It wasn’t just that our systems of rewards and punishments were completely different. We certainly did not get what made them tick. And while they rightly considered many of us unforgivably arrogant and condescending, they also simply didn’t get what made us tick. I learned early on that much of America disliked Princetonians by default. Ronald Reagan carried New Jersey twice, with ease, but in Princeton his appeal was just as hard to understand as the appeal of a Z28. What was cool was being smart, getting accepted to an excellent college, and having the kind of experiences that made for interesting stories. Having a muscle car wasn’t going to bring us status or get us girlfriends, and wasn’t even considered cool. This was incomprehensible to the people I went to school with who would much sooner spend that money on a jaunt across Europe or a trip to Nepal. They might work a summer job and take all the money to buy a Camaro. All I had to do to figure that out was to travel one town over to play a baseball game and interact with the kids there. I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s, and it wasn’t a typical experience. To a degree, I understand that David Brooks’s myopia is a product of his upbringing and that this isn’t very unusual.
