Bobos came out in the era of the "Stuff White People Like" website. It was certainly a moment, and Brooks captured it—not the reality, on the ground, but a way to look at things that made sense for people in it.
Perhaps it resonated because most of Brooks' facts were simply invented.
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2004/04/01/david-brooks-booboos-in-paradise/ — worth a read not just for the careful "oh wait, your telling anecdote is literally not true, the opposite is true", but for Brooks' attempt to intimidate the journalist. 2004 was the end of a long era where you could just make stuff up.
Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books? They're not scholarship ("big synthetic theory inducted from data"); they're not journalism ("just the facts"). They seem to be GPT-3 prompts avant la lettre, where the commentariat is GPT-3. Put in a Brooks line, and out comes a million comments.
I'm guessing the consumer tastes stuff may be the focus of the five-sixths of the book Scott is ambivalent about reviewing? In retrospect, it seems obvious that the supposed differences in consumer tastes (liberals like arugula and lattes!) Brooks wrote about were shallow attempts to describe college/non-college and urban/rural cultural divides.
"Stuff White People Like" postdates Brooks' book by almost a decade. The central conceit of "Stuff White People like" is stereotyping all white people with the traits associated with particular subcultures of affluent, educated, mostly liberal and urban whites in the same way that other racial categories get stereotyped with the traits of particular subcultures. The overlap comes from the fact that they're both doing "avocado toast" bits. You can forgive the latter more than the former because the author is joking. That his stereotypes are funny, but flimsy if you treat them seriously is the point, whereas Brooks is serious even when his stereotypes don't actually hold up in reality.
"Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books?"
Can you elaborate? The point of these books for the authors is at least partially "to make money." Do you mean, why do people READ these books? In the case of Class, the answer is: Because it was funny.
Bobos came out in the era of the "Stuff White People Like" website. It was certainly a moment, and Brooks captured it—not the reality, on the ground, but a way to look at things that made sense for people in it.
Perhaps it resonated because most of Brooks' facts were simply invented.
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2004/04/01/david-brooks-booboos-in-paradise/ — worth a read not just for the careful "oh wait, your telling anecdote is literally not true, the opposite is true", but for Brooks' attempt to intimidate the journalist. 2004 was the end of a long era where you could just make stuff up.
Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books? They're not scholarship ("big synthetic theory inducted from data"); they're not journalism ("just the facts"). They seem to be GPT-3 prompts avant la lettre, where the commentariat is GPT-3. Put in a Brooks line, and out comes a million comments.
Someone should write that phenomenon up.
I'm guessing the consumer tastes stuff may be the focus of the five-sixths of the book Scott is ambivalent about reviewing? In retrospect, it seems obvious that the supposed differences in consumer tastes (liberals like arugula and lattes!) Brooks wrote about were shallow attempts to describe college/non-college and urban/rural cultural divides.
Good catch, thank you for sharing.
Steven Colbert had a word for this - "truthiness." For things that feel true in the gut regardless of if they're actually true.
"Stuff White People Like" postdates Brooks' book by almost a decade. The central conceit of "Stuff White People like" is stereotyping all white people with the traits associated with particular subcultures of affluent, educated, mostly liberal and urban whites in the same way that other racial categories get stereotyped with the traits of particular subcultures. The overlap comes from the fact that they're both doing "avocado toast" bits. You can forgive the latter more than the former because the author is joking. That his stereotypes are funny, but flimsy if you treat them seriously is the point, whereas Brooks is serious even when his stereotypes don't actually hold up in reality.
"Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books?"
Can you elaborate? The point of these books for the authors is at least partially "to make money." Do you mean, why do people READ these books? In the case of Class, the answer is: Because it was funny.
“Stuff white people like” was also pretty funny if you were there at the time. But somehow people want Brooks to be more than a clown.