Posted on 07/01/2004 7:42:13 AM PDT by Phlap
During the Summer of 2003, she joined other socialists in signing onto a Campaign for Peace and Democracy statement protesting repression in Cuba—American sanctions listed as one form of repression. This statement characterized the U.S. involvement in Latin America as “criminal,” and the policy on Communist Cuba as “six decades of exploitation and imperial control of Cuba.” Ehrenreich and her fellow signatories call upon the Bush administration to withdraw completely from Cuba.
She was a regular columnist for Time magazine between 1994 and 1998, and now writes for The Progressive, The Nation, and the socialist online In These Times. In interviews Ehrenreich has made it known that she is divorced from one labor organizer and married to another, the mother of two children, that she doesn’t expect her son to marry his girlfriend even if they have a child together, that she faced no emotional pain or grief following her two abortions (just relief, she says). And, relevant to almost all her writing, she is a fourth-generation atheist.
Ehrenreich makes no effort to hide her contempt for those with religion, especially Christians. In a November 1999 article for The Humanist, she wrote that religions are the same as cults, the only difference being how many people are involved. She described Catholicism as “a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.” According to Babs, the Republican Party is, “a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.” When Germaine Greer went off the feminist reservation with her second book, Ehrenreich worried that her next error in judgment would be to, “announce her membership in the Christian Coalition.” (Greer strayed back on with her third book.) In this screed against religion, Ehrenreich also recounts her childhood horror at having to say the Pledge of Allegiance, especially after the words “under God” were inserted.
But where her ideas about religion become significant to her book assigned to this year’s freshmen is the assertion that working class people hold the tradition of atheism. (In the book, Ehrenreich also refers to Jesus as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.”) According to Ehrenreich, the progenitor of the trade union movement was a working-class atheism called the free thought movement, and that it sprung from “poor people whose distrust of priests and ministers was part and parcel of their hatred of bosses and bankers.” If the people with power and money are not going to hand it over to those without, then there must be no God. As Ehrenreich continues, “If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.” In Ehrenreich’s worldview, that means full Socialism and the abolition of Capitalism. Where that cannot be accomplished, then we’d damn well better have a large and generous welfare program in place.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the war on terrorism had begun, Ehrenreich defended her view that the real threats to America were not terrorists, but poverty, illiteracy, and environmental degradation. In an interview for On the Page magazine, she recoiled at the characterization of the terrorists as evil. “The word evil always makes me nervous. It’s not just a more intense form of bad; it’s usually a signal that we’ve stopped thinking.” What Ehrenreich is implying here is that if we make a value judgment about the nature of the 19 individuals who killed 3,000 innocent people, we are a bunch of brainless idiots (who must be Republican Christians to boot.)
Ehrenreich wrote in The Progressive in January 1999 that “the business of the left has always been to produce thinking citizens, not happy automons.” The implication, again, is that if you are a conservative, you have no brain. Ironically, this is written in an article about how “political movements should be emotionally engaging.” So, is it better to feel or to think? Feelings mean a lot to Ehrenreich. In a Harper’s Magazine June 1999 debate with Lionel Tiger on the decline of males in American society, Ehrenreich becomes apoplectic when Tiger won’t get emotional in his arguments. The exchange is too delicious to paraphrase:
EHRENREICH: I want to get at another level here. I want to explore your feelings about these things. You say the "decline" of males--there's a sad tone to that. I would feel sad, as a mother of a son, if males suddenly started "declining" in some serious way. Do you reel loss and regret and nostalgia? Why call it a decline? Why not say, Let's go boldly forth in this more egalitarian and somewhat de-gendered world?
TIGER: A more attractive picture to be sure, but not, however, I think, quite as accurate a rendition of the emotional consequences of what's happening. I'm not interested in characterizing my own personal psyche in this matter, solely because I think it's of zero interest to anyone. What is of interest is the fact that, as you suggested, young men and women are very concerned about these matters, one reason being that they no longer have a set of rules that they think are emotionally and morally worthwhile. Now, why should people have rules? If you study anthropology, you realize that human beings generally try to have rules, notions of how to behave. What we saw in the Clinton-Lewinsky business was some astonishing confusion between personal and public life.
EHRENREICH: You certainly got away from the issue of how you feel about it. See, I'm willing to say how I feel.
TIGER: I'm wholly uninterested in your feelings.
EHRENREICH: But I think it lends energy to what I say here, because I do feel strongly about this…
So, as long as you feel strongly about what you agitate for, you must be on the side of goodness. Going back to The Progressive column, Ehrenreich talks about this as a “pleasure” known only to the Left: “But there lies deep within the socialist (and feminist, and civil-rights) traditions the insight that some of the most profound pleasures are available to our species are those we apprehend collectively—the pleasures of solidarity and unity in the struggle.”
In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich preys upon the sympathetic feelings of the readers by relating scenarios where we can empathize with the poor woman struggling to make it on two part-time jobs. Indeed, Chancellor James Moeser of UNC-Chapel Hill said that Ehrenreich’s book “provoked in him more sympathy and empathy for people in low-paying service jobs.” To write the book, Ehrenrich posed in a handful of low-skill, low-paying jobs to prove that the working poor cannot make it in American society. She worked as a maid, a waitress, and a Wal-Mart clerk. Of course, her point is that you can’t get by, support a family, or purchase top-end consumer goods on the minimum wage job. The point of her book—and much of her writing—is that the Capitalist system oppresses the people. The “system” forces them to remain in low-wage, low-prestige, jobs and the rest of us have no appreciation for the sacrifices these people make on our behalf. Ehrenreich uses her brief forays into the world of real workers to again rail against Capitalism, Republicans, religious Americans, and corporations in general while she weeps for an expansion of the welfare state.
Hardly Flint blue collar. Complete fraud. He'll be exposed fully. He's so full of himself now he'll make the big mistake and shame his fans.
He's just another in a long line of fruitcakes that won't admit he's a registered Democrat, in 2 states I might add.
Moore is obese, sloppy, foul-mouthed, loud, obnoxious, lies, poorly educated, badly dressed and is the Europeans pet American.
They like him because he is the quintessential Ugly American.
The European elite views him as singularly American in every way and treat him like a lapdog.
Ms. Erenreich, want to know where the elite are? Look in the mirror. Mikey Moore, despite his "branding", is also one of the elite, riding in his limo at Cannes, living in his million dollar homes in New York and Michigan...his "branding" is no more effective than the attempts to portray Al Gore as a simple man of the people four years ago.
LOL!
Actually, Moore was raised in an affluent suburb of Flint, not in Flint itself...
But hey, what's a few facts among friends?
"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."
Well she was right until the 60's part. She probably should go back a bit to the Rockefellers, Carnegies and other Capitalists of the time. They were the conservatives. The ones that believed in god, love of country and the right to earn a buck without government interference. These were the people that built this country and gave people jobs.
Where the author goes awry is the failure to mention that the "liberal elite" in a move to capitalize on the "plight" of the worker, created unions in the communist model. The liberal elite bueurocracy would govern these people as does a politburo govern a nation.
As we have seen over the last 80+ years, power was the utlimate goal of the liberal elite. The ability to control information to the public, tell individuals what to study, teach communist dogma to children from an early age on was the tools used by the liberal elite to indoctrinate society.
From this the true nature of the elite liberal started to appear. They were not religious therefore religion would have to be removed from American society. The condemnation of their agenda would have to be illegal. The removal of future generations of anti-"liberal elitists" would have to be introduced. Anything that was not condoned by the church would be used as a tool to further the liberal elitists agenda. From this we got abortion, gay marriage, the ACLU and other groups that would do anything to hurt capitalism and the church. PETA, Sierra Club, Green Peace, Planned Parenthood, ACTUP to name a few. Any special interest group was welcome as long as they marched under the liberal elites flag.
Bottom line, the liberal elite became parasites, with the poor, uneducated and minorities as the hosts. They have infected society and the virus was spreading. Then they attacked businesses with sexual harrassment laws, affirmative action and more unionization. Like a virus, once the body was infected, there was no cure. And if there was a cure, laws to prevent the cure were put in place by a liberal criminal justice system.
If you look at our society, you see radical change from the 1950's. What has changed between then and now? What has been secretly placed into the Constitution by Conservatives that required radical change by the liberal elite? The reality of it is, nothing has changed except the need to suck the life out of as many hosts as possible until the virus collapses upon itself and there is nothing left to bleed. It happened in the Soviet Union and it only took 72 years.
Our future generations are at risk of being infected. Conservatism is the cure for the liberal elite parasites. We know it and they know it. Now the American people need to know it.
I recall reading Ehrenreich in college and I can't remember which book, but I do remember it being part of the general moral malaise of college -- the push to make your own morality, moral relativism, situtational ethics, socialism, etc. The irony of people like her is their true hate of the "lower classes" - who they just use to gain power, and their hate of the boring middle class, who need to be disrupted for people like her to gain power. The inconsistencies in her arguments are too numerous to be listed here, and I've seen her reliance on "passion" and emotion, so many times, in her ilk.
They have such a huge brush to paint with nowadays - film, university classrooms, public schools, ABCCBSCNNNBC, Time, etc., it's sometimes daunting to think of standing against such an onslaught. My main problem with people of her ilk is their passionate, sometimes violence intolerance of people like me.
The term "elite" is not just about money, it is about attitude and culture. Journalists and others at the NYT are certainly part of a liberal elite.
And never the twain shall meet in the world of the Liberal Elite. They just don't get it.
"The left I encounter on my treks across the nation is heavy on hotel housekeepers, community college students, laid-off steelworkers and underpaid schoolteachers."
No offense to the above group, but I fear many of them don’t know the left from the right. They have just been duped into believing their circumstances are caused by evil Republicans,and the left will fix everything in their life All they are doing is helping to keep a bunch of people in power on their backs. They won’t improve their plight one bit.
Some are very valuable, and good, but school teachers should know how much money they are going to make when they chose the profession. Community college students, what’s up with that? That has been a great thing that has allowed people to improve themselves, and become productive. Should they be making 50k while in school? Hotel housekeepers? Let’s face it. They are very important, but you can only make so much cleaning rooms.? What’s there beef? Steel workers? Most of us have rough times in our careers. You have to adapt. I am pulling for them.
... she faced no emotional pain or grief following her two abortions (just relief, she says).
That's Communism in a nutsell; it kills.
Cordially,
You FReepers rock. Thanks for providing the background info on this pinko lib. I'm cubicle bound so I'm not able to look it up myself.
5 words:
John Kerry and Teresa Heinz
You will notice that in this essay on the so-called Liberal Elite, there is NO REFERENCE AT ALL TO THE FIRST BILLIONAIRE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATEL JOHN F KERRY!!!!!!!
FRENCH SPEAKING, SWISS FINISHING SCHOOL ATTENDING, EUROPEAN COUNTRY HOME VACATIONING, MULTIRESIDENTIAL OWNING, SECRET-SERVICE ABUSING ELITIST!
Maybe you could make the case that Moore is still a man of the people if he actually lived with the working class. But he lives in a million-dollar Upper West Side apartment, and has a vacation home in an exclusive part of Michigan. But because he has the "man of the people" schtick due to being obese and wearing a baseball cap, he's not perceived as being part of the liberal elite. And they say our side is shallow!
Thanks for your contributions to this thread.
I live with some unre-constructed Leftists.
I am dead serious when I tell you that it's about the songs, the music, the emotional high of doing an "Action."
They live to sing "We shall Overcome" and other Movement Songs.
It was by close observation over a period of years that I came the conclusion, noted by many here on FR, that Left-Liberalism is a Mental Illness.
It is escapism, utopianism, "feelingism" DEVOID OF ANY REAL MORAL BASIS.
I am so thankful that I escaped the nuthouse.
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