Chase Carter
Jan Jekielek: In 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, you noticed that two-thirds of the working class voted in his favor.
Batya Ungar-Sargon: It was surprising because he won two-thirds of white working-class voters and is now dominating Hispanic voters as well. In terms of polls right now, he’s looking at a third of black male voters.
He is now the candidate of the working class. That’s really the reason the Democrats have been trying to destroy it. That’s why every time we turn on cable news, we hear liberals calling him a unique threat to democracy, when in fact he is the opposite.
The vast majority of people who occupy elite positions on the left are not just liberals, they are part of an economic elite. His economic interests are in great conflict with the working-class voters that Trump represents. The richest 20% now accumulate more than 50% of GDP. They would rather consider Donald Trump and his voters as evil, because then they wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that they themselves betrayed those voters years ago.
I understood that there was a huge class divide in America and that this story was not being told. I asked: “Who is the working class that has been abandoned by these Democrat and Leftist elites?” So I traveled across the country to find out.
Related Stories
Mr. Jekielek: For much of its history, America was highly meritocratic. Through your discussions you discover that this has changed, and this is one of your central themes. There is a class divide in America and these elites think differently than many of us.
Mrs. We were a meritocratic society, but that started to change somewhere in the 1970s. It really started to consolidate itself as a new paradigm with President Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA. [North American Free Trade Agreement] in law. This was a multinational trade deal in which 5 million good-paying working-class jobs were shipped to China and Mexico.
After that, President Barack Obama said those jobs would not come back and cut funding for job training, which had been another great path to the American dream for the American working class. Then Joe Biden sealed the deal by opening the border and welcoming 15 million illegal immigrants to compete with the working class for their jobs. The wages the American working class was able to command fell because there was a greater supply of labor.
The idea of meritocracy, that everyone should have access to the American dream and equal opportunity, has become an ideology that protects the status of over-credentialed elites. They are convinced that they have more money than anyone else because of their own virtue and merit.
Mr. Jekielek: The American dream means creating a good life for your family. Despite everything, many people you’ve talked to still believe this dream is possible, even though it seems much more difficult.
Mrs. There was such a deep love for this country and such a deep respect for the work. This is something that is lost on the left. For Democrats and the Left, the way to help the working class is to get more people with higher incomes to qualify for welfare. This is not what the working class wants. They take pride in their work and view it through a spiritual lens.
The problem is that today these jobs no longer provide them with the basic characteristics of stability, no matter how hard they work. The cost of a middle-class life in relation to the salaries they earn has become a complete mismatch. This is completely unacceptable, because our entire country depends on your work.
The only people who guarantee the American dream will come true are the people in the richest 20% of the knowledge industry and who do jobs that most of us wouldn’t miss if they disappeared tomorrow. But if all the truck drivers disappeared tomorrow, we would starve.
Mr. Jekielek: I love how people react when you say, “Trump is the centrist candidate.” It’s obvious just by looking, but somehow people are missing it.
Mrs. They’re missing it because there’s a lot of energy spent trying to hide it from both sides. The Republican donor class and elites do not want to admit that Trump is a centrist. But Democrats don’t want to admit it either. He is the Democratic Party’s pro-labor past coming back to haunt them.
That’s why we have this narrative about him and his followers being racist or a threat to democracy. They have to portray it as a threat, because the truth is an indictment of themselves and their own failures.
I had Trump Derangement Syndrome, so this has been a journey for me.
It took me a long time to deprogram myself. It all started with the realization of how corrosive the awakened ideology was. My rabbi has always loved Trump. When he first told me this, it was like a crack in the armor because he is an amazing person and obviously not racist.
The elites’ mockery of the working class has always bothered me. Then I started to see that this was related to the way they covered Trump. His analysis of himself absorbing the blows of their contempt for the working class began to ring true for me. That’s how I ended up here.
Mr. Jekielek: “Second Class: How Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women” is the product of his journey and I highly recommend it to our viewers. Batya Ungar-Sargon, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mrs. Thank you very much, Jan. God bless you.
t
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
