Brad DeLong:
An Infantile Disorder Timothy Noah has fallen in love with Barbara Ehrenreich:
Chatterbox: ...Barbara Ehrenreich has established herself as the Times's best columnist. This is, of course, a snap judgment, but Ehrenreich has long been one of the most eloquent voices on the left, which, as distinct from liberalism, has not had much access to the mainstream press for many years. The Bush administration has revitalized the left, making it necessary for the rest of us—liberals like Chatterbox as well as conservatives—to keep abreast of what it's saying.... The Times op-ed page desperately needs her mature voice, her sharp mind, and the challenge her ideas pose to the common wisdom...
I say, "God, no!" and "PUH-LEEZE!!"
It may be because Barbara Ehrenreich is a typical voice of the American left that it will in all probability be a waste of ink and paper to put her on the Times op-ed page, but a waste of ink and paper it will most likely be.
I agree that Barbara Ehrenreich is a very smart and graceful writer, a keen analyst of American culture and society--she is worth, say, ten of David Brooks. But her brand of left-wing politics is an infantile disorder. Left-wing politics is, for her, primarily a means of self-expression. The point is not to actually do anything to make the United States or the world a better place--not to actually help people make better lives for themselves by improving the enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act or to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit or to raise the minimum wage or to improve Medicaid coverage.
The point, by contrast, is to assume an appropriate oppositional stance, and to feel good about oneself. Witness her argument that what upper and upper-middle class American women should do is to fire their nannies in order to avoid their children "growing up with the world's class and racial hierarchies stamped on their emerging little world views"--thus depriving relatively poor women of jobs and opportunities they found it worthwhile to grasp. If you genuinely worry, as you should, about the wages and working conditions of relatively poor women today, your first action item should not be to urge others to decrease demand for their labor.
But let's let Barbara Ehrenreich speak for herself, in her command to all correctly-thinking people to vote for Ralph Nader that she made four years ago:
Barbara Ehrenreich (2000), "Vote for Nader!" The Nation (August 21-8), p. 33:
It must be some playful new postmodernist form of politics: First you spend years ranting about the plutocracy that has supplanted American democracy and is rapidly devouring the planet. You complain about the growing numbers of Americans who can't afford healthcare or housing; you rant about the inadequacy of wages and the arrogance of the corporate overclass. then, just as large numbers of people start tuning in and even getting excited to the point of supporting the one presidential candidate who's making the exact same points you've been trying to get across all this time--you whip around and shout, "Only kidding, folks. Get out there and vote for Gore!"
full: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001173.html
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