Class clowns
David Brooks sings the praises of Republican exurbia. Thomas Frank is nostalgic for the populist politics of 19th-century Kansas. But these two wise-cracking, class-obsessed pundits have more in common than they realize.
FOR A CERTAIN TYPE of reader, there are really only two available ways of viewing American politics and society today, just two all-powerful frameworks that explain American civilization at this polarized juncture of our nation's history.
I'm referring, of course, to the work of David Brooks -- conservative New York Times op-ed columnist, former senior editor at The Weekly Standard, wisecracking promoter of the "Red State/Blue State" theory of American life, and self-described "comic sociologist" -- and that of Thomas Frank, the lefty founding editor of The Baffler magazine, contributing editor of Harper's, scourge of the commodified counterculture and the laissez-faire pseudo-populism of the New Economy, and, as it happens, merciless critic of David Brooks.
Born less than four years (but what seems a full generation) apart, Brooks, 42, and Frank, 39, both emerged from the University of Chicago -- Brooks earned his bachelor's there, Frank his doctorate -- to become keen, witty, and extravagantly wide-angled cultural critics. And both have just published ambitious new books that attempt nothing less than to explain why whole classes of Americans are the way they are today.
Brooks's "On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense" (Simon & Schuster) -- the follow-up to his highly successful "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There" (which gave us the term "bourgeois bohemians," or Bobos) -- is a sweeping survey of America's new "exurban" civilization and the "Great Dispersal" from our cities and inner suburbs that has given rise to it. Brooks attempts to describe, as he writes, "what life is really like in today's middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs," and to answer the question not only of why Americans live the way they do -- all those Grill-Buying Guys, Buzz-Cut Boys, Ubermoms, and Wireless Women with their "big-box malls, their herds of SUVs, and their exit-ramp office parks" -- but ultimately, and more importantly, in Brooks's words, "Are we as shallow as we look?" (His answer: yes and no.)
In Brooks's America, the people are almost uniformly apolitical, too busy rushing to attain the quasi-spiritual American Dream to be bothered with questions about America's role in the world, or theincreasing gap between rich and poor.
Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" (Metropolitan) -- his follow-up to the widely noted (and just as provocatively titled) "One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy" -- is a sweeping account of how America's Midwestern heartland (epitomized by his native Kansas), once the realm of Populists, Socialists, and New Dealers, has become solidly, conservatively Republican. Frank's aim is to describe the "Great Backlash" against liberalism that began in the 1960s, was harnessed by Ronald Reagan in the `80s, and culminated in the mind-boggling paradox of George W. Bush's 2000 electoral victory in some of the poorest counties in Kansas (as elsewhere in the heartland) by margins greater than 80 percent.
In other words, as Frank writes, he wants "to understand the species of derangement that has brought so many ordinary people to such a self-damaging political extreme." Brooks's Americans may be apolitical, but in Frank's middle America everyone is an ideologue.
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If these gentlemen's names are often found in close proximity it is probably because their central concerns, and their modi operandi, are so similar, yet their conclusions so different. You're apt to see their names together even more in the weeks to come, since in his new book Frank pays Brooks the compliment of a full-frontal assault -- devoting no fewer than four full pages to Brooks in his endnotes, and mounting a zealous effort to demolish Brooks's counterfactual descriptions of the Red/Blue divide.
Despite their disagreements, however, Brooks and Frank have some things in common. As their book titles suggest, these guys Think Big. They ask the Big Questions, and they offer Big Answers. They prefer the sweeping vista and the grand statement to the finely tuned argument. They're bold, they're brash -- and yes, they're funny.
Indeed, Brooks and Frank are nothing if not performers, hard-working entertainers. If Brooks is a stand-up comic (think the Catskills, think Billy Crystal) full of mocking one-liners, then Frank is a revivalist preacher of the secular sort, a barnstorming, stem-winding, high-plains Populist with a capital P. Think William Jennings Bryan. Think "The Music Man."
Yet the similarities run deeper. Both Brooks and Frank are obsessed with social class -- though their conceptions of it could hardly be more different. And despite their tendency toward caricature, both claim to be sympathetic to the class of Americans they are most concerned with: middle- and upper-middle-class exurbanites in Brooks's case, working-class and small-town Midwesterners in Frank's. "If you are, like me, a fan of American middleness," Frank writes, "Wichita is your kind of place." Brooks, too, claims to love the Americans he lampoons, calling his "the love that old companions feel, in which they enjoy jibing each other for their foibles and perhaps love the foibles best of all."
But some readers may notice a similar internal dissonance within each author's work. Brooks, the conservative, does a terrific job of insulting the people with whom he shares his politics -- all those exurbanites who vote overwhelmingly Republican. Frank does an equally great job of insulting the people he believes should share his politics -- all those working-class, born-again, gun-toting Kansans.
Which would seem to beg the question: Just who do Brooks and Frank think they're writing for? Does Frank think his book is going to convert a single conservative, working-class Kansan? Does Brooks think his exurban Ubermoms will see the humor -- and the moral instruction -- in his caricatures?
On this question, we thought it would be best to let our readers be the judge. What follows is an admittedly incomplete, biased, over-simplified, reductive, and unconscionably unfair distillation of the essence of Brooks's and Frank's new books. You can decide, Dear Reader, whether they are talking to you or about you, laughing with you or at you.
Wen Stephenson is deputy editor of Ideas. 