The Democrats Are Finally Catching Up With Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich, who turns 80 today (August 26), began work on her best-known book, Nickel and Dimed, for a specific purpose that’s been largely forgotten: She wanted to demonstrate that the 1996 welfare reform bill’s goal of moving long-term recipients off the rolls was premised on the mistaken belief that poverty wages were sufficient to sustain a family. The minimum wage was about $5 an hour. The going rate for low-wage jobs was $6 or $7 an hour. You couldn’t live on that.
Like any classic, Nickel and Dimed outgrew that narrow premise and, with the richness of a great novel, documented—through Ehrenreich’s own experiences working as a waitress in Florida, a housecleaner in Maine, and a Walmart sales associate in Minnesota—what life at the bottom was actually like. But the book’s literary virtues shouldn’t obscure a more practical matter: She proved her point. Even amid the tightest labor market in decades—we’ve never seen anything like it since—Ehrenreich couldn’t find a way to support herself, even without the under-18 children that qualified someone for welfare. Being poor was too expensive.
It took another 20 years, but the Democratic party has finally come around to Ehrenreich’s way of thinking. The child tax credit was made refundable and expanded to include nonworking families. Unemployment benefits were, for much of the Covid-19 pandemic, increased to be more generous than work. The Democrats didn’t turn their backs on the Protestant work ethic, but they recognized, finally, that workers must be paid a living wage, and started pressing in earnest for a national $15 wage minimum and a serious bill to improve labor rights.
Ehrenreich’s reputation as a sort of white-working-class whisperer to the book-buying public doesn’t capture the great sweep of her topics. Her landmark book, Fear of Falling, published in 1989, documented how liberalism was being hijacked by the professional class. Blood Rites examined war and violence through the prism of religious ceremony. Bright-Sided exposed how a cult of personal responsibility steered Americans away from collective action by persuading them there were no such things as impersonal forces—even in such manifestly impersonal realms as cancer treatment and corporate layoffs. Living With a Wild God and Natural Causes drew on Ehrenreich’s training as a cell biologist (she holds a doctorate from Rockefeller University) to argue that the natural world and the human body are much more anarchic than we want to believe; she used this observation to sketch out a tentative polytheistic metaphysics for unbelievers (like herself). I think of Ehrenreich as America’s poet laureate of anarchy.
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But Ehrenreich’s writing is why she and her ideas endure. Barbara Ehrenreich is perhaps the single greatest essayist writing today—not woman essayist, not leftist essayist, and not sociological essayist, but essayist, period. I know of no livelier mind writing for a popular audience, and no prose stylist more elegant. I certainly don’t know anybody who’s taken on a wider range of subjects (and here I should acknowledge The New Republic’s sister publication, The Baffler, which published her most intellectually adventurous essays during the past decade, many of them collected in her 2020 collection, Had I Known). If the Library of America hasn’t yet knocked on her door, I can’t fathom why.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/163452/barbara-ehrenreich-birthday-economy-inequality
Timothy Noah is the author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.