Had I Known was the title of Barbara Ehrenreich’s final book before her passing on September 1, and indeed, the longtime investigative journalist never closed the book on what there was to learn.

In the introduction, Ehrenreich wrote that “I realized that there was something wrong with an arrangement whereby a relatively affluent person, such as I had become, could afford to write about minimum-wage jobs” — the subject that brought her fame and fortune as an author.

Ehrenreich’s reporting on the conditions of low-paying work in the bestselling exposé Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America was summed up by Roderick T. Long as a rebuke “to those on the right who heroise the managerial class and imagine that the main causes of poverty are laziness and welfare.”  As Charles W. Johnson noted at the time, Nickel and Dimed manages to also be “a frighteningly real response to those feel-good liberals who proclaim the virtues of voluntarily living in poverty and complain about how frustrated they feel with their Palm Pilots and SUVs.”

A decade later, Ehrenreich wrote in the afterword to a new edition of Nickel and Dimed that having assumed that “the standard liberal wish list” of more “public programs” was the way to “reduce poverty” had obscured how the same government increases poverty by criminalizing efforts of the poor to get by.

Had I Known includes a lauding of “informal networks” which “put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame.”  Yet it also ascribes economic inequality to “the free-enterprise system” which “depends only on markets.” Ehrenreich suggests this is really a “free-president system” in which elected officials are “free of all responsibility for the economically anguished.” Yet her own muckraking shows an economy actually existing far closer to Paul Goodman’s term “un-free enterprise.”

In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Ehrenreich viewed a Templeton Foundation report’s rhetoric about how “free enterprise and other principles of capitalism can, and do, benefit the poor” as indicating “a foregone conclusion.”  While not “a right-wing conspiracy,” free-enterprise advocacy by groups like Templeton and the Association of Private Enterprise Education was inherently “conservative.”

Ehrenreich should not have been so sure if she had attended a panel at APEE’s conference the following year making the case for “free market anti-capitalism,” including contributions from both Johnson and Long. Unhindered by obstacles such as what Johnson calls “the government-supported stranglehold of big banks on capital” withholding funding for business outside of big business, market forces would not conserve entrenched power dynamics but dissolve them. Ehrenreich might even have recognized a comrade in Long when he concludes that “libertarianism is the proletarian revolution.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, USA Today, September 9, 2022
2. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Spectrum, September 9, 2022
3. What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, Yahoo! News, September 9, 2022
4. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Montana Standard, September 9, 2022
5. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Star [Hammond, Louisiana], September 12, 2022
6. “What Ehrenreich Didn’t Know” by Joel Schlosberg, Williston, North Dakota Herald, September 26, 2022

“When police found a kindergarten boy who had walked off from school after attacking his teacher and classmates,” Elizabeth K. Anthony writes at The Conversation, “it didn’t take them long to start guessing about the cause of his behavior.”

Long story short: The cops concluded  the boy wasn’t getting enough of That Good Old Corporal Punishment at home, and told his mother exactly that.

“He’s bad because no one’s correcting it.”

“This is why people need to beat their kids.”

“As law enforcement officers  … we applaud the fact that you will please beat your kid.”

There are no happy endings to such incidents, but this case did result in a hefty settlement after a judge ruled that the police behavior involved was “assaultive in nature.”

For much of my own life, I assumed that “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not only how things were, but the only way they could be. My wife and I debated that belief in a  spirited manner and she largely prevailed in banning corporal punishment for our kids. I learned to keep my opinion (or at least my hands) to myself. But I never questioned it.

Then I inherited the razor strop.

It was my great-grandfather’s, then my grandfather’s, then my father’s, and when he passed away it — and memories of it that I’d tried to bury — came to me.

I assume my grandfather and his father used the strop for its intended purpose, sharpening the straight razor which I also inherited. And, yes, maybe for other things.

My dad didn’t need the razor or strop for shaving — disposable razors were fine with him.  But he used that strop liberally, on me, when my behavior didn’t measure up to his standards.

It’s just a strip of leather, backed by a strip of thick cloth, maybe two feet long and four inches wide. But in memory,  it’s a giant serpent of fire and pain that I lived in abject terror of throughout my childhood.

Was my father an evil man? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, 40 years or more after my final disciplinary encounter with the strop, I’m no longer convinced that his decision to inflict pain on me is the reason I’m not dead, in prison, or an alcoholic.

If the strop taught me anything, it was the false lesson that instant resort to violence “works.” I suspect I’m not dead, in prison, or an alcoholic in spite of, not because of, the strop.

I also suspect that violent punishment of children makes those children, and their parents, more inclined to non-defensive violence in general.

Corporal punishment becomes a shortcut that superficially “solves” problems without the time and effort required to understand and work through those problems for real. It’s the crack cocaine of dispute resolution — an instant high followed by the constant need for more.

If you’re a good person with good kids — and I bet you are — don’t make it harder on them, or on yourself. Parent peacefully.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” US president Joe Biden warned on August 25. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”

A week later, in Philadelphia, he expanded on his criticisms: “They promote authoritarian leaders and they fanned the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, the rule of law, the very soul of this country.”

He’s not wrong, but his emphasis on a single aspect — Donald Trump’s cult of personality — obscures the real nature of “semi-fascism” and comes a century too late.

To put it bluntly, the United States has been more than “semi-“fascist since long before Biden was born.

Fascism rose from the social tumult following World War One as armed groups of military veterans clashed violently with the socialist left around the world. In Germany, they took the form of various “freikorps.” In the United States, they flocked to a single organization, the American Legion.

The Legion brawled with leftists in the streets of American cities, conducted military-style raids on labor union offices and, in the words of its national commander, Alvin Owsley, stood “ready to protect our country’s institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy. … Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.” The Legion even invited Mussolini, the first self-declared fascist head of state in the world, to address its national convention.

At the same time, what James Burnham later described as the “managerial state” — which answers to the Mussolini’s definition of fascism, “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” —  began to coalesce in various countries.

In the US, that culminated in the New Deal and a cult of personality around Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented four terms as president and would likely have continued as leader (the German word is “Fuhrer”) had he lived longer.

Pre-existing strong democratic norms blunted and limited the scope of American fascism (particularly quasi-worship of the designated leader), but victory in World War Two allowed it to continue within that limited scope.

American fascism’s key aspects — nationalism, militarism, subordination of rights to “national security” claims, obsession with internal policing, and, yes, increasingly rigged/constrained elections to preserve the rule of “approved” parties (versus no elections at all) — survive and thrive to this day.

Joe Biden has been a cog in the American fascist machine, a willing participant in its depredations, for more than 50 years, promoting everything from mass incarceration to state control of enterprise through “industrial policy.”

His sole valid complaint about “the MAGA philosophy” is that it re-introduces the “cult of personality” aspect of fascism’s Spanish and pre-World-War-2 Italian, German, Japanese, and Soviet variants.

He’s right about that, but he’s advocating for one form of fascism over another, not against fascism itself.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY