“The media really gave the liberal and leftist elites a language with which to pretend that they are the crusaders on the side of the good, when actually they themselves are the villains in this story in a big way. And that language is wokeness.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon says she used to suffer from what’s been called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But after speaking to people outside of her political bubble, she now believes he’s actually a centrist candidate.
“Any time you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy, when he is really the opposite of that. He’s the sort-of apotheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the people,” she says.
Ms. Ungar-Sargon recently traveled the country, speaking to everyday Americans about how they perceive the political, economic, and cultural climate. She compiled her findings in a book: “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.”
“The most shocking thing I found was that the American Dream for working-class people is much more alive and well and healthy in red states than it is in blue states,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon.
We discuss how, according to her, the democratic party betrayed middle-class Americans by creating a knowledge industry consisting of credentialed elites who benefit economically from illegal immigration and trade liberalization.
Watch the video:
“I think much of the Democratic policy today is part and parcel of this upward transfer of wealth, whether it’s student-loan forgiveness, whether it was the lockdown policies, whether it’s the open border, whether it’s the climate agenda and the Green New Deal, Defund the Police—all of this stuff is about the fumes, the virtuous fumes that the over-credentialed elites create out of their ideology. And they always demand that the working class pays for it,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Batya Ungar-Sargon, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much for having me back, Jan, and for all of the important work that you do.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s very much appreciated. Back in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, you noted that two-thirds of the working class voted in his favor. But what happened afterwards was more astonishing. There wasn’t a big soul searching among the Democratic Party to figure out what happened, but it was almost like a blame. How do you account for that?
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: That’s such a great way to put it, a blame. It’s so true. The side that likes to portray itself as the defender of democracy was extremely upset that a democratic election did not go its way. In many ways, most of them were pretty aggressive. They tried to undermine the results for the four years that Donald Trump was president by impeaching him and by portraying his supporters as racists or rubes or deplorables, whatever the insult of the day was.
It was totally astonishing, because he got two thirds of white working class voters back then, and now he is certainly positioned to get that many white working class voters, but he is also now dominating with Hispanic voters. In terms of polling right now, he’s looking at a third of black male voters. The whole idea that all his support came from the white working class is no longer the case.
He is now the working class candidate. In my view, that is really the reason why the Democrats have been so intent on trying to destroy him, whether it was with the impeachment, or now with the lawfare. That is why anytime you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy, when he is really the opposite of that. He is the apotheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the people.
They did not have a reckoning and admit, “We were wrong about Donald Trump. He really is representing working class voters.” It’s because the vast majority of people in those elite positions on the Left are not just liberal, they are part of an economic elite. Their economic interests are very much in conflict with those of the working class voters who Trump represents. Rather than admit that, these Leftists have been the beneficiaries of income inequality in America.
The top 20 percent is now hoarding over 50 percent of the GDP, as well as the pathway to the American dream. They would much rather cast Donald Trump and his voters as evil, because it’s the perfect alibi. Then they don’t have to deal with the fact that they themselves sold out these voters many years ago who are now turning to Trump.
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve done something really amazing here. You’ve spoken to people and found out what they think about all this. Talking about Trump here a little further, it was the Democratic Party, but also the whole system that went after him, painting him as a Russian stooge. Of course, that was preposterous on its face from the beginning. It took a very compliant legacy media to make people believe a lot of this stuff, because it was so outlandish.
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: They weren’t just compliant, they were very much the drivers of the narrative. The media plays a huge role in how the elites see the world, but not in the way regular people see the world. Regular people tend to believe their own eyes and not what the cable news channels want them to believe. When you get a college degree, especially if you get a college degree or a graduate degree from an elite university, you become inculcated into a way of seeing the world that is very much echoed by the elites in the media.
They have a lot of purchase with that elite, especially because they’re looking at things from the same point of view. They’re defending their economic interests, but in a language that dresses them up like they have some sort of high-minded morality. The media really gave the liberal and Leftist elites the language of wokeness with which to pretend that they were the crusaders on the side of the good, when actually they were the villains in this story in a big way.
That’s why the title of my first book was, “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. In my second book, I really wanted to understand who is on the other side of this. I understood there was this massive class divide in America and that story was not being told. I asked, “Who is the working class that has been abandoned by these Democratic and Leftist elites?” Then I traveled the country to find out.
Mr. Jekielek: For a lot of its history, America was highly meritocratic. Through your discussions you find that has really changed and people are deeply aware of that. That is one of your central themes. There is an elite class divide in America. It took a while for us to grasp how significant that is, and that these elites may think differently than many of us.
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: We were a meritocratic society, but that all started to change somewhere in the 1970s. 1971 was the high watermark for working class wages. They really started to stagnate after that, even though corporate profits and productivity have been skyrocketing all along. They used to travel in concert right along with working class wages, then they really decoupled in the 70s.
Now, working class wages are down when you factor in inflation and the fact that the cost of groceries is up 18 percent. People are living on a shoestring budget and they can’t afford groceries. It is really terrible. The process whereby the elites abandoned labor in order to cater to a highly credentialed, overeducated, urban elite started in the 70s and escalated in the 80s.
It really started to take hold as a new paradigm with President Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] into law. That was a multi-country trade agreement, in which 5 million good paying working class jobs that secured a middle class standard of living for these laborers were shipped off to China and Mexico to build up their middle class. That was the beginning of this descent.
After that, President Barack Obama said that those jobs were not coming back and defunded vocational training, which had been another great avenue to the American dream for working class Americans. He simply defunded it. The idea was everybody was going to go to college and join the knowledge industry and obviously become Democrats as a result. Because we know what happens to people when they go to American universities.
Then Joe Biden really sealed the deal by opening the border and welcoming in 15 million illegal immigrants to compete with the working class for their jobs. If you look at the graph of working class wages and align it with the graph of the number of immigrants in the country, they are in complete correlation. As the number of illegal migrants and legal migrants entered the country, the wages that working class Americans were able to command simply dropped, because there was a larger supply of labor. Certainly, the vast majority of illegal migrants are competing with working class people for jobs.
When you look at those two graphs together, you really see a compelling picture of why working class wages stagnated and why working class Americans are so gung ho for Donald Trump. He showed up on the scene and was the first person to say, “This is crushing working class Americans.” For his pains, he and all of his voters were cast as racists, as though the border has anything to do with race. It doesn’t.
It’s all about the economy and the wages that a working class person can command. That is the narrative of how the Democrats abandoned the working class and started catering to a college-credentialed elite whose economic interests were in conflict with that working class. At each of these stages, you can see how it improves the economic fortunes of people in the knowledge industry at the expense of the working class.
Mr. Jekielek: There is a vision of a flattened world, where all people are fungible. You could be in a different country that creates a product, and we bring it here in this perfect free trade world. In some ways, borders stop being as important to this elite class. Perhaps the acquisition of capital became its only purpose. What are your thoughts?
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: I totally agree. If you work in the knowledge industry, your economic fortunes are not limited to a certain place or time. We really saw this with the pandemic. You could go anywhere and work from anywhere. That more cosmopolitan elite has much less of a feeling of belonging to the United States, or to any place at all. There’s a real crisis of patriotism with these people.
A lot of that comes from the fact that in order to graduate from an American University, you have to take a composition class, which is taught by an English PhD, who has gone through the critical theory training. An essential component of that is that America is a deeply flawed, white-supremacist state, whose racism is baked into its DNA and is irredeemable. The more time you spend at a university, the more time you spend being exposed to those ideas.
A lot of these people have a graduate degree, so they spent a lot of time being educated, and let’s put that in quotation marks, by people who believe in this very deeply. As a result, they don’t really feel the same kind of connection to this country. Then you have to take into account the economic piece of this, that the college-credentialed elites are the consumers of the labor of the working class. As a result, they want more illegal immigrants to come in, because it drives down the wages that they have to pay their cleaning lady, their landscaper, their construction worker, or for a meal in a restaurant.
Therefore, they love the open border, because it’s effectively a control on the wages that working class people can command. It literally puts money back in the pockets of those very elites. Effectively, it’s wage theft. It’s an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the overly-credentialed college elites, the top 20 percent. They have effectively plundered the middle class over the last 40 to 50 years. That’s where the class divide comes from.
Mr. Jekielek: There is no moment in history that demonstrates this better than the lockdown policies. People in the knowledge industry could work from anywhere, and suddenly they’re working from home. Many people were happy to do that. They felt virtuous for doing what they were supposed to do, shelter-in-place. They were ignoring this whole economy of people running society, delivering their food, and basically taking care of every aspect of their life. It just came through the door and they didn’t even need to interact much. At the same time, we had the largest upward transfer of wealth in history. All of this happened all at once. Based on what you’re saying, it doesn’t sound like it was an accident.
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: No, I don’t think it was an accident at all. Much of the Democratic policy today is part and parcel of this upward transfer of wealth, whether it’s student loan forgiveness, the lockdown policies, the open border, the climate agenda, the Green New Deal, or defunding the police. All of this stuff is about the virtuous fumes that the over-credentialed elites create out of their ideology. They always demand that the working class pays for it, and it literally does put money back in their pockets.
The lockdown was such a great example of that. These people immediately worked from home, and immediately saw the values of their homes skyrocket. Meanwhile, while they were demanding these lockdowns, the children of the working class fell further and further behind. Of course, the elite’s children went back to school very quickly, relying on the labor of working class people who they had sent out into the plague.
It used to be that people in the elite class had a sense of noblesse oblige, a kind of humility about their good fortune. That has evaporated. The idea of meritocracy, that everyone should have access to the American dream and equal opportunity, has instead become an ideology that protects the elitism and the status of the over-credentialed elites. They are convinced that they have more money than everybody else because of their own virtue and merit, and because they’re good at studying for tests.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about these amazing people you talked to.
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: I wanted to feature people who were interesting, fascinating, and had great stories, but who were also representative of larger trends. Joe Price is an amazing professor at Brigham Young University. He has a group of grad students that you can ask to find data for you. I asked them to give me a snapshot of the working class in 2000, and in 2020. They gave me this snapshot which helped me analyze the trends in working class life. The entire first chapter of the book is devoted to this data analysis.
Mr. Jekielek: What was the most shocking thing that you found in this data?
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: The most shocking thing I found was that the American dream for working class people is much more alive and well and healthy in red states than it is in blue states. I was not expecting to find that. The price of housing alone is so radically different between red states and blue states. If that is an essential component of how you define the American dream, which I think it is for most Americans, the American dream is much healthier in red America than it is in blue America.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s so much of this love of being able to work hard to get ahead. The American dream means that will translate into creating a good life for your family. Of course, homeownership is a piece of that. But despite everything, quite a number of the people that you spoke to still believe that this dream is possible, even though it seems a lot harder.
Ms. Ungar-Sargon: Yes. There was such a deep love of this country and a deep respect for work. This is something that’s really lost on the Left. To Democrats and to the Left, the way that you help the working class is having more people with a higher income qualify for welfare. That’s not what working class people want. They take a deep pride in their work and see it through a spiritual lens.
They see it as a way to create a uniquely American inheritance and as something that connects them to their parents. They talked a lot about seeing their parents get dressed to go to work every day and take so much pride in their jobs. The problem is today, these jobs can no longer afford them the most basic hallmarks of stability, no matter how hard they work. That’s the problem.
It’s not that they don’t want to work or that they should be getting more help from the government. No. The problem is that they work really hard, and yet, the cost of a middle-class life relative to the wages they bring in has become a total mismatch. That is completely unacceptable, because our entire country relies on their work. Somehow, these big corporations were able to offload all of their risk onto their workers, and that’s unacceptable.
The cost of employing somebody should even out by the time they’re in their thirties to a living wage where a person can sustain a family. It’s so obvious that a democracy depends on that. Instead, what we have right now is a