A dozen years back Goodman David Brooks entered the cultural pantheon through an oddly incisive book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The title charmed as Brooks asserted that a new generation of elites was upon us. Living well – not political clash – was the best revenge. What Brooks recognized and what Mitt Romney missed was that aesthetics mattered as much as economic interest in establishing political culture.

I think of Bobos when I assay the broadsheet of Brooks’ current employer, The New York Times. One can count on the editorials of the Times to embrace the most progressive respectable position: the stance of the established Statist elite. And one can count on the adverts in the Times to inspire the warm glow of Veblenian pecuniary emulation. I think of Bobos, too, when I peruse the New Yorker or even such ostensibly apolitical, but fully progressive, sources such as Time Out New York (or, from my prairie perch, Time Out Chicago).

These journals are committed to the goals of redistribution of income, environmental sustainability and ecological responsibility, and rabid, compulsive consumption capitalism. Perhaps there is no inherent contradiction between caring about people and caressing things, but the sections of the paper rarely seem as one. Recently in the Sunday Review, the Times’ editorialists promoted more regulations on health care and financial services, a more welcoming immigration policy with support for new arrivals, and one of their columnists, Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahmbo’s brother, Ezbo) is in high dudgeon about companies providing the wrong snacks for their employees (“an additional serving of potato chips every day led to a 1.69-pound weight increase over four years”). The mandarins of the Times did not comment on sea levels or climate change, but wait.

Along with these exhortations, the Times also delivered a posh 156 page Style Magazine: a testimonial to Ferragamo, the Ritz, and the Caymans. The best of living if living well is the best of life. The two sections as juxtaposed represent the Bobo paradox: a commitment to increased state involvement to achieve justice and collective betterment and a commitment to free-market consumption to achieve status recognition and personal desire.

Yet, re-reading Bobos in Paradise inspires the belief that, like any anodyne composite, social commentary should come with an expiration date. Following Calvin Trillin’s mordant observation of the shelf life of new books, this expiration date is likely to fall somewhere between milk and yogurt. Brooks recognizes the cultural changes among his elites (he embraces his inner and outer Bobo). The desire for omnivorous perfection trumps all. This will lead, he believes, to a twenty-first century political age in which the bohemian 1960s merge with the bourgeois 1980s in a triumph of triangulation. This makes David Brooks all smiley-face. He proclaims that successful politicians “seek a Third Way beyond the old categories of left and right. They march under reconciling banners such as compassionate conservatism, practical idealism, smart growth, prosperity with a purpose” (p. 256). He avers, “Thanks in large part to the influence of the Bobo establishment, we are living in an era of relative social peace. The political parties, at least at the top, have drifted toward the center. For the first time since the 1950s, it is possible to say that there aren’t huge ideological differences between the parties . . . Bobos have begun to create a set of standards and mores that work in the new century. It’s good to live in a Bobo world . . . . they have the ability to go down in history as the class that led America into another golden age .”(p. 268, 270, 273)

How Y2K; how September 10^th. Brooks trips on the prognosticator’s fallacy: what emerges today, will grow in the future. But in 2012 American politics the third way has been overtaken by ways one and two. As our politics divides and fragments, the culture of consumption proceeds apace.

The Bobos have seen their trust erode and trust funds bounce back. This ideological strain has taken root, most dramatically among progressives, who, according to research, are less given to personal charity than their compeers. (For conservatives consumption poses no moral challenge and tithing is Godly). For Bobo progressives enforced compassion and unfettered consumption are yoked virtues. Both for more established progressives (the Times and the New Yorker) or for aspiring ones (Time Out magazines), the front of the book and the back of the book operate in an uncomfortable, but economically necessary, synergy. The encomiums to buy evermore are often enough at odds with the editorial content, but the editorials depend on the slickly depicted products, both those presented in paid advertising and those aspiration goods promoted by journalists. That the contradiction is unspoken is essential to its power.

As we gaze from the bloodied political fields of 2010 and 2012, we chortle at Brooks’ belief in a moment in which those like him, whether Democrats or Republicans, will merrily rule without much concern of the consent of the governed. Elites often believe that their path – the first way, the third way, or the highway – is inevitable. But elites should not sleep well when their power ignores the unwashed. These masses pressure their representatives to stand firm and even elect their favored tribunes, both the Occupiers, not (yet?) invested in Times Style conspicuous consumption and the Tea Party whose consumption tastes are more Wal-Mart than Patek Philippe. Brooks spies an emerging golden age of elite consensus: how’s that workin’ out for you?

In Israel, for over three weeks, there have been demonstrations initiated by young people. They were first directed against the high cost of living, but they seem to be developing into something much larger, a movement for a systematic social change, addressing  the growing disparities between rich and poor and the difficulty of living well, concerned about issues of social security and the deterioration in the provision of education and health care. What had begun with a consumer uprising against the high prices of cottage cheese over a month ago, leading to a boycott on dairy products (since in Israel they operate as a cartel, not open for competition), appears to be  the beginning of what Rosa Luxemburg describes as ”an exercise in democratic action.” I observe the exercise as an Israeli living in Berlin, basing my commentary on newspapers, blog posts and conversations with friends at home.

The “cottage cheese revolt” is no trivial or accidental thing. Israeli dinner tables usually contain this staple, together with a salad. The most popular cottage cheese, Tnuva, has an illustrated home on its package and a well known advertising trope: “the cheese with the home.” Fighting for home is not only for affordable housing or the cost of living. The protesters also talk about the quick decline in the freedom of speech and of the Israeli democratic system under the current government.  However, the demonstrators delay, for the time being, what they see as “political demands” for possible negotiation with the government.  They fear this would compromise the call for “social justice,” and more immediately, could scare off some of the right-of-center demonstrators. According to Ha’Aretz today (August 2), “a document setting out the demands of the tent protesters in the areas of housing, welfare, education, health and economic policy is being drawn up by the movement’s leaders.”

The tent city in Tel Aviv was started by a twenty five year old, Daphne Leef,  who demonstrated against the cost of housing and living on Rothschild Boulevard, calling on her Facebook friends to join her. These demonstrations spread and have been non-violent (she compared them to Woodstock), the first massively successful demonstrations in Israel not connected to the military, wars or specific laws. I would be happy to hear more connections made between the decline in democracy and respect for human needs and the occupation, but that, apparently and unfortunately, cannot be addressed now by a generation that must declare itself “not political” in order to be listened to. Yet, ironically, the demonstrations are of profound political import.

A few of the commentators pointed to the fact that the young leading this uprising is nihilist and self-centered. For example, Eva Illouz in Ha’Aretz sees calls for social change to improve their own hedonistic consumer power, and not in solidarity with the weak and silenced groups, certainly not comparable to the social commitment seen in historical revolts in the fifties and sixties. That might have been true of the first round of the cottage cheese revolt, but it’s no longer the case. The periphery and the poor parts of Tel Aviv are as central and strong to the movement as the wealthy Tel Aviv quarter. The major labor unions, the municipal employees’ union, and the student union have all joined in the protests. The difference between the first protests,predominantly transpiring on Facebook and “at home,” in the form of an economic boycott by private individuals of a mass produced consumer good,and the later actions, in which hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets, remaining for hours of the day and night, in some cases sleeping in spaces coded as “public,” is precisely the one that Arendt illuminated in The Human Condition. In her terms ,the movement has turned from the social to the political, from concerns over “political economy” to a movement of the spontaneous action of human beings in their plurality addressing issues of common concern, Israelis not as settlers or pioneers but as citizens of a state with problems. As David Grossman said in the demonstration on Saturday, the chief problem is: “people are loyal to the state but the state is not loyal to them”. Daphne Leef stated that it is not the government but the “rules of the game” that they wish to change.

In looking at the “tent cities” protest as it has developed, one certainly does not just see the Ashkenazi leftist elite living in Tel Aviv, bragging about how expensive it is to sustain the good life they got used to. Not that that should be so damning a critique: why not live well, consume culture and have individual opportunities for growth?  Avigdor Lieberman and other conservatives called the protesters “spoiled,” perhaps meaning that it is better to not live well, that one should fight for the basics, as the settler  do in the territories, or the way that their predecessors did as young people realizing the Zionist dream.

The Zionist dream was questioned long ago first by intellectuals and minorities, including Palestinians. Now fundamental questions are being raised by a majority that needs to carry the burden for groups (the ultra orthodox) that do not work or serve in the military, in a concentrated market economy that is stable due to high taxes on the hard-working middle class, who feel crunched by the privatization of public services in the past twenty years. This “consumerist occupation” of the public space, in cities large and small all across Israel, calls all that into question in a manner that already appears irreversible.