old classical education,” a “culture much wider” than that of a single profession. The result, Wilson said, was a group of national leaders thoroughly absorbed in the “tradition of political idealism and public conscience which had presided
It’s an attractive enough ideal, this picture of Brahmin priests officiating in the temple of republican virtue. You can almost see Wilson’s silver-haired senators stepping out of a Benjamin West painting, civic magi capable of defusing a diplomatic crisis by quoting a couple of lines of Horace. This ideal-of high-minded patriots with a touch of class-continues to enchant. David Brooks, in his book Bobos in Paradise, an analysis of America’s new upper class, criticizes members of the contemporary elite (whom Brooks calls bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos) for failing to live up to the old standards, refusing to “assume a leadership role,” being slow 5555S are unable to heed the trumpet notes of public duty. Their failure to enter the “public arena,” Brooks argues, has “left a gaping hole in public life.” “Filling this hole,” he says, “means doing what the postwar ruling class did. It means developing a public service ethos, concluding, as peo ple like Dean Acheson, George C. Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower did, that of those who are blessed much is expect’ MIC SSSA
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