"Bobos in Paradise" by David Brooks

Bobos is the term that author David Brooks uses to label the new rising upper class of today's society. Bobos are the creation of two merging social groups; the bourgeois and the bohemians. There has been a traditional clash between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. "The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, the …

…such spirituality that "somehow it is rigor without submission" and "orthodoxy without obedience." Such thorough refusal to submit and to obey is perhaps the best example of an unrecognized tension between the bohemian and the bourgeois in the Bobo world. It is also evidence that perhaps Brooks' declaration of reconciliation is too hastily made. The bobos appear to be really bohemians with a simulacrum of the bourgeois rather than a genuine reconciliation of the two.