Barbara Ehrenreich is a temp op-ed columnist for the NYTimes. In this fine piece, Ehrenreich takes on the right-wing canard of the liberal elite made popular by Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, and their ilk. The concept has been raised to an art form by Karl Rove. Poppy Bush went into a K-Mart store during the '92 campaign and asked a checkout clerk what she was doing with the scanner. Talk about elite! W goes to a Nascar race and demonstrates that he is one of the boys. No elitist is W down on the ranch in Crawford doing his Dutch imitation with a Poulan chain saw. I pity W for the month of July. The tag team of Cobra/Cottonmouth will slap him silly. If this is (fair & balanced) anticipation, so be it.
Dude, Where's That Elite?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
You can call Michael Moore all kinds of things — loudmouthed, obnoxious and self-promoting, for example. The anorexic Ralph Nader, in what must be an all-time low for left-wing invective, has even called him fat. The one thing you cannot call him, though, is a member of the "liberal elite."
Sure, he's made a ton of money from his best sellers and award-winning documentaries. But no one can miss the fact that he's a genuine son of the U.S. working class — of a Flint autoworker, in fact — because it's built right into his "branding," along with flannel shirts and baseball caps.
My point is not to defend Moore, who — with a platoon of bodyguards and a legal team starring Mario Cuomo — hardly needs any muscle from me. I just think it's time to retire the "liberal elite" label, which, for the past 25 years, has been deployed to denounce anyone to the left of Colin Powell. Thus, last winter, the ultra-elite right-wing Club for Growth dismissed followers of Howard Dean as a "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show." I've experienced it myself: speak up for the downtrodden, and someone is sure to accuse you of being a member of the class that's doing the trodding.
The notion of a sinister, pseudocompassionate liberal elite has been rebutted, most recently in Thomas Frank's brilliant new book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?," which says the aim is "to cast the Democrats as the party of a wealthy, pampered, arrogant elite that lives as far as it can from real Americans, and to represent Republicanism as the faith of the hard-working common people of the heartland, an expression of their unpretentious, all-American ways, just like country music and Nascar."
Like the notion of social class itself, the idea of a liberal elite originated on the left, among early 20th-century anarchists and Trotskyites who noted, correctly, that the Soviet Union was spawning a "new class" of power-mad bureaucrats. The Trotskyites brought this theory along with them when they mutated into neocons in the 60's, and it was perhaps their most precious contribution to the emerging American right. Backed up by the concept of a "liberal elite," right-wingers could crony around with their corporate patrons in luxuriously appointed think tanks and boardrooms — all the while purporting to represent the average overworked Joe.
Beyond that, the idea of a liberal elite nourishes the right's perpetual delusion that it is a tiny band of patriots bravely battling an evil power structure. Note how richly the E-word embellishes the screeds of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and their co-ideologues, as in books subtitled "Rescuing American from the Media Elite," "How Elites from Hollywood, Politics and the U.N. Are Subverting America," and so on. Republican right-wingers may control the White House, both houses of Congress and a good chunk of the Supreme Court, but they still enjoy portraying themselves as Davids up against a cosmopolitan-swilling, corgi-owning Goliath.
Yes, there are some genuinely rich folks on the left — Barbra Streisand, Arianna Huffington, George Soros — and for all I know, some of them are secret consumers of French chardonnays and loathers of televised wrestling. But the left I encounter on my treks across the nation is heavy on hotel housekeepers, community college students, laid-off steelworkers and underpaid schoolteachers. Even many liberal celebrities — like Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem — hail from decidedly modest circumstances. David Cobb, the Green Party's presidential candidate, is another proud product of poverty.
It's true that there are plenty of working-class people — though far from a majority — who will vote for Bush and the white-tie crowd that he has affectionately referred to as his "base." But it would be redundant to speak of a "conservative elite" when the ranks of our corporate rulers are packed tight with the kind of Republicans who routinely avoid the humiliating discomforts of first class for travel by private jet.
So liberals can take comfort from the fact that our most visible spokesman is, despite his considerable girth, an invulnerable target for the customary assault weapon of the right. I meant to comment on his movie, too, but the lines at my local theater are still prohibitively long.
Barbara (The Cottonmouth) Ehrenreich 
Barbara Ehrenreich will be a guest columnist for the Op-Ed page through July. Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave for three months.
Ehrenreich has been a contributing writer for Time magazine since 1990. Her work has appeared in a wide range of national publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Ms., Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the Nation, the New Republic, Social Policy, and Mirabella, as well as a variety of newspapers throughout the world.
Between 1998 and 2000, Ehrenreich traveled to three different American cities and attempted to support herself on the wages of entry-level jobs.
She waited tables, fed Alzheimer’s patients at a nursing home, cleaned the toilets of the rich, and worked as a stocker at Wal-Mart. Her original idea was to write a magazine article about whether she could survive alone on those wages. Instead, she wrote Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a powerful, insightful book that garnered a great deal of media attention.
A chapter of the book appeared in Harper’s magazine and received the Sydney Hillman Award for Journalism and a Brill’s Content "Honorable Mention." Another essay, "Maid To Order," which evolved out of her research for the book, was published in Harper’s the following year, and it generated so many letters that the magazine created a special section just to accommodate them.
"I think her book, Nickel and Dimed, has really raised consciousness about what it means to be in the ranks of the working poor in this nation," observed Helene Moglen, professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz. "The issues that she raises in her book only become more timely every day, as more and more people join the ranks of the working poor and unemployed."
A prolific social critic, Ehrenreich has written numerous books over the past two decades about welfare, war, class, and women’s health. Her work is widely lauded for its unrelenting commitment to feminism and social change. She concludes Nickel and Dimed by stating:
The ‘working poor’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
"I think what Ehrenreich is trying to do is bring to the privileged classes some understanding about what their privilege rests upon," Moglen said. "She’s a researcher, an intellectual, an activist--someone who is really working for social change. And that’s enormously important."
In a recent interview, Ehrenreich noted how Nickel and Dimed has affected her life since its publication in 2001.
"It certainly influences my agenda as a writer and as, in some small scale, an activist," she said. "You have to come out of these situations and say the only way to justify going back into a middle-class style…well, I say justify, but I was desperate to go back to middle-class life…is to ask: ‘what am I doing for change, what am I doing to make this a less brutally, unequal society?"
Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company
