer of Twisted Sister?

It is funny to see Dean meet and greet and be questioned by the "rabble". He is a God when he is doing this, you can see how he feels he is superior, he gets impatient with the low class. But if you have the introspection of a NYT writer, you can't see this.

The NY Times seems to have already corrupted David Brooks. He knows better than to write this smarmy drivel. Can he cite a single instance of a Kennedy man's self-discipline?

The Kennedys aren't WASPS. They are Irish-Catholic. But in certain ways JFK was disciplined. His sexual escapades aside, he displayed great physical courage and physical discipline. He was a very sickly child, and a man always in severe pain, at least until the advent of cortisone. Nevertheless he went to war, and endured in that effort, saving others from sure death. That shows discipline and toughness of mind.

Another example of an entitled man becoming a great President is Teddy Roosevelt. He too overcame grave illness, through sheer will and discipline. He really defined the idea of a modern President as a rugged individualist, an image we still to this day like our Presidents to have.

If you were to pick a presidential candidate on the basis of social standing — and really, darling, who doesn't —

Is he a fag? He writes like one.

Howard Brush Dean III, child of privilege, Birkenstock doc, and beneficiary of some $3.8 million in various equities, securities and trust funds. Hardly a man of the people like, say, Dick Gephardt, son of a union truck driver (we have this on good authority, from Dick Gephardt). Yet "Trey" seems to be the currently leading favorite among the sacrificial lambs being offered up by the Democrats to hold a place in the Presidential sweepstakes of 2004.

We are still waiting for "Trey" (or as he is fondly known by his friends, "Ho-ho") to go into meltdown on the campaign trail, as his only barely contained and ill-concealed rage boils forth at some reporter or audience member, when certain of his inconsistencies are pointed out.

He will have no idea how sharp the knives that then come out will be. If dressed out quickly enough, road kill makes excellent stew, or with the right spices, a very good grade of sausage.

Is he a fag? He writes like one.

Gee, that's nice. Are you as derisive about Andrew Sullivan?

Sounds like Dean and Bush will be locked in a true election struggle, with the public making the choice between the lesser of two evils.

This is some snob article. I have nothing against WASP Mayflower descendents, and the gossip columnist shouldn't either.

It's not what you're given; it's what you do with it.