Discussion Main / BourgeoisBohemian

Took these out of Literature because they don't seem to belong there. They're not examples of the trope being used in fiction, but discussions of the purported phenomenon in real life. They seem to belong more in a Real Life section, but this page has been dubbed a "no real life" page, so there doesn't seem to be a good category for them:

• New York Times columnist and PBS/NPR commentator David Brooks coined the term "Bourgeois Bohemian" in his 2000 nonfiction book Bobos in Paradise. He admits in the book's introduction that he himself probably counts as one.
• Discussed and critiqued in the non-fiction book The Rebel Sell as part of the shifting values of the political left from old-school socialism to counterculture hipsterism, and how these values have fed the consumer culture they claim to resent.
• Similarly discussed in Thomas Frank's 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. He charges that many of the U.S. political class's wealthy leftists are not really leftists at all; they are opportunists who feign politically correct attitudes in order to appeal to more upscale (and ostensibly more sophisticated) urban and suburban voters in the "blue states". Conversely, those elites who live in the "red states" generally prefer to act like right-wing culture warriors in order to court the more downscale (and generally more traditionalist) constituents of America's conservative coalition. Regardless of ideology, Frank proposes, each of these groups of political insiders care only about maintaining the status quo and have no problem with screwing the most economically vulnerable of their respective constituencies.

• Michael Moore has been accused of this. How true it may be is up to the individual, as always.

Examples Are Not Arguable