by James A. Bacon
David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, serves up a brilliant update to his 2000 classic, “Bobos in Paradise,” in which he explores the nature of America’s new ruling class. Borrowing terminology from Jonathan Rauch, he introduces the concept of the epistemic regime — “the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true.”
The epistemic regime, he writes:
possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.
Thank you, David Brooks, for articulating ideas I have been groping to define in Bacon’s Rebellion.
The members of the epistemic regime control the dominant cultural institutions of our society — the universities, the media, Hollywood, the publishing houses, the foundations and activist groups, the museums, the social media titans, and, recently, the public schools. They literally decide “what is true” — at least they purport to. They drive the dominant narratives of our era, climate change and systemic racism foremost among them, but always in such a way as to reinforce their own status and economic standing.
Like every other ruling class in history, America’s new ruling class not only asserts its cultural dominance, it protects its economic privilege. As Brooks writes in revising his previous judgments about the “bobos” (bohemian bourgeoisie) who populate the epistemic regime:
I underestimated the way the creative class would successfully raise barriers around itself to protect its economic privilege—not just through schooling, but through zoning regulations that keep home values high, professional-certification structures that keep doctors’ and lawyers’ incomes high while blocking competition from nurses and paralegals, and more. And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades, the number of working-class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media, and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling.
Inevitably, the rise of the new ruling class has consequences.
“When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing,” Brooks says, “they are going to react badly — and they have. … The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls.”
In rejecting that control, populists across the Western world, including Trump voters, often invent their own realities which can veer into the realm of the absurd, such as the birtherism, QAnon and the-election-was-stolen conspiracies. In another strain of cultural rebellion, a group that Brooks describes as “boubours” — the boorish bourgeoisie — flout the new rules of taste and political correctness.
(I would describe Bacon’s Rebellion and its contributors as reality-based rebels against the new cultural hegemony and the epistemic regime.)
Brooks is one of the most acute observers of sociology and culture in America, and he has it mostly right. This post offers no more than a taste of his essay. If you’re looking for a meta-narrative to understand the shifting constellation of political and cultural forces at work today, “How the Bobos Broke America” is a good place to start.
