The Unheard Voices of America’s Working Class

This episode originally premiered on EpochTV on April 13, 2024, and was only available to paid subscribers to The Epoch Times.

From time to time, they release certain interviews to the public via YouTube and/or Rumble, which they did in this case. 

I am happy that they did because this important interview explains what typical Americans think about what has been happening since Joe Biden took office.

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Batya Ungar-Sargon is an American journalist and author. Recently, she traveled the country, speaking to everyday Americans about their lives and what they think about the political, economic, and cultural climate.

She compiled her findings in her 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 Democrat party betrayed middle-class Americans by creating a knowledge industry consisting of credentialed elites who benefit economically from illegal immigration and trade liberalization.

Full Transcript Of Interview

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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 afterward was more astonishing. There wasn’t a big soul-searching among the Democratic Party to figure out what happened, but it was almost like blame. How do you account for that?

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
That’s such a great way to put it, 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 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 sold out these voters many years ago who are now turning to Trump.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve done something 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 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 conflicted 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 any place at all. There’s a real crisis of patriotism with these people.

A lot of that comes from the fact that to graduate from an American University, you have to take a composition class, which is taught by an English PhD, who has gone through 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 lives. 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 pay 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 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 the Left, the way that you help the working class is by 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 risks 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 an oligarchy of the credentialed, where the only people who can be guaranteed the American dream are people in the top 20 percent in the knowledge industry who do jobs that most of us would not miss if they disappeared tomorrow.

But if all the truckers disappeared tomorrow, we would starve. Yet, somehow a truck driver cannot be guaranteed the most basic, fundamental, modest version of what it means to have a stable life. I did between 75 and 100 interviews. I traveled as much as I could until my money ran out and did the rest of them on the phone. I then took all of the interviews and culled them down to the people who I felt had the most sympathetic stories that represented larger trends.
It was very hard finding people. Obviously, we all have our own networks, but I didn’t want my confirmation bias or anything random about my life to determine the picture that I was trying to paint. The other books that exist in this genre are often done by academics who have a team of 10 or 20 researchers at their disposal. They have a foundation and an unlimited amount of time and money. Some people spend 10 years on a book like this.

I didn’t have that kind of time. I have a day job working at Newsweek. I really had these constraints, but I also felt that it was better to have whatever I could come up with, rather than no book at all. I hired somebody and he found about five or six of the people in the book. He happened to be in Appalachia, so he would drive around. I would tell him what kinds of stories I was looking for people and what kinds of industries.

Then it was by word of mouth. I put up ads in different places and I used Facebook groups. I was very hesitant to approach people at work because I felt that there was a consent issue there. I would approach them and they would assume I was a customer and that made me uncomfortable, so I tried not to do that. There’s a lot of working-class people around us all the time. It’s just a question of engaging them in a dignified way. I was totally surprised by how willing people were to share their stories with me, which were deeply personal, and I was very grateful for that.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a remarkable set of stories. One of the things you highlighted is called the benefits cliff, meaning you might not make enough money, but you’re still eligible for all kinds of benefits. But then at some point, if you start making enough money, you no longer qualify for the benefits. It is hard to save anything or do anything more than live month to month. Please tell us about that reality.

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
Yes, the benefits cliff is a really big deal, and it came up a lot in the interviews. Let’s say you’re a single mom working for $11/hour, and you have a child with some sort of disability or medical issue. The child has Medicaid and the Cadillac of health benefits. You’re working for $11/hour and you’re getting by because you get free healthcare from the government. You get food stamps and maybe you get help with housing. There’s a lot of help available to poor people.
But then let’s say you’re a really good worker. You show up on time, you work really hard, you’re invested in the job, and your boss notices. He says, “Hey, I think you’d be really good at the next level. I want to give you a raise to $15/hour.” If that single mom takes that raise, she will lose the equivalent of $25,000 a year in government benefits. What she will be making in increased salary will only be around $10,000 a year, so it’s a massive sacrifice.

We have incentivized people to stay below a certain level of income. If she gets married, she will lose the vast majority of these benefits. She could take the job, which may even come with healthcare, but that healthcare is probably going to have a $5,000 deductible. It’s probably going to be terrible healthcare, and so she’s actually harming her child.

Why would she give up this amazing government healthcare for this terrible private healthcare? In all these ways, we are incentivizing people to work against their own best interests. Everybody I interviewed said they would rather have a better job that paid better than have anything from the government, which they were not really interested in. Yet, so many of those jobs don’t afford them the things that they need.

This is a really big problem. Because they were very upset at the idea that people had to choose not to work, or would choose not to work. But then, if they needed help with a little thing here or there, they could never get the help they needed. They all had stories of people who they knew who worked so hard, who needed a little bit of help and could not get it.

These were people often who had disastrous things happen to them, and as a result, couldn’t afford to feed their families, people who worked and then felt very much frustrated that there was a lot of help for the people who they felt did not deserve it as much. But this benefits cliff is real. We have to find a way to stop incentivizing the worst behaviors and start incentivizing the behaviors that lead to autonomy.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re telling me the system is set up to keep people down. You mentioned that if they get married, they will lose these benefits. If there’s one thing that guarantees success for the children and the family, it is a stable marriage. It’s the golden ticket, but that is disincentivized in the structure that you’re describing.

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
I have also seen the data about that success sequence. I actually did not find that in my interviews. I met a lot of people who had followed the success sequence and were still the working poor. I met a lot of people who didn’t, who had children with multiple partners out of wedlock, and who made it.
But those trends are obvious. We know that the number one predictor for downward mobility for a child is whether they are born out of wedlock. Yet, we penalize people for getting married and doing the thing that would most help their children to succeed. It’s insane and it’s appalling.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is another jargon term called degree inflation.

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
Yes, there is something called the diploma divide, which really represents the way having a degree can ensure you the hallmarks of a middle-class life. People who have a college degree are healthier and live longer. On average, they will make a million dollars a year more than a person without a college degree. They are really insulated from the kinds of precariousness that plague working-class life.

That’s a real problem because it’s not like these people are coming out of college with a succinct set of skills that they then deploy in the workforce. We know that over 50 percent of Americans with a college degree are underemployed, meaning they’re working in jobs that don’t require that degree, although they still make more than people who don’t have a degree. That degree really has become a gatekeeper of the American dream, when it was supposed to be a pathway for it.

Mr. Jekielek:
People who work with their hands in the real world have to deal with reality, more so than people who work at a computer in the virtual world. A degree may be required to get a job, but maybe someone without that degree would do much better at the job because of the real-world skills they have. You have to pass this ideological litmus test now. It almost becomes another kind of ceiling where all sorts of people who are getting jobs are of this woke ideological persuasion, as opposed to people who would look at it and say, “This is crazy. This has nothing to do with me.”

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
Yes, I would say that woke ideology is very alien to working-class Americans of all races. I would define wokeness as taking a worldview that was based on right vs. wrong and replacing it with a worldview that only distinguishes between powerful and powerless. It ascribes all virtue to the allegedly powerless who have no agency and no responsibilities.

Then they say, “All people of color are powerless and all white people are powerful,” and that’s it. Then you have your matrix and your rubric and your binary where people of color are inherently virtuous and have no agency and no moral responsibility to act. They can’t act at all because white people are inherently evil and run the world. That’s woke ideology.

This is very foreign to how working-class Hispanics and black people see themselves. They find it insulting and alienating. On the issue of taking responsibility, I would say they over-ascribe responsibility to themselves. They’re much more likely to blame themselves for things going wrong than the market that’s stacked against them, which is why they’re so patriotic. On the whole, they really don’t like the woke ideology because they see it as intolerant.
But by the same token, they also don’t like Republicans who build an entire agenda around fighting wokeness, because they see that as intolerant too.

The most common view on LGBTQ issues that I encountered among working-class Americans was extremely pro-gay, but extremely worried about the transgender agenda. To them, there is no LGBTQ. There are gay people in their lives who they want to see treated with love and respect, and who want to get married and raise children in a loving environment.

Then there’s the transgender ideology that’s coming for the schools and coming for the sports, and they really don’t like that. The reason they don’t like wokeness is because they see it as intolerant and they are deeply tolerant people. I would urge any Republicans listening to this to keep that in mind.

Mr. Jekielek:
They believe that people should be able to make their own decisions for themselves, but they don’t like a coercive ideology saying, “This is how you have to be. This is how you have to think.”

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
This comes back to Trump. To the Left and the Democrats, Trump is an extremist, but to his supporters, he’s a moderate. They love that about him because they don’t look to politicians to tell them what their values should be. They already know what their values are. They look to politicians to embody and pursue policy that reflects their values. Because they are extremely moderate, they want a moderate agenda.

Trump’s agenda is about tariffs with China, controlling immigration, and 15 weeks on abortion. He’s pro-gay, he’s courting unions, and he’s courting blacks. That’s it. That’s very close to what I found working-class people want. Now, they’re not all going to vote for him. For some of them, character is really an issue. Although increasingly, it’s an economic privilege that many of them don’t have, to be able to vote on character.

The one thing that Trump has not talked about that was very important to people was healthcare. The vast majority of people I interviewed wanted a total moratorium on immigration. Okay, Trump has that piece. But they also wanted some kind of government-backed catastrophic healthcare plan. They couldn’t stand the idea that people would have to go into medical debt. Those that work with their hands for a living, who do physical manual labor, could over the course of their career see their bodies break down and then not be able to afford to see a good doctor. That was really offensive to them.

Mr. Jekielek:
In the book, you mention the cost of individual healthcare has had maybe a 100 percent increase. It is truly an unbelievable increase, relative to wages or inflation or almost any measure.

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
Yes. In the 60s, it cost $120 a year for a family to have healthcare, and now it costs like $25,000 a year. It’s disgusting and obscene. The insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies are cartels, and everybody kowtows to them.

The first party to support policing the border, protecting American jobs, and healthcare affordability is going to have a ruling majority.

I don’t know which party will get there first. I’m not particularly invested in which party gets there first, but that is the winning formula right there. I just hope people are listening, because it’s astounding to me that nobody would want to pick up this formula and run with it.

Mr. Jekielek:
I love how people react to you when you say, “Trump is the centrist candidate and he has a very centrist agenda.” It’s obvious just looking at it, but somehow, people are missing this.

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
They are missing it because there is a lot of energy expended in trying to hide this on both sides. The Republican donor class and the Republican elites don’t want to admit that Trump is a centrist. But the Democrats also don’t want to admit it. He effectively picked up the Democratic agenda from the 90s they had abandoned when they ignored labor to cater to the college-credentialed elites, and then he ran with it. He’s literally the pro-labor past of the Democratic Party coming back to haunt them.

They have to destroy him because he literally embodies their own failures. He is the exposure of their own failures. That’s why you have this narrative about him being racist and his followers being racist, or him being a unique threat to democracy, despite being the most popular politician in the country. They have to portray him as a unique threat because to admit the truth is an indictment of themselves and their own failures.

Mr. Jekielek:
Batya, who needs to read this book?

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
If you’re a working-class person, you will find people like you talking about the things that matter to you and how to help widen the pathway to the American dream. I hope that it will give working-class people comfort and a sense of relief to see their own views represented because effectively, they have been silenced.
If you are part of the elite you should read this book, so you know how your fellow Americans are living.

It’s just appalling to have neighbors who are working so much harder than we are and yet struggling to achieve the things that we take for granted. It’s not always easy to learn about that and to see the things that we should have humility about.

I had the Trump derangement syndrome, so this has been a long journey for me. I was wrong about Trump. I feel very humble towards the people who have a fraction of my education who were right about him, and I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s a nonpartisan book, so I would hope that people on the Left and the Right would find something to help them remember what this country is all about, and which unites us more than divides us.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned that at one time you had Trump derangement syndrome. It’s a kind of brainwashing that people are subjected to by big media and other institutions that are all pushing the same line over and over again. That has had a profound impact on us and that’s part of the reason we’re here today. How do you understand that, and how did you suddenly see through it?

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
I didn’t suddenly see through it, and it took a long time to deprogram myself. It started with realizing how corrosive the woke ideology was.

My rabbi, who’s the most amazing person I know, always really loved Trump. When he first told me that, it was like a crack in the armor because I know he’s an incredible person and obviously not a racist.

There is a local working-class bar here that I go to, and people there gently helped me along. Throughout 2018 and 2019, the wokeness was ramping up and becoming more and more obviously psychotic and more and more anti-Semitic and just disgusting. I started to become really uncomfortable with the way the people in my milieu talked about black people. I started to understand that my black friends felt really uncomfortable with the way that the woke media talked about race in general. It happened slowly, and then all at once.

First, you have to get rid of the derangement syndrome. Then you slowly start to think, “If they were wrong about all of his supporters being racist, what else are they wrong about? Are they wrong about the Russia hoax? Okay, they were big-time wrong about COVID. What else are they wrong about?”

The sneering of the elites vis-a-vis the working class always bothered me. Then I started to see that as very much connected to the way that they covered Trump. His analysis of himself absorbing the blows of their contempt for the working class started to ring true for me. That’s how I ended up here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Your book, “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women,” is the product of your journey. It’s an incredible book and I highly recommend it to our viewers. Batya Ungar Sargon, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Ungar-Sargon:
Thank you so much Jan. God bless you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Batya Ungar-Sargon and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host Jan Jekielek.