THE PARADOX OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust.

By John B. Judis. Pantheon. 306 pp. $26

BOBOS IN PARADISE: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

By David Brooks. Simon & Schuster. 284 pp. $25

Their books are vastly different, and Judis writes for liberal journals while Brooks writes for conservative ones, but both authors make the same complaint: American political life today lacks a public-spirited elite akin to John McCloy, Averell Harriman, and the other powerful figures who served the national interest in World War II and its aftermath.

The absence of a disinterested elite lies at the center of Judis’s case. A senior editor at the New Republic, Judis criticizes the populist and Marxist view that American democracy is a sham, its strings pulled not by voters or parties or interest groups but by a power elite or ruling class. In fact, he argues, if you look at the periods since 1900 when democracy has expanded, you find active voters, active parties, active interests, and an active (albeit disinterested) elite. In this sense, an elite is crucial to democracy—the paradox of the book’s title. Today, though, the disinterested elite has given way to interested elites, represented by organizations such as the Business Roundtable and the Democratic Leadership Council.

For Brooks, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, the absence of a disinterested elite is a corollary. His main point is this: College-educated members of the baby boom generation have fused what used to be contending sets of values, the bohemian and the bourgeois, chiefly by blending the liberationist cultural values of the 1960s with the liberationist economic values of the 1980s. This fusion has created a new and influential stratum, the bourgeois bohemians, or "Bobos": the stockbroker who sounds like a hippie, the hippie who sounds like a stockbroker. Since this fusion gives them such satisfying private and professional lives, Bobos tend to lack the zeal to venture into national public life. "The fear is that America will decline not because it overstretches," writes Brooks, "but because it enervates as its leading citizens decide that the pleasures of an oversized kitchen are more satisfying than the conflicts and challenges of patriotic service."

Daniel Bell famously observed that the corporation wants its employees "to work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification," even as the company’s products and advertisements "promote pleasure, instant joy, relaxing, and letting go." One can’t do both, Bell maintained—but Bobos pull it off, according to Brooks. They work hard and play hard at the same time by working at play (climbing mountains, hiking the wilds) and playing at work (dressing casually in offices that evoke treehouses). Brooks doesn’t take himself seriously—he describes his method as comic sociology—but his book is just as incisive as Judis’s.

A respectful question for both authors: On the broad cluster of issues that we group under the rubric of multiculturalism, there is an elite consensus whose content meets a prima facie test of disinterestedness. Every elite white heterosexual male who endorses wider opportunity for those who are not elite, not white, not heterosexual, or not male holds a disinterested view. Is it possible that what’s new is not the absence of a disinterested elite, but the presence of a disinterested elite whose agenda differs from its predecessors’ and can be pursued by means other than government service?

—Ralph Whitehead, Jr.