"Throw an egg from a Pullman," newspaper columnist and social critic H. L. Mencken famously noted in the 1920s, "and you're bound to hit a fundamentalist." Were David Brooks to update Mencken's observation for today, it might go something like "Toss a double mocha latte from an SUV, and you're bound to hit a Bobo." But just who are these curious new creatures that Brooks describes in his best-selling Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks coined the neologism "bobos" as shorthand for "bourgeois bohemians." And these Bobos have emerged, he informs us, as the dominant social class in America.
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William Inboden is a special advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom.
Issue: "Modern Reformation Turns Ten" Jan./Feb. 2002 Vol. 11 No. 1 Page number(s): 35-37
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