Is David Brooks Imitating Lenin the Funniest New York Times Column Ever?

Yuppies of the world, unite!

New York Times columnist David Brooks, calling for a “mass civic uprising” against Donald Trump:

We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place… [that] this is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.

You don’t say!

It’s hard to convey the scale of the comedy in this article, which received a lot of attention. Brooks lifts the opening from Genesis (“In the beginning there was agony”) and the ending from the Communist Manifesto (see below). In between lay a call for “mass civic uprising” which spends much of its time trying to figure out where to find the “civic” part, after drafting corporate lawyers, university administrators, “corporate executives,” reporters, and — what other kinds of people live in America? It’s either the funniest revolutionary manifesto ever, or the most touching. You be the judge:

David Brooks in 2000 wrote Bobos in Paradise, a seminal work of aristocratic self-congratulation declaring the epoch of the “Bourgeois Bohemian,” or bobo. “All societies have elites, and our educated elite is a lot more enlightened than some of the other elites,” Brooks quipped. The bobo was a delicious confection in which “You got your countercultural sixties in my high-achieving eighties!” The resulting admixture was part rebel, part establishment pillar whose mere presence would radiate fabulousness. “Wherever we educated elites settle,” Brooks wrote, “we make life more interesting, diverse, and edifying.”

The book was a tribute to the superior looks, taste, and romantic strategies of America’s elites, who’d not only won the Cold War but conquered the problem of power itself, by being so chill and amazing that no one would ever think to resent their authority. They wore jeans and sat on purposefully downscale furniture, being utterly casual, unlike previous ruling classes (in one upper-class suburb, “the restaurant La Fourchette has changed its name to the less pretentious Fourchette 110”).

Don’t be fooled, though: underneath that jeans-and-coffee exterior, the Bobo cultivated what the Greeks called metis, loosely equivalent to savoir faire, a type of extrasensory knowing. “This trait cannot be taught or memorized. It can only be imparted and acquired,” Brooks proclaimed, adding: “People sharing metis do not lecture; they converse… To acquire metis, a person must not only see but see with comprehension. He or she must observe minutely to absorb the practical consequences of things…” The yuppie version of the all-seeing Third Eye was a wonder, departing bobos just once — well, twice — in the small matter of populist voter revolts they failed to detect that were fueled by a mass desire to pitchfork them.

Now that it’s happened for a second time, and as treasured tenets of Bobo life like the New York Times wedding announcement page, white shoe law firms, and the Ivy Leagues are under real assault, elites realize they need help. Throwing a “mass civic uprising” isn’t like a Park Avenue cocktail party. You need lots of guests. Like, millions! So serious is he about the need to get this done that Brooks is doing the work, realizing middle America will need first to be talked out of shooting them into space or burning them in a televised auto-de-fe before they’ll sign up, because as he points out, “this is not just defending the establishment.” It’s also something else! But mostly defending the establishment. But that’s good. Really! I’m pretty sure!

Brooks published, “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal” on Friday, triggering an avalanche of weekend commentary that wanted to be supportive, but couldn’t quite because of the author. Daily Kos joked that you know the moment is dire when “Vanilla David Brooks is calling for an uprising.” Salon proclaimed, “The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?” declaring an “upside-down America” in which “David Brooks calls for revolution while Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom grovel.” Jezebel went with “Centrist ‘NYT’ Columnist Calls for ‘National Uprising,’ Making Gavin Newsom Look Like a Weak Baby,” over a subhead, “Barf Bag: It’s a cold day in hell when David Brooks seems more radical than the governor of California.”

Even the most virulent anti-Trump outlets were cowed by Brooks’s past writing. A thesis of Bobos was the countercultural shell of the new establishment made rebellion unnecessary. The post-sixties corporate culture commoditized everything, making every impulse so fully explorable that it wasn’t necessary to smash things, or even cheat. “Bobos do more than merely moralize what was once subversive. They are meritocrats through and through,” he wrote. “They don’t just enjoy orgasms; they achieve orgasm. Sex in this literature is like college; it’s described as a continual regimen of self-improvement and self-expansion. It’s amazing how many sex workshops, seminars, institutes, and academies there are… Lady Chatterley’s lover becomes Lady Chatterley’s empowerment counselor.”

In the world of Bobos, the aristocrats were “wearing Timberland boots with their suits, a signal that they are still rebelling against the money culture. Their taste in ties and socks will tend toward the ironic; you might see one wearing a tie adorned with the logo of a local sanitation department, a garbage truck driving over a rainbow.” This idea of the appearance of ironic rebellion stifling the real thing was compelling to many (see below) for a long time. It seemed foolproof until the arrival of Trump, whose followers were not mollified by Timberland boots with suits, funny socks, or the political version of a sex seminar. The movement didn’t go away, getting to the White House not once but two times! Brooks, used to sitting inside the establishment and having the ability to ask the maître d’ to remove undesirables, has been reduced to asking for outside help:

So far, each sector Trump has assaulted has responded independently — the law firms seek to protect themselves, the universities, separately, try to do the same. Yes, a group of firms banded together in support of the firm Perkins Coie, but in other cases it’s individual law firms trying to secure their separate peace with Trump. Yes, Harvard eventually drew a line in the sand, but Columbia cut a deal. This is a disastrous strategy that ensures that Trump will trample on one victim after another. He divides and conquers.

Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.

What do you do when you need more than eighteen key people? If you need a crowd? In the piece he notes sadly that the “only real hint” of organized resistance has been “the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” but what self-respecting ex-establishment figure has faith in the earnest left? The moment requires people of quality:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

It’s genuinely touching to see Brooks, the AFLAC duck of elitism, a man who wrote an actual book on being a snob, forced to consider the question of raising mass support. Adding to the pathos is the fact that it’s mere months after this same coalition of academics, lawyers, “nonprofits,” and scientists tried and failed at throwing up every legal and illegal obstacle to Trump’s election. In other words, “civic uprising” flopped when the folks in whom Brooks places faith held every lever of authority. Now they’re going to lead a grassroots revolt?

It won’t be just any kind of revolt. Brooks ends with a curious homage:

I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Brooks of course is a curious choice to ape leftist revolutionary rhetoric, having spent his life arguing against it. Marx and Lenin sleep in a bunkbed in the “too ludicrous to be considered” wing of his brain, as evidenced by pieces like “The Revolution Lives!” (in which he argued Iran’s leaders were too full of revolutionary fervor to be trusted) or “My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon,” in which feeling “as if I were talking with Leon Trotsky in the years before the Russian Revolution” is the unsettling part.

Either way, “The establishment has nothing to lose but its chains!” has to be one of the great endings in the history of the Times op-ed page, especially considering how the piece started. The irony of seeing this particular writer make that journey is also incredible, but you have to have lived through the progression to see it.

Kurt Andersen, a writer I grew up adoring, connected immediately with the Bobo book when it came out in 2000. This confused me at the time because I thought his brilliant Spy magazine was a vicious send-up of such people. Apparently not. Andersen penned a slobberous Times review of Bobos in Paradise in which he recalled toying with Marxism before moving to neoliberalism at Harvard, where sociologist Daniel Bell gave a prescient seminar.

The post-industrial future, he was told, would belong to a “new class” of “symbol manipulators, Brie-eating, wine-sipping lawyers and journalists and creative directors, high-end hard-working quasi bohemians, hedonistic meritocrats, people like us.” In Andersen’s cheery future, the symbol of American power would be more Harvard Square than Hoover Dam:

Indeed, Bell’s vision suggested that Harvard Square was a prototype for the new age — that, soon, simulacra of our smug, twee neighborhood would be concocted all over America, and thus the universal signifiers of upscale would be ochre-walled coffeehouses serving labor-intensive European coffees, Marimekkoesque shops selling haute-design everything, huge bookstores with unimaginably vast magazine racks and old brick warehouses-cum-shopping malls patronized by computer-fluent young adults wearing chinos and bluejeans.

Andersen noted defining changes took place in 1975-1976, when “Jann Wenner moved Rolling Stone from a hippie dump in San Francisco to a fancy building in midtown Manhattan.” Years later, when I went to work in that fancy building, I recalled Andersen’s review, which gave breathless praise to elites who “spend their lives selling yet worry about selling out” and are “affluent yet opposed to materialism.” To Kurt Andersen, to Graydon Carter, to David Brooks even, people like Steve Jobs, my ex-boss Wenner, and Clinton represented aristocratic perfection: the rebel in power.

A quarter of a century later, history not only isn’t over, we have more of it every week than we know what to do with. Harvard Square, that “prototype for the new age,” is a besieged castle, behind which Bobos are experiencing something opposite to paradise. Kurt Andersen, thirty years from being funny, yukked on BlueSky that a “second-wave fascism” to follow the first of Céline and Ezra Pound would come when “Walter Kirn writes another novel.” He’s become what he used to satirize, not realizing it.

As for Brooks, he made news a few years ago by complaining about a $78 bill at the excellent Smoke House Barbecue at Newark Airport, neglecting to mention that 80% of his tab came from the bar. Apparently this is what he meant by making life “interesting, diverse and edifying” everywhere people of his set went. Of course the Brooks post became Internet legend and of course the restaurant responded by offering a “Brooks special,” a “burger, fries and a double shot of whiskey for $17.78.”

Maybe it will be time for a “civic uprising” sometime soon, but advice to future elites: make sure to use some of your metis to remember that there is no such thing as a non-aristocratic aristocrat. When things go bad in the real world, neither boots, socks, nor a ponytail will dull public anger, at all. Pretending to not be an asshole is a surefire route to being taken for one, a tough position to be in when you suddenly need a crowd.