Collection: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers

Overview
Tom Wolfe pairs two of his most striking long-form pieces to create an acidic portrait of late-1960s American culture. Both essays deploy the hallmarks of New Journalism, crisp scene-setting, vivid description, and an almost anthropological attention to social rituals, to expose how status, sentiment and spectacle shape political life. The writing is energetic, often mocking, and deliberately theatrical; humor and moral judgment are woven into close observational reporting.
The collection presents contrasting arenas where power is staged: the living rooms of the rich and the conference rooms and community meetings where government and activists negotiate. Wolfe's aim is not merely to lampoon individuals but to trace how manners, media and money create predictable, performative outcomes in the era's racial and political conflicts.

"Radical Chic"
"Radical Chic" zeroes in on a single social event that becomes emblematic. A star-studded fundraiser, hosted by a famous musician for a radical group, serves as Wolfe's microscope for examining the collision of liberal philanthropy and revolutionary aesthetics. The scene is described with baroque precision: the guests' clothing, their nervous liberal conscience, the commodified exoticism of the radicals as fashionable accessory. Wolfe drains the veneer of good intentions by showing how the dinner functions as a theatre of status, a way for the wealthy to indulge a sense of moral daring without altering their lives.
The piece is sharpest when it dissects social codes, the cocktail-party niceties, the ritualized awkwardness, the private assumptions that let privileged hosts believe they can sympathize with violence and radicalism as if it were a trendy cause. Humor and contempt combine to show how charity and chicness can masquerade as political commitment, revealing the gulf between symbolic gestures and structural change.

"Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers"
"Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers" shifts the focus to the machinery of urban politics and public relations. Wolfe tracks the interaction between community activists and the city officials and agency representatives who serve as buffers, "flak-catchers", for bureaucracies. He observes how displays of outrage, theatrical performances of grievance and carefully rehearsed rituals are used strategically by community leaders to extract resources and concessions from officials anxious to avoid scandal or appear compassionate. The term "mau-mauing" becomes a metaphor for wielding moral theater as leverage.
Wolfe treats these confrontations as a kind of performance art with its own rules, hierarchies and technicians. The essay maps how empathy can be weaponized and packaged, how officials learn to wear the marks of contrition, and how the spectacle of conflict often substitutes for meaningful problem-solving. The result is a portrait of a civic culture in which emotion, publicity and bureaucratic self-preservation rewrite the terms of democratic negotiation.

Style and Themes
Both essays are united by Wolfe's fascination with social theater and his conviction that surface behavior reveals deep social dynamics. Class posture, fashionable morality and the commodification of outrage are recurring motifs, as is the idea that image management and media-savvy performance have become central currencies in modern public life. Wolfe's satire targets not just individuals but the systems that make certain behaviors productive, predictable and profitable.
Stylistically, the work blends sharp reportage with flamboyant rhetorical devices: rapid-fire detail, ironic similes, and a voice that alternates between amused anthropologist and scolding moralist. The collection sparked debate because its caricatures could feel cruel, but it also forced readers to confront uncomfortable truths about performative liberalism and the theater of politics. Its influence remains as a document of an era and as an interrogation of how spectacle continues to mediate power.