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How the elites betrayed America's working class, with Batya Ungar-Sargon
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There has long been a curious sub-genre in liberal journalism. It can best be described as “examining working class Americans in their natural habitat.” It goes something like this. Journalists from New York or California will bravely venture into a red state, observe the local inhabitants from afar, and come back with a series of superficial insights that reinforce the existing prejudices of coastal elites.
Partly as a result of this lack of journalistic curiosity, liberal America is no closer to truly understanding the underlying forces that swept Donald Trump into the White House, and may yet do so again.
Batya Ungar-Sargon did something novel. She wanted to understand the American working class, so she actually spoke to them, all over the country, for over a year. Lessons learnt were captured in ‘Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.’ It is the best book to read if you want to understand the political and cultural forces at play in America in 2024.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fire at Will'
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator Australia, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
Liberal Journalism's Approach to the Working Class
00:00:28
Speaker
There has long been a curious subgenre in liberal journalism. It can best be described as examining working-class Americans in their natural habitat. It goes something like this. Journalists from New York or California will bravely venture into a red state, observe the local inhabitants from afar, and come back with a series of superficial insights that reinforce the existing prejudices of coastal elites.
00:00:55
Speaker
Partly as a result of this lack of journalistic curiosity, liberal America is no closer to truly understanding the underlying forces that swept Donald Trump into the White House, and may yet do so again.
Bardia Angusagon's Exploration of the Working Class
00:01:08
Speaker
Bardia Angusagon did something novel. She wanted to understand the American working class, so she actually spoke to them all over the country for over a year. Lessons learned were captured in second class. ah The elites betrayed America's working men and women. It is, in my opinion, the best book to read if you want to understand the political and cultural forces at Play in America in 2024.
Democratic Party and Working Class Abandonment
00:01:33
Speaker
Bartia, welcome to Far at Will. Thank you so much for having me and for those kind words. That means a lot to me. Thank you so much.
00:01:41
Speaker
course Well, they were kind to you. They weren't so kind to your journalistic colleagues. Do you think that's fair? Do you think there has been a relatively superficial approach to this topic in the past? It's so funny because I thought you were about to accuse me of going on safari in the working class. And I was like, God, I so tried so hard not to convey that. And in fact, the first half of the book is very tightly focused on working class Americans talking about their lives in first person. And part of the feedback I got from early drafts was people would say to me, you know, please put yourself in it more please tell us where you were vis-a-vis all these people and I was like no I will not do that because I am not doing one of these books you know where you know you show up as this person with immense privilege and then kind of you know look down on these people and insert yourself into the narrative so what I did was maybe a little bit less honest by taking myself out of it but I really wanted to give people the floor and the ability to speak for themselves and yeah I totally agree with you there's been this sort of rash of you know quote-unquote journalism stuff like that book White Rural Rage that came out very helpfully around the same time as my book, because it was a really good sort of counter proposal in which basically leftist elites project everything that they want to be the case onto the Americans that they used to identify with and represent and now have totally abandoned and left in the dust. And I mean, that's where all of this kind of calling Trump voters racist comes from people on the left who used to represent labor simply cannot face the fact
00:03:08
Speaker
that they abandon working class Americans to cater to the very wealthy, educated elites and the dependent poor. And as a result, people who used to be Democrats 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago are increasingly voting for Donald Trump. And rather than deal with the outrage of having abandoned the hardest working Americans as leftists, you know, they simply project these narratives onto them that they deserve it. So either they are racists or toxic masculinity, right? We don't have to deal with the outrage that a man can no longer support a family on a single income because they are toxic and they deserve it. That's where all of the leftist rhetoric really stems from over the last 50, 40, 30, 10, five years, in my view.
Global Political Shifts and Class Dynamics
00:03:54
Speaker
And a lot of the kind of you know attempts to decode the Trump voter are really just attempts to let leftists off the hook for having abandoned them.
00:04:03
Speaker
So you said that the Democrats have betrayed the working class. It's perhaps been the biggest phenomenon in politics over the last 20 or 30 years. And interestingly, it's not just a US phenomenon. I can look to Australia, I can look to the UK and you're seeing the same thing where the traditionally left wing parties have moved towards the coastal elites or the college educated progressive class. And the traditional right wing parties have taken, I would say some, but not all of the working class vote. How has that happened? And that is a big question, but how has that immersion happened? Well, it is a global phenomenon because globalization is a global phenomenon. So of course the US played an outsized role in this, but of course you're seeing this in Australia and the EU and and everywhere across the world where the elites created an economy very intentionally that operated like an upward funnel of wealth to people with a degree or two degrees, people who had gone through the university system. where they both became more employable in the economy that the elites were building for themselves and of course became more left wing because in university what you do is you become extremely left wing right that they're sort of like woke mind virus factories basically. um But even before wokeness was a thing, in the 90s, they called it you know gender race power, right? And and you know before that you had political correctness. These ideas that are fomented in supposedly cultural settings, which operate as a way of disguising the very real material economic situation in which people who get this education and become extremely left in their worldviews are also now
00:05:46
Speaker
coincidentally, right, not much more likely to be able to achieve the American dream. Right. And that is the real, ah you know, the real outrage here. And it was very intentional um when you had President Bill Clinton say, you know, actually, we're going to have we're going to transition to a knowledge economy. We're gonna outsource all of our production and producing to to you know through NAFTA through to to third world countries to China to build up their middle class and meanwhile everybody here is kind of going to go to college and get retrained and Obama really ran with this.
00:06:21
Speaker
going so far as to defund vocational training, which is a massive avenue for upward mobility for people who are in the skilled trades. And then, of course, this mass immigration, which was really a handshake between both parties for many, many years, just like free trade was. You take all these things together, and what you've done is you've created an economy that is a funnel for wealth to people who have a college degree, who work in knowledge industry jobs, who are very good at paying attention and sitting quietly and listening to authority, right? These people love
00:06:54
Speaker
authority figures, they love institutions, they love paternalism because institutions have really, really delivered for them. And simply abandoning people who don't share your worldview, who are maybe more conservative, who work with their hands to fend for themselves in an economy where good working class paying jobs have been shipped overseas. And then millions and millions of people have been imported from failed socialist states to compete with the remaining jobs here for people who don't have that credential. And of course, this is happening.
00:07:24
Speaker
across the globe where people are embracing this knowledge industry. And so if you're a person who's very good at sitting still for many, many hours and listening to authority figures and saying, you know, yes, ma'am, and taking tests, you're going to have access to the kind of stability that we used to guarantee anybody who works hard. And we now guarantee to people with many degrees who actually don't work very hard, who actually don't know how to think, whose main characteristic is the contempt they have for the people they rely on to survive, who work much harder for them. and those people meanwhile are struggling. Yeah, I've heard you say and in another interview that we've prioritised jobs that in the greater scheme of things don't actually offer real value to the way that we live our lives and the jobs that do, caring for old people or driving trucks for 12 hours straight, have been not just de-prioritised in terms of how they are paid, but de-prioritised culturally in the way that they are perceived by so-called social betters.
Cultural and Economic Marginalization of the Working Class
00:08:22
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, what happens when you take a job like writing comedy or writing for TV, which used to be something you'd, you know, grab people from anywhere, maybe from a newsroom where a person didn't have a college degree, but was really funny and good at cracking wise. And now those jobs are really only available to people from Harvard. I mean, that's the funnel, right? People from Harvard pull other people from the Harvard Crimson into these jobs. So now everyone in ah in a writer's room in Hollywood is a person who has an elite degree and you know, they are writing. TV and movies and and books, of course, et cetera, for themselves and for the people that they know. And by the way, this includes hilariously the stuff they write about the ghetto, which is all written by you know black kids from Harvard who have no idea, like have never been exposed to this kind of thing. you know And so all of this is created for people like them. And what happens in a situation like that is that if you're a working class person, Even if you're getting by, suddenly the restaurant that you can afford to take your family to for a nice a nice occasion is the punchline of every TV show and every movie that is available to you on a streaming service. That is freaking disgusting. It is just disgusting. The entire culture now is geared at the average American consumer who is now a rich person because everything is so expensive. And so everything is now targeted at people who are much wealthier than the average person. staying It's It's so infuriating. And I know that this cultural piece of things, it's not as bad as the fact that people can't afford you know a home. It's not as bad as the fact that people can't afford health care.
00:10:06
Speaker
But it is really enraging that the people who work the hardest in this country are the butt of every joke and the butt of immense amounts of contempt hurled at them by the very people who dispossessed them. It's really important that this get across because this is, of course, one of the main reasons why we're seeing this huge, huge revolution in terms of the political realignment. People are just sick of being sneered at while they cannot afford to feed their children. I think it's they can't afford to be sneered at, but what is the icing on the cake is that they're being sneered at by people who think that they are the ones being morally virtuous. So they are the ones who are morally right. And so they're not just sneering at them. They're actually saying you are wrong for your views, whether it be your religious views, whether it be your views about immigration, which is often incorrectly tied in with yeah with racism. It's that moral virtuousness that goes along with the sneering that I think must be very difficult to take.
00:11:06
Speaker
Oh yeah, absolutely. And for a long time, I think people felt insecure about this kind of thing. Like there's people from the South who who oversaw a huge revolution in America in terms of race relations, simply the abandonment of racist views by you know the vast, vast, vast majority of this country. But of course, because we have that history, when you turn on your TV and you see people saying, no, you are still racist, there's a part of you that's like, Oh, God, is that true?
Identity Politics and Elite Narratives
00:11:31
Speaker
Like, I would hate for that to be true. Maybe it is. Let's like look into this, right? But but at some point, it becomes ridiculous. And of course, like they don't realize that that whole language
00:11:41
Speaker
was designed to let millionaires on cable news channels off the hook for the fact that they had become millionaires at the expense of people who work much harder for them. So the race language around immigration was totally designed to hide the fact that open borders is a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the elites who of course employ all of these illegal immigrants and have to pay them much less than they would have to pay an American, right? Because this person is not able to command the kinds of job security protection and wages that a native born American would. And so to mask the ways in which the elites were lining their pockets in a wage theft of their neighbors, they developed this language that, oh, it's racist to oppose the thing that puts money in my pocket and makes me rich. It is sexist.
00:12:30
Speaker
to think that a man should be able to support a family, that a man should be able to approach a young lady in a bar and engage in mating rituals that have sustained humanity for our entire history. No, that is now a crime. criminalize mating so men cannot find a partner and we're going to criminalize masculinity to hide the ways in which we created an economy that makes women rich actually because it is built around all sorts of skills that women have sitting patiently, sitting quietly. you know, social skills, caring about how people feel about things, right? I mean, all of this stuff was just, again, a massive transfer of wealth away from, you know, physical jobs, jobs that require bronze, jobs that reward men for their hard work with the most basic tenets of the American dream. And instead, we sort of turned all that on its head and then created an ideology that hid that from view by saying, we're the good guys, we're the side of the right, you're the racist, even though you can't, because you can't afford to feed your family. Yeah, I was going for a walk the other day listening to your conversation with Brendan O'Neill. And when you made this point that identity is great, he's been on the show before, he's wonderful. I watched that man, I just watched him. He's awesome. When you made the point that identity politics or locism
00:13:52
Speaker
whatever you want to call it, is effectively a diversionary tactic for the elite to recapture a moral high ground that they were losing because of the incredible disparity of wealth between the working class and the elites. That was a ah light bulb moment for me. And I guess my question would be, I don't think this is a group of elites sitting in a dark room somewhere in New York, Washington DC, mapping out identity politics principles to say, this is how we're going to cover the wealth inequality gap. But how does this happen? Because it's, it's, I'm not sure it's it's, it's a conspiracy as much as a lot of very successful people thinking in similar ways. How does this work?
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's not a conspiracy. ah People on the left, on the right often think that, you know, everything's coming like from Joe Biden, you know what I mean? Like everything's coming down from like the top from the Democratic Party. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They sit in these like cigar smoke rooms. Maybe they do. And I've just not been invited to them. but i do have a PhD in English literature. And to me, it seems much more likely that what happened was, you know, this stuff is extremely mainstream in universities, but it used to be sort of relegated to universities and stuck there, you know, when they started started coming over in the form of postmodernism and French philosophy and, you know, Foucault and Derrida and all of these guys who really created the building blocks
00:15:09
Speaker
out of a Hegelian Marxist view of dialectics and power, that you know that that they basically said there's no such thing as right versus wrong. There's only power dynamics, who has power and who doesn't have it. And the person who doesn't have it is inherently virtuous no matter what they do. And the person who has it is inherently compromised and has no right to a moral view on anything. We have to center you know the voices of the marginalized, you know including Hamas. It turns out we all found out this year, like Yes, they really mean that. So that worldview controlled the the humanities um in the universities, but it really became mainstreamed. I don't think it was a coordinated effort. I think what happened was it was sort of like a lot of people, like you said, who who have ended up in positions of power and have sort of main character syndrome, right? And think that they it's their job to rescue the world and maybe understood that they
00:16:04
Speaker
had actually ended up in a position of power, a position that gave them more wealth than they had expected. And suddenly, wait, but they couldn't possibly be the bad guys, right? So they had to find another way to make themselves the good guys. But I think it really happened through the sort of mainstreaming of the ideas in the university. When jobs like journalism, for example, that used to not require a college degree, became increasingly peopled by people with elite university degrees as the industry constricted, right? So it used to be the vast majority of journalism was local journalism, and it was done in towns that were like, you know, one paper towns. And so there was a huge premium put on reporting the news straight and having a balanced op-ed page because, you know, you could either go to the left or go to the right and sacrifice potentially 50% of your readers and viewers, or you could, you know, stay down the middle and get like everybody in this town to read your paper. and Actually, I was recently in a town in Pennsylvania, and it was very clear that the the local paper that arrived at my hotel was still following that rule. It was very hard to tell whether the people writing for this paper were liberals or or or conservatives, and that's what it used to be. That's what most journalism used to be. But the journalism industry started to collapse.
00:17:17
Speaker
the local journalism industry largely as a result actually of Craigslist, because classified ads used to be one of the major ways in which um newspapers sustain themselves. And as things became more digital, they became more national, and the premium was placed not on reporting the news straight, but on getting the most engagement. You know this as a person who has a podcast, what we're trying to get is engagement. And of course, the most engaged readers are the most extreme readers. And so people who had a kind of slight liberal tit tilt, became extremely woke-ified because, of course, they still wanted the rich readers, right? I mean, that' so to sell that the you know their their engagement to third-party outlets. So they still wanted rich people, but you know of course, rich people love this woke stuff because it is a smokescreen for the classified in the way that liberals who like to think of themselves as the good guys have benefited from income inequality. And so I think that that had a massive impact. And you can see this in the polling around race and gender, that around 2015,
00:18:13
Speaker
this sort of great awakening happened where these ideas that used to be very, very relegated to the academic fringe started to really enter the mainstream through the media because they were so good at making leftists be able to resolve that contradiction, the the cognitive dissonance of wanting to think that they're so much better than Republicans and conservatives while also being so much richer. yeah that old Monty Python clip where Eric Idle says, I want to be a woman to John Cleese. so I don't know if you've seen it. It came to mind there because I initially thought that these guys were the most prescient people on earth. They predicted the nonsense that we're seeing today.
00:18:54
Speaker
And then as you speak, I realized they were just commenting on the extreme fringes that they themselves saw at places like Cambridge and and Oxford when they were in university. It wasn't that they were prescient for what was happening in 2024. It's that what they were seeing at the very far fringes at university campuses is now what we are seeing in the mainstream in 2024. How that migration from extreme university nutcase ideologies to the positions of most mainstream institutions in society. It is quite stunning.
Class Divide and Political Representation in America
00:19:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you can really see the like, I mean, you know, in the right wing, the hemisphere, they call it like the current thing, but you really do see how they move from one issue to the next. So first it was, you know, the racial reckoning, right? And all of this stuff. Then they moved back to what they had been, you know, in 2016, it was like, you know, undocumented immigrants who suddenly were like the, the real inheritors of like the American civil rights. you know, movement, right, like people who are not American. And then they moved into the trans thing, right. And now it's all about Gaza and the Palestinians. And you know, it's just everybody following. There was a Ukraine spell where it was like all about everybody had the Ukraine flag, you know, people who've never like thought about this at all. And Again, it looks like it's happening in a coordinated way, but I really don't think it is. I think it has more to do with just what happens to you when you get a humanities degree in one of these universities. And it it's so amazing because there's just nothing left about it. I mean, identity politics is is right way up.
00:20:28
Speaker
Sorry, it's very like it's really there's nothing left about it. There's no economic platform, right? Exactly. There's no there's nothing that you would recognize as liberalism, right? They don't believe in free speech. They don't believe in hearing from the other side. It's it's wild. Yeah, I spoke to a philosopher called Susan Nyman who wrote a book called Left is Not Woke. She's part of, I think, a really important growing group of, I guess, sent well, she's not sent to left, she would call herself a Marxist, but left-wing liberals who are saying, look, this stuff actually doesn't represent traditional leftism. Let's take that as a ah segue into the idea of class, because you say the preface to the book, and it's a lovely little line,
00:21:09
Speaker
The class divide has become the defining characteristic of American life in the 21st century. Yet the working class is a cipher in American politics and media. That may instinctively rub some Americans the wrong way who think about the American dream and a classless society and look at countries like the UK and turn their noses up at that sort of classist behavior. Explain that to me. Honestly, it's really funny because thinking about this, like in relation to the UK, I do think that there is something really important to note there, which is that in the UK, people have accents. you know and
00:21:46
Speaker
A person's accent can tell you with reasonable certainty, you know, where somebody is sort of from, how much money their father probably made, where they fit in the hierarchy. And we don't have accents here. And so the elites who still needed very much to distinguish themselves from the middle class and to reveal the status that they have, right? They can't use the way they talk or their accent or their dialect. So instead they developed words like Latin X, right? you throw that into conversation and that's like saying i spent a hundred thousand dollars a year to go to university right they are obsessed with where people went to college you go to one of these journalist parties i really don't go to them i first of all i never get invited but you know if you are you suddenly not getting invited now.
00:22:29
Speaker
the view that i've been to it's like people are obsessed with where people went to university where they went to college they're both obsessed with revealing their educational status and with hiding how rich they are and how much money their parents make right so there's a lot of you know they want to sustain the fiction that they got there through their hard work which they truly believe and they act like you know they came from like you know the hood you know or like rural America, right how hard they work to get here when it's like your parents were literally like doctors. you know like There's no way you were like ever going to not make it because we've become so entrenched in this class divide. And I do think that there's this weird thing that happened where because this elite is quite diffuse. I mean, in the book, I define the elite as the top 20%
00:23:14
Speaker
who are working in knowledge industry jobs because that is really the dividing line. They are controlling over 50% of the GDP. And so they are acting like an aristocracy, but it is quite diffuse, right? So you have the people who went to Harvard, right? But then you have the people who went to like slightly less good schools who have to show that they don't mind that they didn't go to Harvard because they were able to get at their slightly less elite school and even more left woke education. And of course, this all goes back to Tom Wolfe's book, Radical Chic, where he argued that basically ah he called it Nostalgy de la Bou, which is French for nostalgia for the mud. And what that is, is it's something that arose in the 19th century in France where the, you know, people who are sort of upper middle class, right, they wanted to show that they were part of the elites. They wanted to sort of have pretend to be part of the aristocracy.
00:23:59
Speaker
So what do you do in order to prove that you're part of the elites? Well, you have to distinguish yourself from the middle class, right? Like, so they they developed this, they would dress like peasants, basically, that was like the fashion, the girls would like wear kerchiefs and have these like little like adornments on their outfits that of course cost a lot of money. But that made them look like they were peasants, because to be a peasant, right means you're not middle class, right? Obviously, only a very rich person would dress like a peasant because a middle class person is too busy trying to dress like a nice middle class person right what we have today is that but ideologically and so you have this worship of the mentally ill and of the criminal the criminal element right which of course makes it
00:24:41
Speaker
Doubly disgusting how they're now using like Donald Trump convicted felon as a big insult right because of course they are the ones who routinely side in rhetoric and an action with criminals against their victims that is nostalgia de la boo it's saying you know every middle class person and can side with the victim of a crime crime over the criminal. But we are so elite. We are so protected from violent crime that we can side with the criminal. You know, it's saying, you know, every middle class American now knows that Dr. King was right. And the only society worth living in is one in which, which is sanctified by God, where we judge people based on the
00:25:19
Speaker
Content of their character not the color of their skin. So the elites have to turn on that view and say That's lame. That's the real racism, right? We know that the only way to escape racism is to become obsessed with race all the time It's nostalgia de la boo and it is simply a method of consolidating status and proving that you're part of the elites and you know, having immense contempt for the average American who finally by the way has embraced the values this nation was founded on.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, in between that 19th century view of, I'm going to mess up the term, the Australian accent isn't good for French terms. What was it again? I'm definitely not saying it like a French person. I was calling it i was pronouncing it totally wrong until somebody like took me aside and was like, Bátio, Bátio, this is how you say it. But I it's it's i think it's pronounced Nóstel gee de la boo. Boo, I think means mud. I was calling it boo-ay for a very long time. Well, in between that and the modern incartation, we had this kind of period in the 20th century where instead of luxury beliefs, you had status being portrayed through big houses or through trophy wives or through Ferraris. It's funny how there has then been this move back to
00:26:32
Speaker
using ideology to define who you are and where you fit in society. That is the top 20%. But let's get to the heroes of the book, the working class. And this is a surprisingly difficult category to define because you have waiters and waitresses in Manhattan making very little money who no doubt would hold the sort of luxury beliefs that many people on the Upper East Side in penthouses would hold. And similarly, you've got electricians potentially making more money than university graduates. So it's It's not a simple categorization. How do you define the working class?
Defining the Working Class and Its Challenges
00:27:04
Speaker
It is very hard to define. I mean, 11% of people working in service industry jobs have a degree, right? It's ridiculous to call them elites. Although many of them are sort of, you know, in Starbucks right now to sort of try to unionize Starbucks and then from there they will move on to their next union job and finally ascend union leadership, right? So it's not, it's not quite, but you know, I don't see them as a lot of people sort of are saying, well, this is the new proletariat. I don't really see it that way. If you have a college degree, you have many, many, many options open to you. It might be difficult in the beginning, but you know a clerk for a Supreme Court justice is going to be making $70,000 a year, which is just slightly above the household median. right like They're not economically elite yet, but in 10 years, they're going to be making $500,000 a year. so it's Of course, their income is a proxy, culture is a proxy, but many of these things really go together. so The definition that I eventually settled on, which to me seemed to be the line,
00:27:59
Speaker
between an elite that has access to the American dream, that lives longer, that is healthier, that is insulated from crime and deaths of despair and so forth, versus the working class, which is increasingly struggling to become homeowners, doesn't have access to affordable health healthcare care, has no retirement savings. Some do, but you know mostly will will struggle there and is downwardly mobile and their children have fewer options than they do. So that distinguishing line to me fell along the lines of, I defined working class as people who work full-time in an industry that does not require skills you would have learned in college, ah who have been locked out of the top 20%. And the top 20% cuts in now with inflation around $130,000 a year. So for example, cops, sanitation workers, firefighters, skilled trades folks who are not rich, I would define them as working class. I would also define as working class people making $17,000 a year um working for DoorDash.
00:28:55
Speaker
But, you know, contractors making 250K a year. I think it's safe to say, you know, we could, we could consider them, you know, outside the scope of this book, if you will. Then you say yeah you say there is incredible diversity within that group and you put forward three subcategories, I guess. Take me through those. Yeah. So the working class is both racially diverse. It's obviously made up of men and women, um ah people all across the country in many, many different industries. It seemed to me that they fell in three main categories, and I called them rising, floating, and sinking. um The rising category is people who have access to the American dream. Like I said, cops, firefighters, um you know a lot of people, civil servants, and the skilled trades mostly.
00:29:36
Speaker
and people working in steel and aluminum and manufacturing a lot of these people are making you know eighty ninety thousand dollars a year their homeowners they have adequate health care they have retirement savings and their kids are upwardly mobile the choice to go to college if they want to then you have the sort of the biggest sector which is the floating working class americans. These are people who are able to cover all their bills, especially now wages are up. They started going up under President Trump. And then after the sort of post pandemic labor crunch, wages went up even further, although then, of course, we're totally halted by Joe Biden's open border. But these are people who are making, you know,
00:30:10
Speaker
Between $50,000 and $70,000 a year, they're able to cover all their bills. But because of where they live, if they live in metro areas or in Democrat-run cities, they will never be homeowners. And they have no retirement, often because they spend all of their savings on health care. And so they're not sort of lying awake, wondering how they're going to pay the bills, but they don't understand how they will ever be able to afford to retire. And their kids, they have nothing to pass on to them. So that's kind of the biggest group in the middle. And then there's the working poor, people who just work and work and work and cannot get any kind of stability, whether it's because their lives are impacted by crime.
00:30:45
Speaker
or drugs or multiple children with multiple parents, a lot of single moms in this group, single grandmothers, people who just work really, really, really hard, some of whom have done everything right and just cannot get a foothold. Maybe they have to live in a certain place because they have elderly parents, and that is a place where they you know there are no opportunities for them. They don't have a college degree, and so they're immediately locked out of a lot of opportunities that they feel they would be qualified to do. And these are this is, I call them the sinking working class. Across those three groups, do you find commonalities amongst what they believe or are they actually defined by the differences in their beliefs?
00:31:23
Speaker
I found that across the board, there was much less division than there was consensus. So for many, many of these people, they had a very similar view. And um the two women I like to bring up to to really exemplify this are Amy, a gay certified nurse's aide who lives in Florida and is married to a woman, and Linda, um a big Trump supporter who drives a van for Amazon and lives in West Virginia. And just describing these two women to you, you might expect like, well, they would have nothing in common. And in fact, almost nothing distinguishes their ideology from each other. So Amy, the gay certified nurses aid from Florida thinks that parents who take children to drag shows should be put in prison. She thinks that. the open border is impacting wages in a really big way. She doesn't understand why we're supporting the war in Ukraine. um She thinks that, you know, gender transition should be available only very rarely and only to adults who have really put in a lot of thought about it. And, you know, and she doesn't like welfare. She thinks people should work and she's she has ah a disabled nephew who lives with her and she's very proud of him because she got him a job in the kitchen at her nursing home and She's really proud that he chose to work when he could have chosen to live on Social Security.
Working-Class Political Preferences and Engagement
00:32:30
Speaker
and linda's like i mean There's nothing there that Linda would disagree with. In fact, Linda, the Trump voting West Virginia Amazon truck driver, is extremely pro-gay. When her nephew came out of the closet and was kicked out of his mom's home, she said to him, I will always be here for you. I will always support you. I love you. and I've got your back. and She said, I don't care what people do in the privacy of their own home. and
00:32:50
Speaker
As far as all the other things, it doesn't understand why we're funding the war in Ukraine. It thinks it's a travesty that there are so many homeless veterans. It doesn't understand why people who are working class, who are struggling can't get food stamps, but hates welfare. It's a very, very, very, very similar views. And I found that across the board, the vast majority of people I interviewed wanted much less immigration and much more access to healthcare, including government backed healthcare. So those things in America, we don't think of them as going together. But 60% of people fall into that category where they want much less immigration and much more access to quality health care. Yeah, that's fascinating. And so when that group or that series of groups that generally hold similar beliefs don't see a political party that actually adequately reflects those things or maybe only reflects pockets of them, does that lead to a ah sense of nihilism? Do they just go, neither of the parties represent me, so I just don't care anymore? What's what's the implications of that?
00:33:47
Speaker
They're much less political politically active than we are in the elites because of that. But also, they really like Trump. And they see Trump as a third party candidate. And they see him as a liberal. And they really like that about him, the ones who are Trump voters. Of course, I met people who, Amy really doesn't like Trump. She feels like he, she doesn't like the way he talks about women. But her wife voted for him. Her wife really likes him. um She thinks that he put money in her pocket and she thinks that he can't be bought. And, you know, they had interesting conversations about it. And as soon as he was elected, Amy said, okay, this is my president. And that's the kind of normal conversation like normal people have, like working class people, like they have neither the luxury nor the desire to hate people for their political views, especially because they mostly agree with them. But you know, there is disagreement on Trump, but it just does not activate them in the same way that it activates the elites and
00:34:40
Speaker
You know, even a lot of the Democrats who I interviewed who would not vote for him, they did admit that he puts money in their pockets. Which raises the question as to why the Democrats are running so hard on basically the whole Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump is the next incarnation of Hitler. Trump is a fascist, because whether or not you believe that, it just doesn't sound like that line of attack is resonating amongst the people that they need to win over to win the election. Right. So they that it tells you a lot about who they see as their base. And their base is, for example, the people who are would never be impacted by
00:35:19
Speaker
low-wage competition from illegal immigrants because they're either rich, educated people who work with, ah you know, who need a command of the English language and need credentials to do their jobs, or they are the dependent poor who don't work. And so, you know, they're not threatened by illegal immigrants either, right? they You know, that it tells you a lot about who their base is, the fact that they're running on such a symbolic thing. I mean, obviously, a nonsense made up thing, but even if you don't think it's nonsense and made up, it is symbolic. when the vast majority of Americans say that their number one issue is inflation and their number two issue is immigration. And these things are like totally connected, obviously, because immigration for them is an economic proposition, not a symbolic one or a racial one. Yeah. So it tells you everything you need to know about the Democrats that they're running on these symbolic issues because they do not have an economic platform to run on because it was stolen by Donald Trump, who realized that the Democrats sort of pre-Clinton, you know, pro-labor,
00:36:12
Speaker
A platform was like just there for the taking. right i mean It used to be the Democrats who were into policing the border to protect working class wages. It used to be the Democrats who said, you know, abortion should be legal, but rare. right It used to be the Democrats who said, look, we're getting you know most of these you know union workers, laborers, working class people, like what do they need? And now this is you know Donald Trump. We'll get to the economy and immigration in just a moment and how they come together, but there was an interesting little insight there that I do want to pull out, and that is the respect that the working class has for hard work and the dignity that they find in hard work. That's a theme that runs through the book. Tell me about that.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yeah, that was ah that was really, really apparent to me. And I mean, people just talked about their jobs from a place of this is where I get a lot of self esteem. This is where I get a lot of dignity. This is where my freedom is rooted in my willingness to work hard. It was something nobody can take away from them. It was a precious inheritance that they had gotten from their parents in many cases. They remember seeing their parents getting dressed and going to work every day. Every person I interviewed said to me, ah you know given the choice between you you know welfare, more government assistance, a pay raise, more money, more ability to support myself, more opportunities, every single person wanted more opportunities. They loved working and they believed in autonomy. I mean, this was a huge value for them. They wouldn't have used that word, but that was what they were describing, the ability to to be to have self-determination, to decide for themselves.
00:37:47
Speaker
All they wanted was just a little bit more money out of that paycheck so they could make more choices for themselves and for their children. And this is one of the biggest divisions between the working class and the elites. The elites are very paternalistic. That is a very big value for them. They believe in sort of they're happy to give up taxes. I mean, they're so rich, they don't even notice it. but they're happy to pay higher taxes as a kind of indulgence for their wealth and have that go to the government and have the government or institutions redistribute that. And that's because, like we were saying earlier, like the institutions have really delivered for them in like a really big way. And so they have this paternalistic mentality that institutions are good and will make right decisions for them.
Economic Policies and Working-Class Struggles
00:38:25
Speaker
And they don't need to be bothered with those decisions. You make the decision for me. And working class people are the opposite. They really believe in autonomy. They want to make decisions for themselves. They don't believe in redistribution. And it's funny because I feel like here as well as in the UK and in Europe and maybe in Australia as well, you'll tell me we have this view that the sort of two so sides of the economic spectrum are you know, higher taxes, redistribution, welfare on the one side, and then trickle down free markets, free trade, lower taxes on the other side. But the truth is neither of these models works for the working class. What they want is something, it's not even in between, it's in a totally different place, which is they want a protectionist economy that has a lot of sort of free market components within America
00:39:12
Speaker
But when it comes to you know the supply of labor from other countries or trade with other countries, it should favor their work. It should protect their work. And effectively, what we have right now is a situation that really started under you know Clinton, where we have made the labor of American workers too expensive for American consumers and for global consumers. And that's terrible. That is terrible. We're in a race to the bottom. And people will say, oh, well, but in exchange, you know, working class people get cheaper goods from China. And it's like, well, yeah, sure. They could buy a new $75 flat screen TV every year, but they don't have a house to put it in. And everybody recognizes that as a kind of
00:39:53
Speaker
you know, deal with the devil that the United States made that has put money in the pockets of the elites who maybe do want a new bigger flat screen TV every year because they already have two homes and one of them doesn't have one. And I think you you make that case very persuasively in the book, and I'm a libertarian. it was There were parts where I had to struggle with my own beliefs and you know the memories of watching Reagan and Thatcher clips growing up as a nerdy kid. so But I think you make the case. But the ah question that I would have is, was this a failure of ideology or the principle of open markets, or did the US s just not get the transition right? so did they Forget about transitioning areas in the rust belt effectively so that those people would be cared for as, say, less competitive industries like steel, a like the car industry, go offshore and and there wasn't enough attention paid to what happens next to those people. Was this a transition problem or was there a fundamental problem with the underlying principle of free trade in open markets?
00:40:53
Speaker
I think it was the principle of the matter because like you know people are actually still making cars. They're just not making them here as much. right like we're still People are still doing those jobs. and Meanwhile, you know AI is coming for like the learn to code jobs. right so It was really, I think, a mistake born of hubris. I do want to say, you know one of the critiques that I get from the left about the book is that I blame Clinton and Obama and Biden for things that are really um Reagan's fault. you know The deregulation, right which in the the left wing fantasy resulted in this upward transfer of wealth, not to them, which is actually where it went, but to the billionaires. right I got to say, the like the deregulation that Reagan did
00:41:34
Speaker
none of the working class people i interviewed had a problem with that and of course they're right you look at a place like Scandinavia right which is like held up as the like bastion of like leftist hope by people like Bernie Sanders they are a very low regulation low corporate tax system, right? Like they've understood that regulation doesn't necessarily, that it can be a real problem for prosperity and for opportunity for working people. And I think that they see that as well. So they didn't really see Reagan as the bad guy in this story. A lot of them had voted for him. Again, sort of thinking about where in that spectrum they are, they're in a really interesting place. And Trump, to his credit, he just hacked it. I mean, he just somehow
00:42:15
Speaker
understood this, that there was a lane for tariffs, no free trade, no immigrants, but also low regulation, low corporate tax. you know like It's very interesting because I would not have been able to hack that or predict that in 2015 and say, this is where the working class is. And I think most people did not have this feel, just this innate genius for reading the crowd and understanding what they wanted. But between him and Steve Bannon and a few others, they really came up with something that really, really worked. And the left, of course, it's invisible to them because it's against their economic interests. And so they've had to dress it up in this kind of more symbolic cultural way.
00:42:59
Speaker
Why do you think that the few people around the world who have been able to tap into this populist moment? I think Bannon was Goldman Sachs. Was he for a period of time or he was definitely in banking? and This is, you know, he was a wealthy guy, Trump obviously. in the UK for Raj was it was from you know the upper class of the united kingdom boris johnson and the red wall boris was from eating but is not interesting that the people of accident and understand the working class the best in politics of the last decade have all come from the. Traditional elite hat what do you put that down to.
00:43:34
Speaker
they don't have class anxiety. Either they don't have class anxiety vis-a-vis the middle class and the middle, or they themselves, I think in Trump's case, this was really the case. He has felt the pinch of and the sting of the elite contempt that he you know came to represent. So he was very much, you know he yes, he's this sort of real estate tycoon from New York City, but He was very much treated as kind of rigid tunnel, which is ah is a New York City way of sort of sneering at people from the outer boroughs who are more suburban, more middle class. You know, he was always kept out of the elite families who were kind of, you know, have this little cartel in New York City. And I'm sure that he felt that, you know, he went and and and he's always loved the crowd and loved the masses. You know, he's had his TV shows and and all this. But I think that probably it's just
00:44:22
Speaker
they do not have class anxiety vis-a-vis the kind of establishment elites or if they do have it or did have it, it manifested as like wanting to get back at them for for for keeping them out.
Immigration Policy and Working-Class Perspectives
00:44:36
Speaker
um I think in Trump's case, that's true. I don't know Steve Bannon well enough to say. um I will say, I think it's just a travesty that they're trying to put him in prison and just absolutely terrifying. Yeah, that little point there that they love the crowd is a lovely little insight as well. And I think that applies to Farage, to Johnson, to Trump.
00:44:54
Speaker
go back 2,000 years, you the original populist Julius Caesar was theatrical, apparently. like There is something that that basically is part of that as well that says that they want to put on a show to to the ah masses. Immigration, let's go there. The interesting thing when I hear you talk about this that is that when I see 10 million people crossing the border into the US and otherwise intelligent people not making the very sensible argument that countries should have borders, that you can be pro-immigration but you need to do it in a way where you can still have some sort of order around around it. That to me seems like madness, but it's not there is there is a rhyme and a reason to why this is happening. Why is this policy being adopted or allowed by the ah the current administration? I think there's three reasons. The first is that each side has its donor class. So the Republican donor class, they only want one thing.
00:45:47
Speaker
Only want tax cuts. And that is why they all gave money to Nikki Haley, tried to get her you know in and Nikki Haley outspent Trump two to one in this primary. They were desperate to get rid of Trump. They hate Trump and they failed. This is the old country club, Republicans, chamber of commerce. Like what they want is lower taxes, free trade and foreign wars. I mean, that's kind of the, and Trump stands against all of those things. They hate him. And amazingly. Because American democracy is healthy and robust, Trump was able to blow Nikki Haley out of the water despite the billions of dollars that were spent to try to defeat him. And I i feel euphoric about that. I think everybody should, whether you hate Trump or love him, you should feel euphoric about the state of our democracy because it turns out that you know the voice of the people, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, they will have their way and there's nothing you can do about it. And that's incredible. on the left
00:46:39
Speaker
The donor class is sort of made up of this kind of revolving door of democratic politics, celebrities and NGOs, um you know, the Soros Foundation, the Tides Foundation. And a lot of the policy is it's sort of, you know, fomented through these institutions. Like the left has its version of the Cato Institute and they are all open borders. George Soros very, very much does not believe in borders. Tides Foundation is super, super, super left. celebrities in Hollywood who have burnished their, again, this indulgence they pay for being so rich and yet wanting to see themselves as good guys, the immense amounts of pity and empathy they have for everybody who is not their fellow American. So all of that is, that's one reason. The the money is in the open borders. The second reason is the activism is in open borders and the Democrats are very sensitive to activism because they are obsessed with the youth vote because they think it will help them. And so they're kind of like,
00:47:33
Speaker
desperate for the approval of the youth, which I find just completely disgusting. i I don't know why. I'm personally so put off by these grownups, like on their knees, begging young people to tell them what to do and what to believe. I find it disgusting, I guess because I'm religious, but I just find it disgusting. And the third reason is I think Joe Biden thought that it would lower inflation because if he could stop working class wages from rising, There's this view, the Fed perpetuates this view because it only has one function and it is to set interest rates. And the view that kind of controls that is very much based on this idea that rising working class wages is the number one contributor to inflation. It's a very binary way of thinking. And I also think this is appalling and disgusting.
00:48:19
Speaker
that there is this desire to halt working class wages from growing, but they very much see things that way. I mean, that's the way economists see things. I think it's wrong. I think it's been proven to be wrong so much so over the last four years, but um this is the way they see things. And I think Joe Biden and his or his administration, I don't know how much he's in charge of this, certainly Alejandro Mayorkas has never given ah Talk or an interview or a testimony before congress in which he has not brought up the fact that as you put it american corporations are desperate for workers and i think that they felt that they could halt inflation if they brought in just millions and millions of people to ease the labor crunch.
00:49:00
Speaker
and supply American corporations with basically people who are enslaved to the cartels who they can pay very little money. And of course, because the data includes non-citizen labor in it, they could then say you know that this labor you know labor the gains in labor had had halted and thus inflation would come down and thus interest rates would come down and the economy would improve. I'm sure by now you could tell how absolutely disgusting i think that whole like apparatus for arriving at that conclusion is but i think it's unmistakable that that was part of the calculation as well.
00:49:33
Speaker
It also sounds like it comes back to a misunderstanding of the working class that you understand so well now, and that is, there is this implicit assumption from me, Orcus, and people like that, that Americans don't want to do these types of jobs because liberals wouldn't want to do these types of jobs. Whereas what I read in your book is, Even if they are a janitor or if they're flipping burgers or whatever, they're still an innate dignity that many of the people you spoke to find in that job, regardless of what a a someone in New York may think about it.
Recommendations for Democratic Party's Strategy
00:50:04
Speaker
ah hundred percent 100%, 100%. It is so disgusting for liberals who would literally rather die than clean toilets for a living to have turned that into a job that does not pay a living wage. And if you want to meet people who really get a lot of dignity from cleaning toilets, please, I urge people to read my book. I was deeply, deeply humbled by the way people talked about their work there are a lot of people who are happy to clean toilets the thing that's undignified about it is not. The labor itself there's no labor that is undignified it is the conditions it is the wages and it's so obvious first to see this with the job like i mean i'm sure none of us. Very few of us would wanna be like a proctologist right i mean like we can imagine very well paying jobs that we would not wanna have.
00:50:50
Speaker
but we don't consider them to be inherently undignified. Maybe that one a little bit, but we don't consider them to be inherently undignified. But why is it that a woman who changes the diapers of the elderly for a living, so we don't have to change our grandparents diapers, why is it that we are okay saying this job is beneath our dignity and thus we'll never pay a living wage? I think that's so, so outrageous. My final question bar here is it was going to be a one part question. Now in my mind, it's now been reframed to a two part question. If you are speaking to a po a Democratic politician today who has a genuine interest in reconnecting with the working class that they they once owned, or I guess related to more, what advice do you give to that politician? And where the two-part comes in is there is a promising question there. Are there any Democratic politicians you think that are still willing to actually reach out to that demographic, or is it a lost cause?
00:51:45
Speaker
I'm desperate to be asked this by Democratic politicians. I don't know why they're not breaking down my door. like i' It's such an easier sell for the Democrats to go back to where they were in the 90s on immigration than it is for Republicans to come up with a healthcare plan. and yeah it. Republicans are like, welcome me and like, tell us what to do. We want these voters. We want to keep them after Trump. What should we do? And the Democrats will not even give me a look in. I don't know. But yeah, it's a great, great question. And I'm so grateful to you for asking it to me. You know, I think number one is immigration. Just say we were wrong.
00:52:18
Speaker
for all the best reasons. We looked at these people. We felt sorry for them. We felt like it was our fault because of US policy. We thought Trump was really evil, but Trump was right about this. We're going to listen to you. We know that you're not evil and racist. We're going to take Trump's three executive actions, which immediately police the border completely and put them into place. And we're going to refocus on you, the American worker. If they just did that, I think that they would get ah ah because they already have the healthcare piece of things. you know I think that's number one. Number two, they need to come up with some plan for this inflation. I mean, I'm sure you know this, but um Javier Milai apparently might, I don't know if I'm saying his name right, but apparently he's gotten inflation down by double digits in eight months. I mean, come on, like that's amazing. And so much- He's my spirit animal. I love him. He's mine too. i just I just worship that guy. I just love that guy. I love his style of his energy. I love his, you know,
00:53:09
Speaker
that he he likes jews which is very you know increasingly rare and and i love what he's doing with the economy and he's just putting people out of their misery and a lot of that is just government spending like it's so obvious it's same thing with health care if you look at the industries that are growing in terms of jobs numbers health care is always at the top these days But of course, it's not nurses and doctors. It's administrators. It's all this crap that effectively raises the cost of health care without giving any better services. So, you know, I think they need a plan on immigration. They need a plan on um inflation. I think they need to stop backing the trans agenda because it is
00:53:47
Speaker
so unpopular with people. It makes people feel really unsafe for their children. And it's so marginal. Just be normal. Just be normal. But I think the the the economic pieces are the most important pieces of it. And I'm happy to say that on trade, Biden has kept all of Trump's ah innovations and and and revolutionary steps. So that's on that, they're doing really well and reshoring manufacturing and so forth. I think the green agenda is just garbage. Working class people hate it. The left loves to say that Biden's going to lose Michigan over Gaza. He's not. He's going to lose Michigan over EVs and EV mandates, which are totally punishing to both auto consumers and auto workers. So, you know, just it would be so easy for them. They have the playbook. Just go back to the playbook. But unfortunately, you know, because of the reasons we said before, I'm not sure that this is
00:54:33
Speaker
you know There are people out there, but as soon as you get them talking about Trump, because they see him as an easy way of not having to deal with the systemic problems in terms of policy and material issues, you know it's it's very hard to imagine them turning the ship around. Yeah, I heard I can't even remember the commentator that said it, but I heard someone say the first party that just chooses to be normal will to use an Australian expression piss in this election. But unfortunately, both of them in their own little ways are ah seemingly doing everything they can to be weird.
00:55:06
Speaker
Bardia, the insight and the passion that you bring to this subject and the honesty that you bring to it makes this, as I said, I think the politics book of the year. And if more people read it, I think that the America would be getting closer to bridging some of the divides, which at the moment are pervasive across the country. Thank you for writing it. And and thank you for coming on today. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation and those kind words. They really mean so much to me. um Thank you. Thank you. God bless you. And we'll talk soon. you