A dated diagnosis of what's ailing US

This Land Is Their Land:
Reports From a Divided Nation
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan, 235 pp., $24

One of the questions liberals need to ask themselves at this extraordinary moment in American political and ideological history is how to recalibrate their message, forged over the last four decades, for a new-millennium audience.

Strike the tack taken by Barbara Ehrenreich in "This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation," a left-wing rant on what's wrong with America. Flawed in ways that liberals could learn from, her snappy approach in this collection of 62 short pieces is its own worst enemy, undermining the progressive agenda she seeks to advance.

Asserting that America's middle class is dying as the rich have become richer and the poor poorer, especially during the Bush administration, Ehrenreich wisecracks her way through problem after problem without offering any real solutions. These problems, in venues from the boardroom to the bedroom, have been caused by the emerging chasm of wealth and class and read like quick hits of American despair.

Family incomes are too low. Corporate profits are too high. Jobs are being outsourced or eliminated. Workers are being tyrannized by age discrimination, unjustified firings, bureaucratic hierarchies, and invasive surveillance. Health care is being held hostage by the profiteer insurance industry and its political pawns. Moral conservatives are imposing their oppressive views on gay marriage, sex education, and abortion rights.

Ehrenreich writes, "How many 'wake-up calls' do we need, people - how many broken levees, drowned cities, depleted food pantries, people dead for lack of ordinary health care? We approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century in a bleak landscape cluttered with boarded-up homes and littered with broken dreams.

"The presidential candidates talk about 'change,' but don't bother to articulate what kind of change," she continues. "Why don't we dare say it? The looting of America has gone on too long, and the average American is too maxed out, overworked, and overspent to have anything left to take. We'll need a new deal, a new distribution of power and wealth, if we want to restore the beautiful idea that was 'America.' "

However correct Ehrenreich may be, and she's often correct, her approach is from an antiquated school of tabloid liberalism, unpersuasive because of scant evidence, swift analysis, cynical outlook, shrill tone, and sanctimonious presumption. It is the liberalism of 1968, not 2008. It's also frustratingly clear that she's capable of far more thoughtful writing, straying into it in a piece or two. For instance, "A Uterus Is Not a Substitute for a Conscience," which explores the lessons for feminists of the Abu Ghraib debacle, is so eloquently distinctive from the rest of the pieces that it seems written by someone else.

If nothing else, this book's title is apt. It's a play on Woody Guthrie's classic folk song "This Land Is Your Land," an iconic anthem of the counterculture 1960s. Why apt? Because that's when this fist-in-the-air book should have been written.

Robert Braile reviews regularly for the Globe.