If four years ago you would have told me that come the next US election we’d be confronting the prospect of Donald Trump: The Resurrection, I’d have suggested you get more fresh air. But here we are. And with his fascinating, if not inspired, choice of Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as running mate, Trump redux sharpens his pitch to the embattled American working class.
In this post I speak with journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon, a lefty after my own heart who nonetheless reckons the Trumpian right is offering American workers something genuinely new and transformational. Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor at Newsweek, has written two books: Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (you can see why I like her), and the recent and hugely relevant, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.
For the latter Ungar-Sargon travelled around the US for a year interviewing non-college educated workers to get their sense of whether they had a shot at the American Dream — home ownership, upward mobility, a dignified retirement — and if not, what might make it more of a reality.
Despite the interviewees’ diverse backgrounds and circumstances, she found strong consensus on some issues, chief among them the vexed issue of mass illegal immigration. Nowhere is the class divide as pronounced as it is here; as Ungar-Sargon sees it, while educated Americans view migrants with “patronising pity,” workers regard them as little different from themselves save for the fact of American citizenship, “and they think that should mean something.” “They (the working class) are frustrated when it seems like the opposite is true: immigrants are getting help they could desperately use and can’t access.”
We discuss — and debate!— class warfare, the new Republicans and whether they really are that, Trump and whether he’s a threat to democracy, the Democrats’ decapitation of Joe Biden and why a party that takes its cues from George Clooney is a party in bad shape.
Hope you enjoy this interview with a gutsy and iconoclastic commentator.
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