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Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back.
It's Washington Journal's annual Holiday Authors Week series, and it continues this morning, eight days of conversations with America's top writers from across the political spectrum on a variety of public policy and political topics.
Today, we have Batya Unger Sargon, an opinion editor at Newsweek, and her book is called Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
Batya, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much for having me.
It is so great to be here with you and all of your viewers.
So from the title of your book, how are you defining elites?
So one of the things that academics, sociologists, anthropologists, people who study America from a data point of view have noticed over the last few decades is that this country that was founded on the idea of classlessness, on the idea that every person should have equal access to the American dream, has increasingly become divided by class.
And what I mean by that is, if you have a college degree, you are increasingly likely to become a homeowner, to have children who have that passed on to them, the privilege of the American dream, to be able to afford an education for your children, to be able to afford adequate health care.
You live longer.
You make on average about a million more dollars over the course of your career than people without a college degree.
And in general, this idea of the American dream has become something that only people with a college degree have access to.
And meanwhile, people without a college degree are increasingly facing things like deaths of despair by suicide, by overdose, by alcoholism.
They are less likely to be homeowners.
Their children are downwardly mobile.
And so this class divide has really opened up in America, separating out the haves from the have-nots along class lines based on your education.
So that's what I really write about in the book is how that process happened.
Sorry, just to go back to the question as is it anybody with a college education then you would define as an elite?
So I would define elite as anybody who's working in a job that requires skills that they learned in college, who are in the top 20%.
So that's making more than $135,000 a year.
And then how do you, how would you say that this group, the elites, as you called them, have betrayed the working class?
What do you think they did to the working class?
Well, basically, over the last 60 years, since 1971, which was the high watermark for working class wages, after which they began to stagnate and then decline when you factor in inflation, we have put into place policy that was an upward transfer of wealth from people who work with their hands for a living to people who are in that top 20% who work in jobs that require skills that you learn in college.
Those policies took money from our working class neighbors and put them in the pockets of people who are in that elite.
And those policies include things like NAFTA, which shipped 5 million very good paying working class jobs overseas to China and Mexico to build up their middle class.
So you had downward mobility in the Rust Belt and other areas that were manufacturing powerhouses where working class people could achieve the American dream.
We imported millions and millions and millions of low-wage workers to compete with the jobs that remained here, further driving down the wages of the working class, but putting those savings in the pockets of people who hire working class people.
And then we defunded vocational training in high school, meaning that now you don't have that avenue to the middle class for working class kids who want to work with their hands rather than go to college.
All of these things were policies that took money that would have gone to the working class in previous generations and put them back in the pockets of the people who hire working class people.
That's what I call a betrayal of our working class neighbors by the elites, the consumers of low-wage labor.
And do you think this betrayal was one party over the other?
Or do you think both political parties are to blame for this?
I think that there was a handshake agreement between the elites on both sides.
However, those three policies that I named were enacted by Democratic administrations.
So while the Republicans were certainly supportive of NAFTA, it was Bill Clinton who put that into practice.
While I'm sure Republicans didn't object, it was President Barack Obama who defunded vocational training.
The Republicans used to be the side that loved an open border.
It used to be the Democrats that wanted strong borders to protect working class wages.
But then you saw this kind of political realignment to where now you do have Republicans saying we need a strong border.
And it's really the Democrats who believe that we need a much more permissive policy.
And often they will say very explicitly why.
They'll say, well, you know, Americans are not going to be able to afford things if suddenly you limit the supply of labor.
These are jobs Americans just won't do.
That's really a myth.
There is no industry in America that is a majority done by immigrants, certainly not illegal immigrants, and that includes farming, okay?
So every job in America, the majority of people working it are Americans.
And it is so insulting to say to those hardworking Americans, this is not a job that's worthy of an American.
How do you think that makes them feel?
I want to play for you Independent Senator Bernie Sanders.
He was on CNN, and he talked about his thoughts on how the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.
Take a look, and then I'll get you your reaction.
60% of our people live in paycheck to paycheck.
How do we not talk and fight for raising the minimum wage to a living wage?
Dana, on Tuesday, in the election, in the state of Missouri, a conservative state.
They became one of the many states that vote, I think, 58% to raise the minimum wage.
Now, how is it that in Congress and the Senate, we haven't even brought a damn minimum wage bill onto the floor?
We are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people as a human right.
The Affordable Care Act is a stopgap measure.
It is not addressing the real health care crisis in America.
Why aren't we saying, yes, health care is a human right?
We're going to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies.
We're going to pass the PRO Act to make it easier for workers to join unions.
We're going to expand Social Security by lifting up.
We're going to demand that the billionaires start paying their fair share of taxes.
You know, Dana, all of these issues that I'm talking about, these are not Bernie Sanders ideas.
These are without exception popular ideas that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents support.
Now, the people who don't support it is the billionaire class, and they got a lot of power.
But we've got to be prepared to take them away.
Batier, your reaction to that.
First of all, I just have to commend Senator Sanders for even speaking in this way.
The rage that he feels about how working class Americans are treated in this country.
I feel it too.
I think a lot of them feel it.
So just huge kudos to him for speaking up on the issue.
The solutions he proposes are not the solutions that I found when I was traveling around the country and interviewing hundreds of working class people that they want.
And what I mean by that is Bernie Sanders is the perfect example of the good faith left-wing effort to describe the plight of the working class.
But the solutions there are very redistributionist.
His answer is, let's raise taxes on the rich, take that money, and give things to working class people.
That's not what working class people want.
What they actually want is something Senator Sanders talked about in 2015 when he was asked by Ezra Klein, shouldn't you support open borders if you care so much about the poor?
What about the global poor?
To which Senator Sanders said, open borders?
That's a Koch brothers proposal.
They would love to bring in people to work $2, $3 an hour and compete with the American working class.
I don't believe in any of that.
That is the kind of solution that Senator Sanders no longer believes, but that working class people understand very, very intuitively that the supply of labor, an endless supply of people to compete with them, is going to drive down their wages.
They see that at the end of every month.
They understand that trade deals that don't favor America, that favor China, that favor Mexico, that favor Vietnam, that these are coming at their expense.
They don't want the proceeds of someone else's labor.
They want their very hard work to pay more.
And honestly, you just can't get there with the minimum wage bill.
Of course, I support people making minimum wage, making much more than they're making.
But I think what Trump was offering, which is why he got so much support, not just from white working class people, but from Hispanic working class people, he got the majority of Hispanic men.
He got 25% of black men.
Why?
Because he was providing an alternative to the redistribution model.
He was providing a protectionist model that said, I'm going to protect the labor of the American worker by limiting the supply of the competition, by making better trade deals with tariffs.
These are all things that will make sure that when a working class person goes to work, their employer has to pay them more money rather than taking that money from a rich person and handing it over.
And I think that appeals to them much more.
And if you'd like to join our conversation with our author, Batia Ungar Sargon, you can do so.
Our lines are actually regional this time.
So if you're in the eastern or central time zones, call us on 202-748-8000.
If you're in Mountain or Pacific, you can use 202-748-8001.
Batia, Senator Sanders also talked about access to affordable health care.
What do you think about policies geared toward that?
Health care is so unbelievably important.
Our healthcare system is so broken.
There are cartels in the hospital administration world.
There are cartels in big pharma and in the insurance companies that all collude to make sure that the hardest working Americans who work with their physical bodies cannot access high quality, affordable health care.
And here's the thing.
What I found in my book is the same thing that polling finds again and again and again.
The vast majority of working class people in America, whether they vote for Democrats or Republicans, what they want is much less immigration and much more access to health care.
The first party that gets to that combination is going to do extremely, extremely well because what we have right now is one party that believes in controlling the border but does not really have a health care plan and the other party that's willing to talk about health care but has basically ceded to the open borders activist and donor class because the Democrats donors really like that kind of far-left radical ideology and neither party is really saying we're going to make sure you have both of those things.
If the Republicans realize this before the Democrats, they'll have a ruling majority for a very long time.
I want to read a portion of your book called Second Class.
This is about political party and it says this.
The majority of the people I spoke to have views that don't fit with either party, whether liberal or conservative.
Most people I spoke to supported significantly limiting immigration, but also majorly expanding access to health care.
They supported gay marriage and were very pro-gay, but also very worried about the spread of transgender ideology, especially the spread in schools.
They were, quote, anti-woke, but it wasn't a topic they thought a lot about.
Instead, they thought a lot about housing and why they couldn't afford it.
Talk about that portion of your book, Batia.
I would say the American working class is defined by a radical, radical tolerance, a radical moderation.
These are people who are unbelievably generous, both in what they do and how they see other people.
So the majority of the women I interviewed said, I would never get an abortion, but I sure as heck would never judge another woman who didn't have the luxury of making this decision.
So they're both pro-life and anti-ban, okay?
So which party should they vote for, right?
It's funny because again, Donald Trump showed up and sort of gave voice to that exact idea, and he sidelined the far right, which had been saying no exceptions and all of this stuff.
They are very, very pro-gay, and this includes very Christian people, Republicans, very tolerant.
A lot of Christians that I spoke to have a gay person in their life who they want treated with respect.
But they're very worried about the transgender ideology, especially in schools, in sports, in women's bathrooms.
So again, you see how this doesn't really fit with how the elites tend to talk about politics.
We talk about LGBTQ as if it's one thing.
Regular Americans do not see it that way.
They see it as we need to be tolerant.
We need to be respectful.
We need to treat every individual with dignity.
But I sure as heck don't want somebody coming into my kids' school and confusing them with things that I should be teaching them.
They cared a lot about their material circumstances and they did not look to political parties or leaders to tell them what to believe or what values to have.
This is the American working class radically, radically moderate and fatally underserved by both parties.
Can you talk a little bit about the book itself and who you spoke to, how you did the research, how you got this information, and kind of how you went about writing this book?
So finding the people who are profiled in the book was the biggest challenge, right?
Because once you find the right people, they tell their own stories.
And the book is just full of people's stories about the struggles and triumphs of being working class in America.
And I was reporting it in 2022, 2023.
And the way that I went about finding them was what I wanted was for the people's stories to be interesting enough to carry the story, that carry the narrative, but also I wanted each person to be representative of a larger cross-section of the American working class.
And so I started with data.
There's a wonderful professor at Brigham Young University called Joe Price, and he has a team of grad students who can help people like me who studied in the humanities and don't have a very good grasp of how to handle surveys.
He helps you understand the sort of data bird's eye view.
Who is in the American working class?
I said to him, I want that bird's eye view of from a data quantitative perspective.
How many people are working class in America?
What are their races?
Where do they live?
What jobs do they work in?
How many of them are homeowners?
Which jobs have the highest home ownership rate?
Which states have the highest home ownership rate?
One of the biggest surprises was that the American dream for working class Americans is much healthier in red states simply because the price of housing is so much lower.
And so working class people can afford to become homeowners, which is just not the case anymore in places like California, New York, and Seattle.
So once I had that data set, I knew what I was looking for.
So for example, I didn't know this, but 52% of women who clean homes for a living are homeowners.
So I knew that in my sample of stories, I had to include at least one woman who was a home cleaner, who was a homeowner, and at least one who wasn't, so that I knew when I was going into this, that both I and my reader were going to get a very complete feeling having read this book of what the American working class looks like.
And once I had that data set, I just traveled around the country.
I interviewed many, many, many people.
I did a lot of phone interviews.
When I would do a phone interview and felt that someone had a really good story, I would hop on a plane or I would get in my car and go and try and spend a few days with them.
And so that I could give the reader a really full sense of who these people are.
That's the first half of that book.
And then in the second half of my book, what I did was I narrowed down the top really impediments to working class people achieving the American dream and came up with five or six totally nonpartisan, easy to implement solutions that could be implemented by either party tomorrow, which would greatly increase the ease of the hardest working Americans to achieve the American dream.
All right, let's talk to callers and we'll start with Gary in Meridian, Connecticut.
Good morning, Gary.
Yes, good morning, Mimi.
Good morning, Ms. Sargon.
I just want to take issue with how you began your discussion.
You posited that this country was based on egalitarian principles.
Well, it wasn't.
It took till 1920 for women to have the right to vote.
Initially, people who didn't own property couldn't vote.
This country was designed to protect the wealthy, and it's been years of fighting to change that.
African Americans are still fighting for the right to vote.
So how you posited that this country was based on egalitarian principles really bewilders me.
I don't disagree with much of what you're saying about the way things are now, but I really have to disagree with that premise that you stated.
I'm curious what your educational background is that qualifies you to write this book.
I'm a retired history professor from a major Ivy League university, and it's contrary to everything I understand.
So I'm willing, I'd like to hear your answer.
All right, Gary.
Thank you so much, Gary.
That's a very important point.
I don't believe I said the word egalitarian.
I said classlessness.
The idea that anybody could rise up and could make something of themselves.
But you're absolutely right.
That did not include women and certainly did not include black Americans until after the civil rights movement.
So I totally take that point.
I should have, you're right.
I should have made that much clearer in my opening.
God forbid, not to erase the work of the abolitionist movement and Abraham Lincoln and everything that followed the civil rights movement.
Dr. King, of course, my hero.
So I accept that criticism completely.
But the whole idea of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, all of our amendments, the Constitution, was to protect not just tolerance, but actually liberty itself, which the Founding Fathers believed was something that was granted by God.
So I would say, you know, I accept the criticism.
It was limited, but we would not have gotten where we are today without those founding documents and that founding principle, which to me makes the betrayal of America's multi-ethnic and multiracial working class all the more keen.
We've got a question for you on X from J.D. Redding, who says, given Trump's policies that do not directly benefit the lower classes, how do factors like cultural resonance, the perception of fighting the elite, misinformation, and strategic leadership choices contribute to his continued support among his demographic?
So one of the things you hear a lot, you know, if you turn on sort of liberal media, if you watch, you know, MSNBC or CNN or read the New York Times, you'll hear this refrain.
Trump's signature achievement was a tax cut for the rich.
I'm sure we've all heard that many times.
I don't think that that is an accurate statement.
First of all, a lot of the people that I interviewed for my book recall getting a tax cut that was significant to them.
The percentage of tax cuts that were given to working class and middle class families was much higher than the percentage given to the rich.
So the top 1% only saw a below 5% tax cut, but for a lot of working class and middle class people, it was between 15 and 24 percent.
So of course, you know, if you're a billionaire, you know, 1% is much more money than if you're making $55,000 a year and you get a 24% tax cut.
But to the person making $55,000 a year, that is very significant.
But beyond that, Trump started a trade war with China at a time when both parties were pursuing this sort of free trade globalization model.
He controlled the border at a time when both parties had basically committed to importing many, many, many people to work here for starvation wages, many of them enslaved to the cartels who bring them here illegally.
So these were big achievements.
And as a result of them, if you look at 2019, the bottom 25% of wage earners saw a 4.5% wage increase for the first time in decades, whereas the top 25% of wage earners only saw a 2.9% wage increase, which means that Trump was the first person to shrink the gap between the top 25% and the bottom 25% in decades, five decades maybe.
So you look at something like that, and at the same time as he was limiting the supply of labor and imposing massive tariffs, massive tariffs, 25%, 30% on China, inflation was only 1.8%.
So to me, that is what people who voted for him are trying to get back to.
I think, you know, in the liberal media, they were cast as white supremacists trying to return to the 50s and to Jim Crow era and so forth.
But what they really wanted was just to get back to 2019 when they had a little bit more money in their bank accounts at the end of the month to spend on things that gave them dignity.
So I think, you know, and I say this as someone who heard this many times from people who are working class, they could point to the specific Trump era policies that put money back in their pockets.
I don't think that Trump won because he was fighting wokeness.
I think that's sort of a fantasy of Republican elites who don't want to talk about the economy.
They want to talk about the transgender issue because that's their piccadillo.
But I think that the reason that Trump won was because many people who were Democrats five years ago voted for him in swing states, and many of them were working class, and they didn't do so on trans.
They did so because he put money back in their pockets and they believe that he'll do that again.
Let's talk to Ron next, who's in Dunlap, Tennessee.
Hi, Ron.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
I agree with a lot of your opinions here.
And my opinion is that the Democratic Party has aligned with the elitists, the Davos, Switzerland people.
And that's who they've aligned with.
And they want to destroy this economy.
You cannot have communism with a middle class because if people have hope, then you can't have communism.
You've got to have like no hope.
And that makes you have the government take care of you.
And, you know, I think we'd be in big trouble here if it wasn't for the Second Amendment.
But, you know, during COVID, more billionaires were created from COVID because all these large corporations got to stay open and all the mom-and-pop shops got shut down and it destroyed the middle class.
And this is what they're aiming to do.
They're aiming to kill our middle class so they can usher in communism here.
And I hope people wake up to that fact because it's going on.
You know, 95% of the media is owned by people from Davos, Switzerland.
CNN spam.
You know, it's Comcast, Disney, Paramount.
All right, Ron.
These people.
Let's get a response.
Go ahead, Batia.
Thank you so much, Ron.
You know, I often say the Democratic Party right now is kind of like a plane.
There's, you know, a few people in first class and then a lot of people in the economy.
And what their message to the people and economy is, you can fly for free so long as you stay in the back of the plane, right?
So if you look at the data right now, the Democratic Party's coalition is no longer the multiracial working class like it used to be for so long.
That is now the MAGA movement.
The Democrats now, the people who vote for Democrats consistently are the college educated, the elites, and then the dependent poor, people who don't work.
So they are this sort of very polarized party.
And you look at so much of the policy, and it really reflects that it's either sort of bolstering the status of the poor, but without actually improving their life, there's no upward mobility, or it's sort of helping the rich, putting money back in the pockets of the rich.
And there's so much data to back this up: this realignment to where the Democrats became the party of the rich.
So 65% of Americans who make more than $500,000 a year today are living in Democratic areas.
These are Democrats.
75% of donations coming out of Silicon Valley Democrats.
Joe Biden got 10 points more, 10% more of the billionaires than Donald Trump did, even though people are often saying Trump is a billionaire controlled by billionaires, et cetera, but it's actually they're gravitating towards the Democratic Party.
95% of donations out of the top three management consultant companies go to Democrats.
75% of hedge fund donations go to Democrats.
So we're really seeing this realignment.
Nine of the 10 richest counties in America now are Democrats.
And meanwhile, Trump won with the majority of people who earn under $100,000 a year.
So we've seen this radical realignment.
And I think that what we're in the midst of right now is the Republican Party deciding whether they're happy with this, right?
Because for so long, it was the Democrats who were the party of labor and the Republicans who were the party of the rich.
Trump sort of took an axe to all of that.
But of course, there are elites on the right who would much rather go back to catering to rich conservatives who only care about the woke issue and only care about symbolic issues.
I think they're not quite sure.
We're going to see in the next four years whether the Republican Party has realized who their new base is.
And I think actually healthcare, which came up earlier, is going to be a really big part of that, whether we see them actually being willing to talk about this issue or not.
It's going to be a signal about whether the sort of Trump revolution, the Trump realignment, has legs, has staying power.
Let's talk to Sean in Hesperia, California.
Good morning, Sean.
Good morning.
I am enjoying the conversation.
I do believe or actually side with some things that this young lady is saying.
However, I am one of those Democrats that I do believe we need to, first of all, not group people because of the fact that if it's a Democratic political party, but I'm an individual that happens to vote for a lot of things that are right for a lot of people that are in need.
I've been there before and I've been helped.
So when I hear, oh, the Democratic Party, we're elites in this and that, I'm that moderate Democrat that I'm in the middle class.
I have a master's degree.
I work.
I probably am at the bottom of that middle class.
And yes, you're correct.
We are scuffling to continue to be able to provide for our families.
I take care of an 80-year-old family member, blind.
I also have a disabled son that I'm trying to get through college.
And I see on the job where when money's supposed to go to the correct party or the correct people that are doing all of the legwork, that money only goes up to the higher people that are in the organization.
That's your CEOs, that's your manager, and they're all in the cahoose together and pretty much kind of whip you down at the bottom to do the work.
We worked through the pandemic and this young lady, she's really telling the truth about a lot of things that a lot of people don't hear about.
But please don't group me with the, no, I'm not saying you, ma'am, but I'm saying a lot of people don't group certain people or don't group people with higher up people that are making these millions of dollars.
Us down here that are Democrats, we're really scuffling and we're just trying to do the best for everyone all over the world.
We think we're doing right.
But thank you very much.
Go ahead, Batia.
Wow.
God bless you, Sean.
You're the exact person that both parties should be fighting for your vote.
The role that I'm sure you play in your community, the role you play in your family, taking care of both a child who has struggles and a parent while working full time.
That is the struggle for dignity, for the American dream.
And as far as I'm concerned, which either party successfully convinces you that they have your interests at heart and makes your life a little bit easier, that's the future.
So I just, what I want to see and why I wrote this book is because instead of seeing both parties ignore people like you, Sean, I want to see both parties fighting for your respect.
That's the America that I want to live in, is a country where somebody like you who works so hard and then comes home and is taking care of both the generation above you and the generation below you has two parties struggling, fighting for your respect and to make your life a little bit easier.
You're the backbone of this country.
And honestly, that is why I wrote this book.
And I just hope that what I say resonates with you.
Thank you so much for the call.
We have a text from Greg in Dallas.
He says this, I admire your passion, ma'am.
However, making the wealthy and the corporations that they own pay Americans fairly is the same thing as taking their money and giving it to the working class.
You see, the wealthy do not see work as having any value other than someone else's work enriching them.
That is so true.
I mean, look, I think when you, you're right.
Like, you can't convince these like rich ghouls to pay people more when they have been allowed to do this for so long.
They're not going to do that out of the kindness of their heart.
It is not in the nature of power to share itself.
It is not in the nature of corporations that have had two parties encouraging them to sell out the working class to suddenly grow a conscience.
What you can do is what I think Trump did in the first term, which is if you limit the supply of labor, labor is like everything else.
It adheres to the ironclad law of supply and demand.
So if there's less workers, each one has to be paid more or they can't get the profits.
So by simply controlling the border, working class people are going to see an immediate increase in their wages.
And when Joe Biden came into office and the first thing President Biden did was undo all of Trump's border executive actions, remain in Mexico and all these other ones that were very effective, immediately you saw people streaming across the border.
We now have the highest percentage of illegal immigrants living in the country that we've ever had in our history.
The percentage of Americans that are foreign-born right now is 15%.
And that was very intentional because I think President Biden and his administration, Alejandro Mayorkas, they thought that this would bring down inflation because it would bring down working class wages.
And that's exactly what it did.
It brought down working class wages, which had been seeing all of these, all of this growth.
And I'll just give one quick example of this because it's so infuriating.
But, you know, meat packing.
This used to be like the job to have.
You would have communities that were, they had this big plant and people would get great jobs there.
The wages were incredible.
The conditions were incredible.
The hours were incredible.
You could retire in dignity.
And if you look now at who is doing our meat packing, it is illegal immigrants working for much less wages, working in much less safe conditions.
And the scandal is, is that a lot of them are children who have been trafficked here by these cartels and are now effectively enslaved to them and have to pay off whatever it is, $5,000, $10,000 that was used to get them here by these murderous cartels while making $6 an hour.
It is so utterly infuriating.
And yet this was all done completely by design in order to bring down the prices for people who have that college degree who are in those elites.
Let's talk to Marvin in Michigan.
Hi, Marvin.
Yes, good morning.
I would like to ask some points that the young lady gave about what they used to have the apprenticeship program for the high school students, how that program was cut.
And I would strongly disagree with her, saying that you have to have a college education to be an elite.
I don't know where she get that from, but I worked 30 years through the labor union at Detroit, 1191-334.
Learned the construction trade, concrete, demolition, worked for big companies, Wine Sally, Barn Marlowe.
And I made over $120,000 a year.
And I just have a high school education.
The ladies should try to uplift the young people and staying and trying to get jobs and suffering training instead of saying a comment like she got on the back of the plane, you can ride for free.
So I totally disagree with that statement.
And also, I would like to get some rebuttal from the ladies.
She keeps saying the Trump administration, they have right now, just like I just said, I retired at 49 with 30 best years, a good pension, everything through the union.
The Trump administration is trying to eliminate the apprenticeship programs from the international unions for a young guy like she said or the people that are supposed to be in economy on the thing.
They will never become pilots because if you cut their training to get to that point, like she was saying in the first statement, how they've done the high school students, you never bring that funding back.
I would like her to give me some kind of rebuttal of something to stand like set to give the young person an uplifting view.
So that comment on economy on the back of the plane.
All right.
We got that.
Marvin, go ahead, Batia.
Thank you so much.
Marvin is absolutely right.
Unions, trade unions are one of the remaining avenues for working class people to achieve the American dream.
They're incredibly, incredibly important, and they do secure that middle class life for working class people.
The problem is, is only 6% of the private sector is unionized.
So while Americans feel really good about unions right now, they're not flocking to join them.
And I think it's because in the high schools, they don't get pushed.
In high school, it's very common for kids to be told, you know, you're kind of a loser if you don't go to college.
I think that's terrible.
I totally agree with Marvin.
We should be uplifting kids.
We should be telling them that this is a dignified way to live, that you'll be able to support a family on this wage, that you'll have great benefits.
You'll be able to retire in dignity.
So I'm completely in agreement with all of that.
I totally agree with him that the trade unions are great and wonderful and a staple and a mainstay of this country.
Very supportive.
The problem is that not enough Americans are unionized.
And as a result, they don't have access to those benefits.
In terms of cutting the apprenticeship, I had not heard of that.
I'm going to look into that, Marvin, because that's a terrible thing.
And if that's happening, you can be assured that I will raise my voice against it because apprenticeship programs that get young men specifically into working class jobs that have a future are unbelievably important.
And Batia, you had said early in the program that the Obama administration had cut vocational training in high schools.
Can you tell us more about that, why those were cut, and then in the next Trump administration, what has he said about those programs?
We know he has said that he wants to close the Department of Education and give that function over to the states.
Yeah, so the idea I think from the Democrats, if I'm going to steel man what they were doing, they saw this globalized economy.
They saw these jobs being shipped overseas to China and Mexico due to these very good trade deals for China and Mexico that they had signed.
And I think the idea was: look, those jobs are not coming back.
President Obama said that many times.
What we have to do is get everyone to go to college.
We'll build a knowledge industry here.
We'll send all of our young people to college.
They will join the knowledge industry.
And then we'll just consume goods that are made elsewhere.
Forget about manufacturing.
And it's clear now that that was not a good idea because 50% of people who have a college degree are actually underemployed, meaning that they are not using the skills they learned in college because the economy is already overproduced.
We have overproduced people with a college degree.
Like we have enough accountants and lawyers.
We have enough programmers.
What we need now is we have a huge dearth of skilled trades folks, right?
I think nobody really thought about the idea that, you know, actually a lot of Americans get dignity from those jobs, and maybe we should make sure that those jobs remain available to them.
The idea was everyone will go to college and join the knowledge industry.
Of course, not everybody wants that.
Not everybody is suited for that.
And the economy is not suited to handle so many people who are doing those specific jobs.
So I think that was sort of what went wrong.
There was a sort of slight attempt to correct it with Pell Grants later on in the administration.
President Trump has talked about vocational training.
There are plans being put out now by the GOP that focus very much on this idea that you don't have to have a college green.
You shouldn't have to have a college degree in order to achieve the American dream, in order to be able to support your family.
I think all that's great.
I do think a lot of it from the right comes from this feeling that when people go to college, they become indoctrinated into leftist and Democratic ideas, which I actually think is true.
But so all of which is to say, it does seem promising, like that, which is one of the main suggestions in the second half of the book, that we will start to restore this view.
It's not just the training, it's the romance of the idea.
It's the cultural respect for people who work with their hands for a living, which you just don't really see so much in culture today, which is very much created for the ideal American consumer, which if you think about that as a person who has extra money, disposable income, right, which is who these ads are targeted at, is going to be people in the elite.
So we really need to see a revolution, both in terms of, I think, the economics, the training, the material side of things, but also in terms of the cultural aspect of things of restoring respect to the hardest working Americans.
Kevin is in Ellicott City, Maryland.
Good morning, Kevin.
Jeezy, I don't even know where to begin.
Like the idea that you go to college and you become indoctrinated.
I mean, I went to college.
My wife, my children went to college.
This is exactly the problem in America today.
The author makes these broad statements like it's true.
It's like she's listening to Joe Rogan or something.
And they tell this kind of partial fib.
It's like this kind of thing out there.
And this is the challenge in America today.
We have so many people making these big comments like it's real.
Like everyone's woke.
And it's this idea that's really making America less smart in the decisions they make because the information they get is from podcasts and people like this who make these statements that is so ignorant, it's unbelievable.
Like college education, regardless how you use it, is a benefit for a lot of Americans.
And you should not be discouraged.
Trades are wonderful.
If you can get in the trades and that's your decision, that's wonderful.
But we can't continue to like demonize so many things and say, oh, it's bad to go there.
And if you look at the statistics, who makes more money?
Who has a better life?
Who lives longer?
It's typically people that are either college educated or could have a trade and be in there.
But don't discourage people from getting a college degree like you're going to come out like brainwashed, like your parents didn't raise you properly.
It's just a bad comment.
And just the last point is this: Donald Trump lost 2.5 million jobs.
He spent $8.2 trillion in our debt.
And at the end, he spent 4.2 unmanaged COVID money that he was giving away to everybody.
And that was the money people were getting.
They didn't have jobs.
He had lost millions and millions of jobs because of COVID.
And then our international relations was horrible.
So he rewrites history and makes all these promises.
And I will promise you, after four years, you're going to see some of the same things.
I lost so much money in the stock market under Donald Trump.
It's finally gotten back.
Biden's created 18 million jobs, manufacturing's up.
And so it's this ability how they rewrite history.
It's just disappointing.
And when I listen to someone like this talk, all right, Kevin, let's get her response.
Go ahead, Batia.
I could see why he was triggered by the word indoctrinated.
But the truth is that the number one predictor for whether people will vote for Democrats is a college degree.
That's all I was trying to say.
I should not have used the word indoctrinated.
It was a little too aggressive for this context.
And I apologize to Kevin and appreciate his comment.
But the number one predict, the only group Kamala Harris won with was white college educated voters, especially women.
So that correlation is there.
Now, you might say it's not causation, it's correlation.
Well, okay, so what's causing, I mean, it seems like it seems pretty, I mean, you go somewhere.
I have a PhD, so I spend a lot of time in the context of universities.
It's very hard to be a conservative there.
You know, and then humanities, upwards of 90% of professors are not just liberals, but very liberal.
So, you know, it's just, it's a thing.
I think most people can see that it's a thing.
But I apologize for using the word indoctrinated.
I see that that's triggering, and I'll try to, you know, try to be more careful with my words.
The problem is, I think he's actually agreeing with me, even though he thinks he's disagreeing with me.
He is agreeing with me that a college education has become the prerequisite for the American dream.
And that is terrible.
It is unfair.
It is unjust.
It is wrong.
We need many more people.
Our economy relies on the labor of the working class.
So when we say that a college education is going to be the only way for us to allow people to have the American dream, we are effectively saying we get it, but all of you who we rely on to survive, you don't get it.
You don't get to be a homeowner.
You're going to come to my house and clean my house.
You're going to deliver my Amazon back packages.
You're going to deliver my groceries, but you're not going to get to be a homeowner in this neighborhood.
And I think that's disgusting.
I think that's godless.
And I think it's un-American.
We've got a text for you that says redistribution is the answer.
It doesn't matter if that's, quote, not what the people I talk to want.
You may not want your taxes raised, Batia, but don't tell us that redistribution is somehow taking money from the rich and handing it to the poor.
You just talked about healthcare.
How exactly do we create and fund that without raising taxes?
Or are you not for the actual solution?
Universal health care.
I would support universal health care in a heartbeat.
I have no problem raising my taxes.
The problem is, I think I have much more in common, and Donald Trump has much more in common, and the MAGA people have much more in common with the Medicare for all AOC, Rokana, Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party than those people have with the center of power of the Democratic Party.
That's kind of what I want people to understand.
Like, if AOC comes out with a proposal for Medicare for all, I'll probably support it.
I think that healthcare is incredibly important.
I don't think that you have to pay for improvements to Medicare with people's tax dollars.
I think that there are a lot of very easy, obvious policy implementation things you could implement tomorrow that would make healthcare much more affordable and much easier for people to deal with, starting with things like price transparency, starting with things like forbidding AI from being used to deny claims.
A lot of these conversations we're having now after the horrific shooting of Brian Thompson, these are important conversations to have.
What I would say to this person is like they immediately jump to assuming bad faith on my part because I don't support the solution that they want.
But I don't feel that way about them.
I would support your solution, even if it's not the one that I would implement.
Why can't we do that?
Why can't we say we recognize the same problem?
Let's have that conversation instead of always saying, Well, you're clearly on the other side.
Obviously, Batya doesn't want to pay more taxes.
I mean, like, no, we're on the same side.
It's not left versus right anymore.
Those distinctions do not exist anymore.
It's the populists who care about the working class versus the establishment elitists who don't.
And the establishment elitists who don't, on you know, on both sides versus the populace on both sides who are not going to agree on the solution.
But we're much closer than we are to either of them.
And why don't we recognize that and come together and have these conversations?
Thomas is in Deerwood, Maryland.
Hi, Thomas.
Hi.
I listened to your guest, and she's speaking from a lot of linguistic propaganda.
The reason why I use that term is because if you look at what's going on today, you see the segregation and the segregation is being pushed by white Americans.
It's not being pushed by Latinos or Americans.
It's being pushed by white Americans.
And this is why you see when she talks about the unions and things like that, they should be like the guy before said, they should be uplifting people that go to college.
But you see, white people have realized that they are being, like the group said, replaced number-wise, not physically, but number-wise.
And you see, even if you look at her, she wears a star of baby on her on her neck.
Her parents didn't tell her, go to the union.
Her parents told her, you got to try to get to Harvard or you got to try to get into an Ivy League school.
So this woman here is just talking a bunch of linguistic propaganda, and she is a trumpster all the way, but she doesn't want to.
So, Thomas, you talked about segregation.
What kind of segregation are you talking about?
The segregation I'm talking about is that the majority of white America right now is pulling together.
They're not spreading out and diversing with the rest of the population.
They're segregating to themselves.
And you can see it if you look at who, like you talk about the elites.
Well, who are the elites?
White segregationists.
All right, Thomas.
Any comment there, Batia?
Well, white people are the only group Donald Trump lost ground with this election and like in a significant way.
He gained ground with every group of minorities, including black Americans, black men gave him 25% of the vote, which is pretty unheard of for a Republican.
He got the majority of Hispanic men, 46% of Hispanics overall, 40% of Muslim Americans, which was more than Jewish Americans, which is something I feel some type of way about.
So, you know, I just don't see this narrative as holding water.
I don't think Americans feel negatively towards people based on the color of their skin.
I think Americans feel very proud of having overcome that on an individual level and on a national scale.
So I think the evidence that, you know, that we're dividing or divided by race, you know, if November 5th taught us anything, it's time to put that narrative to bed.
But I respect the caller and where they're coming from, and no doubt the experiences that informed their opinions.
So Austin, Texas.
Cindy, you're next.
Cindy, are you there?
Yeah, can you hear me?
Yes, go ahead.
Okay.
Yes.
I just want to say to your guest, I really appreciate her comments.
Maybe about a month or so ago, a little more, I saw her on C-SPAN's book TV possibly be interviewed and was highly impressed with her being interviewed there as well.
I want to thank you for the comments about the first party that gets to limiting immigration and kind of combining the Bernie Sanders economic message is the one that's going to be the ultimate winner.
I want to say I am much older than you, but I am college educated, a prestigious, whatever I heard David Brooks say recently, one of the 34 prestigious colleges in this country graduate.
And what I have observed is, and coming from Flint, Michigan, so that says a lot, I think, about my background.
Very working class in my values, but not stupid enough to vote for MAGA.
I think the MAGA designers are highly intelligent and highly intuitive about what gets American voters going, but the MAGA voters are not so well educated or astute.
What I want to ask you is what I've been doing, because I was too young to pay attention back in the day, is go back to NAFTA, go back to when George Bush Sr. got rid of a defined retirement benefit plans and switched everybody to the 401k system and look at those congressional votes and who voted that's still around.
And I was actually quite shocked to see that for the NAFTA vote, which yes, happened during Clinton's administration, but was an idea, my understanding is that also came from George Bush Sr. and maybe even somebody in the Reagan administration, which he was.
Nancy Pelosi voted for NAFTA.
Dick Durbin in the Senate from Illinois voted for NAFTA.
Now, I expect Chuck Grassley to be on that list.
He's a Republican from Iowa.
I was blown away that Democratic people, Nancy Pelosi just needs to retire now that she's broken her hip.
These people who claim to be for the Democrats are really, as you say, for the corporate elite.
I just couldn't believe some of the names on that list.
I checked all the California senators at that time, you know, and a lot of them have passed away.
But the ones who are still around, and you claim to be a Democrat, and you shipped all the jobs from Flint in Detroit down to Mexico and now to China, I just will never vote for them again.
Thank you.
All right, Cindy.
Thank you, Cindy.
I have not done that, but now I kind of want to go back and take a look at those lists.
Thank you so much for the comment.
Here's Michael, who's in Texas.
Hi, Michael.
Hi, how are you?
Good.
Good, thanks.
Good.
Thanks, Jacob McCall.
I just wanted to say, I'm Texas, and I'm in the middle of a big red state, but I'm a die-hard, I guess you'd call me a bleeding-hard liberal, but I think that your comments about, I guess, to me, I take it as degrading the degrading educational aspirations.
Everyone does, I mean, our country needs to have people that are second line from the Brexit Club.
Someone has to be a ditch digger as well.
Someone has to make the burgers.
But the fact that you seem to want to denigrate wanting a higher education seems a little harsh.
The smarter, and I think you brought this thing about causation versus correlation.
The causation that it seems that people become more educated, they tend to be Democrat.
Well, maybe you're looking at it from the wrong point of view.
Maybe because you're educated, you tend to see a better way forward for things.
Conservatives want to go back.
Progressives, i.e., your elitism and your causation to education makes us want to go forward.
Maybe you're looking at it in a different way.
And also, I also wanted to address the fact that America seems to be so stuck on binary reasoning and thinking.
You're either black or white.
You're either Republican or Democrat.
You're either man or woman.
When in the real world, we operate on varying degrees within those two polars.
So I think the, you know, socialism or capitalism, there are ways to figure out the best way forward that fit in between those points.
There's a gray area for everything.
All right, Michael, we're running low on time.
Let me get you an answer.
Oh, yeah, I totally agree.
There's so much more consensus than, you know, polarization is a totally elite phenomenon.
That's the number one message of my book: if you travel around the country, you will find enormous unity and love Americans have for each other, including for people across the political spectrum.
Working class people just don't have the luxury nor the appetite of hating people based on who they vote for.
Across this country, you have working class people working side by side with praying side by side with, breaking bread with people who voted for Trump, even if they didn't.
And so we can take a page out of their playbook.
On the college thing, the reason I'm so down on college is because in the name of this so-called expertise, we have sort of come to worship not actual expertise, but the interests, the economic interests of the elites, of the expert class who have implemented again and again and again policy that hurts their less fortunate neighbors while they continue to rely on those neighbors' labor to survive.
That is the thing that I find appalling and unacceptable is in the name of higher ideals and progress, we have overseen an upward transfer of wealth into our own pockets from our neighbors who in most cases work much harder than us and yet now have not just less, but don't have access to health care, don't have access to the American dream, don't have access to home ownership, and their children are worse off.
That's what I find unacceptable.
And real quick, Batia, before I let you go, about policies for the incoming Trump administration, the people you talked to, did you find them in favor of higher tariffs, higher, you know, keeping the Trump tax cuts, extending the Trump tax cuts or revoking them?
What do you think?
They love tariffs, that's for sure.
Working class people feel that those tariffs protect the fruits of their labor and make them worth a lot more.
You know, the average steel worker makes $88,000 a year, and these are in right-to-work states in the South, where most of the steel mills are.
That's because Trump put a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum coming in from China.
It protects wages.
We should want our neighbors to make more money.
And they were very in favor of controlling the border.
These people are not anti-immigrant.
People would apologize to me.
They would say, I'm not anti-immigrant.
I love immigrants.
I have immigrants in my life, in my community.
But it is an undeniable fact that they've brought down the wages of the working class, and they really appreciated Trump's attempt to reverse that.
All right, Bhatya Unger Sargon, opinion editor at Newsweek.
The book is called Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me.
God bless you and happy holidays.
You too.
After the break, more of your calls in Open Forum.
Anything you want to talk about, public policy or politics-wise, please do start calling in now.
Republicans, 202-748-8001, Democrats, 202-748-8000, and Independents, 202-748-8002.
We'll be right back.
During Christmas week, each night at 9 p.m. Eastern, C-SPAN will feature interviews with departing members of Congress, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents from both chambers.
They'll discuss their careers, key legislative achievements, the state of Congress, and American politics, and their farewell speeches.
Tonight, we'll hear from West Virginia Independent Senator Joe Manchin and Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin.
Tuesday, California Democratic Congresswoman Anna Eshu and Washington Republican Congresswoman Kathy McMorris-Rogers.
Wednesday, North Carolina Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry, Michigan Democratic Congressman Dan Kildie, and Oregon Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer.