How Working Class Americans Became Second-Class Citizens – It’s “the class divide that separates the college-educated from the working class.”

How Working Class Americans Became Second-Class Citizens

How Working Class Americans Became Second-Class Citizens | The Free Press (thefp.com)

Batya Ungar-Sargon new book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women – Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women – Kindle edition by Ungar-Sargon, Batya. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Blue-collar workers have been abandoned by both the Democrats and the Republicans. Batya Ungar-Sargon explains why. By Batya Ungar-Sargon April 2, 2024

How Working Class Americans Became Second-Class Citizens

Blue-collar workers have been abandoned by both the Democrats and the Republicans. Batya Ungar-Sargon explains why. By Batya Ungar-Sargon April 2, 2024

By Batya Ungar-Sargon April 2, 2024

On Election Night 2016, many of us thought we knew who would be the next president of the United States.

We were blindsided when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Legacy media quickly scrambled to account for what had happened. They ultimately arrived at an explanation: Trump’s voters were racist, xenophobic conspiracy theorists, and possibly even proto-fascists.

That wasn’t quite right.

My guest today, Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, has been on a journey for the past eight years to understand how Trump won the White House in 2016, and how the left fundamentally misunderstood the American working class. She eventually came to the conclusion that the most salient feature of American life is not our political divide. It’s “the class divide that separates the college-educated from the working class.” 

Democrats have historically been the party of the working class. But for the better part of the past decade, Democrats have seen their support among working-class voters tumble. Policy wonks and demographic experts kept saying just wait: the future of the Democratic party is a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition. But that didn’t pan out. 

Instead, in 2016, Trump carried 54 percent of voters with family incomes of $30,000 to $50,000; 44 percent of voters with family incomes under $50,000; and nearly 40 percent of union workers voted for Trump—the highest for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Meanwhile, in 2022, Democrats had a 15-point deficit among working-class voters but a 14-point advantage among college-educated voters.

In order to understand how and why this happened, Batya decided to spend the last year traveling the country talking to working-class Americans. Who are they? Do they still have a fair shot at the American dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life? 

She collected these stories in her new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. What she found is that for many of them, the American dream felt dead. 

On today’s episode of Honestly, Batya discusses who really represents the working class, how America should reinstate its commitment to them, and what will happen in 2024 if we don’t. Click below to listen to my discussion with Batya, or scroll on to read an adapted excerpt from her new book. —BW

Americans are constantly told we are hopelessly divided, and it’s easy to see why many of us could believe it: our politicians relentlessly accuse the other side of undermining democracy and endangering the vulnerable, while our legacy media, which no longer even pretends to be objective, consistently portrays its side’s enemies in the starkest of terms.

People on the right are “racist,” says the left. People on the left are “groomers,” says the right. And so on.

But what if I told you that the people in the political and media classes are the ones who are polarized—in fact, they are the only ones who are so polarized?

This is obvious to most Americans, even—perhaps especially—to those who have neighbors or friends or colleagues who vote differently than they do. Regular Americans know we are more united than divided on the issues that are supposedly tearing us apart.

Democrats portray conservatives as characters out of The Handmaid’s Tale, and Republicans portray liberals as “baby killers.” Yet two-thirds of Americans agree that abortion should be rare and also legal.

Democrats like to tell us that Republicans are gung ho on school shootings, and Republicans are fond of saying Democrats want to steal our guns. Yet 61 percent of us believe that the Second Amendment should stand, but it’s too easy to get a gun. 

Democrats tell us Republicans hate gays and Republicans tell us that Democrats want every child to be queer. Yet average Americans believe that sex is determined at birth and that trans people should be protected from discrimination, though when it comes to sports, trans people should compete on teams that match the sex they were born with. This is how six in ten of us feel. 

The partisan claims of a polarized America ring especially false to working-class Americans. This is because—unlike the college-educated elites who run the country—they don’t identify with the full list of policy proposals produced by either party. 

I spent one year interviewing working-class Americans across the country from every political persuasion for my new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, and what I found was a remarkable consensus on the issues. 

They want higher wages. They want better healthcare—or really, just affordable healthcare. They want fewer migrants competing for their jobs, and they want trade policy that favors America. They want stable jobs that reward their immense efforts with the hallmarks of a middle-class life that so many in the top income brackets take for granted: a home. A vacation with their kids every now and then. Enough in the bank so they don’t have to call the electric company every month to beg forbearance to keep the lights on. Some money to put away for retirement for when their aching bones can no longer perform physical labor.

Of course, the working class is not a monolith. A group of people as radically diverse as America’s working class is bound to have a lot of diversity of opinion. And yet, when it comes to the questions of politics and policy, their opinions are a lot less diverse than I was expecting. 

An extreme moderation characterizes America’s working class, coupled with the kind of deep tolerance and humility you learn from a life of precarity. By and large, I met a lot of people who say they would never get an abortion but feel appalled by the idea of an abortion ban. Most people support something close to a moratorium on immigration, both legal and illegal, for the foreseeable future. They also support a government-backed healthcare plan or even full government healthcare. They are very pro-gay; I met a lot of Christians who have a gay person in their lives who they want to see treated with respect and who they hoped would find lasting love. But they are also very worried about transgender ideology, especially in schools. They support taxing corporations and the rich but not expanding the welfare state, which they see as rewarding laziness. They all knew someone who was scamming the welfare system while they worked and worked and worked and still struggled, and they felt frustration toward those who chose to live off the government—but also anger at corporations that maximized profit at the expense of their workers, and politicians who didn’t care. 

These views were held by almost every working-class person I spoke to, whether they said they were conservative or liberal. Again, when polled, it’s how most Americans feel. Nearly two-thirds of us say healthcare should be the federal government’s responsibility. The same percent want to see the level of immigration decreased. (Opinions about immigration change when Americans have a college degree. People who make under $100,000 a year are much less likely to support the mass migration we’ve been seeing than those making more than $100,000 a year.)

And yet, neither political party represents these positions that unify most Americans. The Democrats support taxing corporations and expanding healthcare, while also supporting the medical transition of teenagers, the expansion of the welfare state, and an open-border policy that allows an unlimited supply of low-wage competition to enter the country. The Republicans want to restrict immigration and limit welfare, while also supporting corporations and lowering taxes on the rich—and its representatives never utter the words universal healthcare except as a slur. 

Who should the working class vote for? In the best-case scenario, they can pick one party that supports half their views but actively undermines the rest. At best it’s a crapshoot, which explains working-class people’s frustration with both political parties. 

It also explains why working-class Americans aren’t polarized like elites. Political and media elites tend to believe their party has chosen wisely on unrelated topics like immigration, climate change, and abortion. But working-class people know that the stances each party has chosen are arbitrary. This is why they have tolerance for working-class folk who vote for the other party. They know that the way they vote reflects only a portion of their political views, and extremely little of their larger identities. You can’t be devoted to a party that represents only half your views while actively undermining the other half. And you can’t hate someone for choosing the other party when it’s such a crapshoot.

Here, too, I found data to back up my observations. A 2019 study by James Druckman and Matthew Levendusky in Public Opinion Quarterly found that individuals harbor more animus toward the other party’s elites than they do toward people who vote for the other party. And Anthony Fowler at the University of Chicago has found again and again that the majority of Americans do not consider themselves left or right but moderate.

Who represents them? No one.

Progressives on the left like to demand that billionaires “pay their fair share,” yet are unwilling to share any of the prosperity that has come their way now that a college degree has become the new prerequisite of a middle-class life. Conservatives on the right demand that the working class—the GOP’s new base—sacrifice their one vote on the altar of fighting wokeness, while elites in the party revert to the free-market policies that have impoverished their voters.

There is no party that represents the American Dream, in which a life of hard work is rewarded by a home, retirement, the occasional vacation, and a better life for one’s kids. In other words, a life free from the precariousness that plagues the working class today. It’s led to a working-class electorate that feels alienated from both parties. They have only each other to rely on. 

This essay is adapted from Batya’s new book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, from Encounter Books, which is out today. For more on this topic, read Sohrab Ahmari’s New Statesman essay, “The Bloodbath Affair.”

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