by WorldTribune Staff, April 1, 2024
“The real divide” in 2024 America “is along class lines — between an over-credentialed college elite and the working class,” a self-titled pro-Trump Marxist told the New York Post.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women”, out April 2, said that although she has a PhD herself and admits to being “100% of the class I critique,” she seeks in the book to give a voice to working class Americans who she said have been robbed of a platform by elite politicians and journalists.
“I simply cannot stand to see the good-hearted working-class people of this country smeared by the left that sold them out,” Ungar-Sargon told The Post. “We simply have evicted the working class from public view. We just don’t hear from them anymore, even though they represent most Americans.”
In researching her book Ungar-Sargon said she traveled across the U.S. and interviewed citizens of varied political, gender, racial, and religious backgrounds. The author said she came away surprised by just how much they have in common.
“Whether they were a Hispanic cleaning lady in a hotel in Las Vegas, or a black sanitation worker in New York, or a white rural worker who works for Amazon, they had very similar views,” Ungar-Sargon told The Post. “They have actually an unbelievable consensus about the important issues, and what they would like to see in government.”
Ungar-Sargon found working-class Americans largely share the same view on stricter border control and trade tariffs that favor domestic industry.
“The open border hurts them economically in a very real way by driving down their wages — and that’s obvious to people, whether they are Democrats or Republicans,” she said.
Working-class Americans are also overwhelmingly in favor of promoting vocational training and trade schools as an alternative to higher education — though Ungar-Sargon writes that elite politicians are responsible for the fact that the federal government invests $150 billion in higher education, compared to just $1 billion in vocational trades.
“Skilled trades are one of the few working-class jobs that really guarantees the American dream, and yet we’ve sort of cut that out of public life,” she said.
Ungar-Sargon said she also found that working-class Americans are generally opposed to zoning laws that restrict housing development for the benefit of NIMBYs: “Getting rid of the laws that allow wealthy liberals to protect their neighborhoods from having duplexes would let us build a million new units a year, and in a decade solve the housing crisis.”
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In 2024, according to polling, more Hispanic voters are supporting Trump than Biden and Trump is making inroads with black men.
Ungar-Sargon predicts these trends will continue.
“Any Republican who thinks that [these voters are] defecting to the GOP is totally wrong. They are defecting to Trump, because they see in him a champion for working-class issues,” the author said. “I think that’s the number one trend to keep your eye on. That’s really the realignment right there.”
Pro-Trump Marxist author slams the contempt with which elites like her regard the working class added by Editor Two on
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