Here’s David Brooks, writing in Bobos in Paradise, his book on upscale “bourgeois bohemians,” which was published in the spring of 2000:

Thanks in large part to the influence of the Bobo establishment, we are living in an era of relative social peace....[T]he college campuses are not aflame with angry protests. Intellectual life is diverse, but you wouldn’t say that radicalism of the left or right is exactly on the march. Passions are muted.

Here’s Brooks now, writing in a recent issue of The Atlantic, as quoted at National Review Online:

What we are looking at here is human nature. People want to be around others who are roughly like themselves. That's called community. It probably would be psychologically difficult for most Brown professors to share an office with someone who was pro-life, a member of the National Rifle Association, or an evangelical Christian. It's likely that hiring committees would subtly -- even unconsciously -- screen out any such people they encountered. Republicans and evangelical Christians have sensed that they are not welcome at places like Brown, so they don't even consider working there. In fact, any registered Republican who contemplates a career in academia these days is both a hero and a fool.

You see the difference. This is why I’m not pleased that Brooks will soon be a regular op-ed columnist in The New York Times. The Brooks of the late Clinton era may have had doubts about certain characteristics of his Bobos, but he thought they’d brought many good things to American life, even though so many of them were liberals (and many had been left-wing radicals). Now, by contrast, he sees a world out of balance, a world in which flabby, effete coastal moral relativists lord it over upright real Americans with a clear, God-given sense of right and wrong. In other words, he holds a lot of us in utter contempt -- and he’ll be using The New York Times to tell the world why. Why should we pay him to insult us when readers of the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times don’t have to do anything of the kind?