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 explain 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.
Today, Batya discusses who really represents the working class; why she thinks America has broken its contract with the working class; how we reinstate our commitment to them; and what will happen in 2024 if we don’t.
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Time for my favorite quote from Fight Club:
“
Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us.
“
This is what the wealthy elites in media refuse to understand.
Your guests provides some much needed perspective on the plight of the nation’s current working class. However, she doesn’t have a very firm grasp of market economics.
As such, she presents a number of myths. The key myth is that manufacturing has been in decline—that is just wrong. Manufacturing output has been growing steadily—USA is still a leading manufacturer. However, the relative number of jobs in the manufacturing sector has declined relative to all jobs.
Despite this relative decline many manufacturing jobs go unfulfilled. The challenge is that today’s manufacturing jobs tend to be higher skilled but well paying. The manufacturing jobs that have and are disappearing are low-wage, low skilled or no skilled jobs that were plentiful in the 50s and 60s but not so much now.
I do think she has a point about how uncontrolled immigration puts pressure on the remaining low-wage, low-skilled jobs as well as on housing and food costs. However, these issues are policy issues reflecting government intervention in the economy—e.g. restrictions on building new homes or green regulations have limited the supply of housing, driving down availability and driving up price.