His 2000 book Bobos in Paradise heralded the rise of a new upper class that mixed ’60s-style liberalism with ’80s-style conspicuous consumption celebrated by reviewers, it quickly became a best-seller. IT’S HARD, IN FACT, to think of many American thinkers more influential at this moment than Brooks. (Philadelphia was fifth nationally.)īrooks could be dismissed as little more than a snarky punch-line artist, except that he postures as a public intellectual - and has been received as one. “Very few of us,” Brooks wrote of his fellow Blue Americans, “could name even five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country.” He might want to take his name-recognition test to the streets of the 2002 NASCAR Winston Cup Series’s highest-rated television markets - three of the top five were in Blue states. Among the study’s criteria was the presence of bookstores and libraries 20 of the 30 most literate cities were in Red states. A 2003 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America’s most literate cities doesn’t necessarily agree. “We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books,” Brooks asserted. “When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers we have illegal aliens.” Actually, six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red. “Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors,” Brooks wrote.
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“Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas.” Rose’s standard PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code - Beverly Hills, 90210 - covered in little red dots that each represent one QVC customer address, to debunk “the myth that they’re all little old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day.” “I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country,” says Doug Rose, the network’s vice president of merchandising and brand development. That’s probably not, however, QVC country. According to sales data, one of Goodwin’s strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. Through his articles, a best-selling book, and now a twice-a-week column in what is arguably journalism’s most prized locale, the New York Times op-ed page, Brooks has become a must-read, charming us into seeing events in the news through his worldview. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing.”īrooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called “status detail,” those telling symbols - the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles - that immediately fix a person in place, time and class.
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In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. “I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is,” Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across “the Meatloaf Line from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.” Franklin County was a place where “no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings … people don’t complain that Woody Allen isn’t as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny,” he wrote.
To see the vast nation whose condition he diagnosed, Brooks compared two counties: Maryland’s Montgomery (Blue), where he himself lives, and Pennsylvania’s Franklin (a Red county in a Blue state).
A few years ago, journalist David Brooks wrote a celebrated article for the Atlantic Monthly, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” in which he examined the country’s cultural split in the aftermath of the 2000 election, contrasting the red states that went for Bush and the blue ones for Gore.
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