Transcript: Batya Ungar-Sargon

My interview with the author of Second Class

It’s an election year in the United States. And so far, the media’s focus has not been on working people and what policies they want to see from their leadership. But my guest on this week’s program has travelled across America interviewing working class voters — and here, she shares her insights on what the media is missing. 

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek. Her latest book is Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. The audiobook is out this month. 

This is an edited and condensed transcript. You can steam the episode, recorded in April, here.

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TH: You write in the book's preface that despite the fact that the largest share of Americans are working class, their voices have essentially been erased from the public sphere and public debate. And you also write that this situation is “untenable morally, spiritually, and economically. No society can survive that is built on the labour of those with no voice.” Batya, when did you start thinking about this in a deep way?

BUS: The theme of the class divide is very much the animating principle of my first book, because I argued that the media is not terrible because it's leftist — although it is [leftist] — but because it's elitist. So, the idea of the class divide and the abandonment of the working class by the very elites that pretend to represent them was something that I discovered very much writing my first book. This divide that separates the way working class people think and talk about themselves in the country from the way elites think and talk about the working class or the poor or themselves was something that became more and more apparent to me. Working class people really value autonomy and believe in it. And there's a level of dignity that they get from autonomy, from having self-determination, in a way that is very alien in elitist culture. Because if you believe in the meritocracy as your religion, the way our leftist elites do, you don't have that same appreciation for autonomy because the system has really raised your boat.

So, you believe in a much more paternalistic approach. You believe in institutions because they've helped you and you believe in the government because it's always on your side. So, that gap between paternalism and autonomy was something I was thinking about a lot, especially when I was promoting Bad News. I kept wanting to reach for a book where I could say, “Read this and you'll understand what I mean about how alien we sound to working class people.” There was no book like that. There were academic ethnographies of the working class. But, first of all, they were very difficult to read. When there would be a page that was just a transcription of a working class person talking, it would be fascinating, but then it would be followed by all this academic jargon. Second of all, they all brought this paternalistic lens to it because they were written by leftist academics.

The working class people would say, “We just want dignity. We just want our labour, our hard work, to give us the most modest version of the American Dream.” Then these academics and leftist journalists would conclude: What they need is more welfare. It was so funny. Because every time I would finish a book like that, they would come to the same conclusion and it was literally everything the working class had been saying they didn't want. So, I thought, you know what? There's a room for a journalistic book that I could then say to people, “Here, read this. This is what I'm trying to convey about the class divide — both economically and culturally.” And that's Second Class.

TH: You had a really interesting process for writing this. I know you interviewed 100 people across the US over a year, but you started the project by consulting Joe Price at Brigham Young University. Talk to me about what you learned from him and from his team of researchers.

BUS: Yes. I should say it's probably between 75 and 100. I didn't keep a list because I would meet people, I would interview them, I would do the sit-down interview and then decide whether I was going to include it in the book or not. So, the first thing I wanted to do was I wanted my sample set to be as representative as possible to the American working class writ large. So I needed a data perspective on who is the American working class — a kind of bird's eye view of how old are these people, where do they live, how much money do they make? Are they homeowners? What are the industries they work in?

There's this fantastic professor at Brigham Young University called Joe Price, and he has a team of grad students who he will allow to work for journalists. He will hire them out. I worked with a bunch of wonderful grad students there who looked at the American Census Survey. I asked them to look at 2000 and then 2020, so we could get a view of the trends that were developing. They gave me a spreadsheet that was just so delicious to me. It was exactly what I wanted. It was the total breakdown of all of those factors, the demographics, and the economics, and the home ownership question. It allowed me to see these large trends — some of which were really surprising.

It's obvious now that you think about it, but home ownership for working class Americans is much higher in Red America, simply because of the price of housing in Blue states and Blue cities and Blue metro areas, where it's become just astronomical. So, if you think about home ownership as a crucial part of the American Dream, it's thriving much more in Red America than it is in Blue America, which is not something that I was expecting to find. Of course, the wages are higher in cities. But the point is that the wages are not enough. What you have to measure them against are the hallmarks of an American Dream, the hallmarks of a middle class life — and how do working class people define that? They were surprisingly unified on how they define the American Dream. It's owning a home, having affordable and good healthcare, their children having as many choices as they did if not more, and being able to retire in dignity. Very few working class Americans have that anymore.

TH: You went into this project expecting to find a pretty dire situation, but as you've just started sketching out, the picture was far more complex. It really makes for an interesting read and complicates that narrative. Now, the college degree is a common delineating factor for class in the U.S., but there's a lot of diversity in the working class. You identified three subsets that you outlined. Can you sketch that out for us?

BUS: In my personal life and my friendship circles and family circles, there are a lot of working class people who are high working class people. So, people who are working class, have working class jobs, but are living the American Dream. They're homeowners, for example. They have a pension and a retirement fund and so forth. I assumed that these people were outliers and that the vast majority of the people I was going to meet were like the people who were outlined in the deaths of despair literature, people who were struggling with deaths by suicide, overdose, alcoholism, homelessness, crime. I expected the situation to be much more dire than it turns out it is. So, both turned out to be a piece of the puzzle. My friends and family who are high working class are representative of a sector of the working class. The downward mobility, the deaths of despair, the working poor is also a significant part of it. I call those “rising” on the one hand and “sinking” on the other hand.

Then there's this middle category, which represents the largest share of working class Americans, who I call “floating.” Now, these are people who, because of the COVID economy and the labour crunch are making more in wages than they have ever before in their lives. However, these higher wages are not equal to purchase those hallmarks of the American Dream. So, home ownership, for example, is just out of the question. They'll never be able to own a home. They don't think their children will have as many choices as they did, and they have zero savings. They have no idea how they are going to retire when they can no longer do the physical labour that they do every day. So, they are able to cover their bills; they are not like the working poor who I interviewed, who are constantly having to call the electric company and beg for forbearance and so forth. But they also feel very precarious, because they know that there's an end of the road at some point. Healthcare is a really big deal for these people. They end up spending all of their savings on deductibles. Because they often have health insurance, but it's very bad health insurance through their employers. There are no limits on the terrible nature of the health insurance that they can get. So that, I would say, would be the three tiers that I found: Rising, floating, and sinking.

TH: You've talked about what defines an American Dream: home ownership, healthcare, the ability to save for retirement, knowing that your children will have opportunities. You talked to people who worked really hard and did everything right and still couldn't achieve it. But as you say, you talked to some who did. I want to just sketch out a few of the stories of the people you encountered. Let's start with Skyler.

BUS: Skyler has an amazing story. He was a homeless high school student. He was sleeping in his car and going to high school classes, and he met one of his fellow students, Lauren. She met him when they had a class together and there was a downpour one day. To park in the school parking lot, you had to buy a permit and he had no money, so he was not able to do that. So, he would park much further away where it was free to park. There was this downpour and Lauren, who comes from a nice middle class Christian family, was driving her car. She had parked in the parking lot, which she had paid for, and she saw him walking in this downpour getting soaked. She offered him a ride to his car — and that became their routine. She would pick him up and drive him to his car. At some point she realized that he was living in it.

They have this amazing love story. I mean, really, it could be a romance novel. This homeless teenager, but he was so smart and interesting to her. Before they graduated high school, they pretty much decided that they were going to have a life together. Lauren’s family was, at first, not sure how they felt about that. But Skylar got a job out of high school. First he worked as a barista, I think, and then he got a job at a paint factory. This paint factory paid really well and he was able to put aside a lot of money. It was a very difficult job. They had to shower afterwards, because there were chemicals in the paint. They would shower and all of the colors of the paint would sort of fall off their bodies. If you would blow your nose, it would come out bright blue.

It was a hard job, but there were guys there pulling in six figures. There was unlimited overtime. Skyler was able to put aside a little nest egg. And he would have stayed there much longer, except that he came up against the diploma glass ceiling. He was a very good worker. He had come up with innovations. Some 20-year-old kid came up with innovations for the factory that were actually deployed! When a management position opened up, he applied for it and they said, “Look, Skylar, you know you can't apply for this job. You don't have a college degree.” And he said, “But do you think I could do it?” They said, “100% you could do it, but you don't have a college degree.” And so he left that job.

He got another good job, he became an electrician, he became a contractor. And he's now really living the American Dream. Just a beautiful story of upward mobility. Lauren had a big part in that. The stability that he got from this love of his life, it's incredible how their marriage allowed them to access a kind of economic stability that is out of reach for so many. Now, Lauren can stay home and raise their three beautiful children. And Skylar is very eloquent about what he calls restoring the romance of working class life. When he was in high school, there was very much this idea that if you don't go to college, you're a loser. This is the track for losers. Even though a lot of people are just not cut out for college, they don't learn that way. They're not academic minded. And our economy is already overproducing college-educated people.

So, we know that 50% of people who have a college degree are under-employed, meaning they're employed in jobs that didn't require that degree or any skills they picked up there. Although, infuriatingly, they still make more than working class people. He talks about restoring the romance of the working class, so that we can give young people the idea that this is actually a pathway to the American dream. The skilled trades, for example, where you can actually become a middle class person without college, without debt, without any of that stuff. The way Skyler did.

TH: I've heard you say on another podcast, too, that people have different talents. Some people's talent involves having incredible patience for the elderly that they take care of. So, there are these different talents. Now, I also wanted to ask you, there is a Canadian connection in the book, Gord Magill, a trucker, who was involved in the Freedom Convoy and has published essays about his experience as a trucker. You interviewed him as well. Tell us about him, and his situation, and what you learned from him.

BUS: Gord is incredible. Everybody should check out his Substack. He has a podcast now, Voice of Gord, the R is in parentheses. He's a real character. He's fabulous. He's from Canada originally. He's been in Newsweek, because I found him during the trucker convoy. He was just tweeting up a storm in the most eloquent fashion, giving voice to the real story here, which Canadian media was at great pains to hide from view. As I'm sure you know, Tara, I don't have to tell you about that. So, I asked him to start writing for me at Newsweek, and he's an amazing writer. He's a poet, although he will say that all truck drivers are poets at heart. It's true, there are two truck drivers in the book, because they were both so poetic and so eloquent. I couldn't choose which one to keep. Although Cyrus is now working at a call centre.

Gord lives in Ithaca. His wife Jenna, she's a school teacher. They have two kids. They have health insurance through her work, because otherwise he wouldn't have health insurance. He is a trucker, through and through. He's never as happy as when he's on the road. Well, I shouldn't say that. I'm sure he's very happy with his kids; he adores his daughters. But he just loves to be behind the wheel. His father was a trucker. His grandfather was a trucker. His grandfather drove a truck during the Second World War to help the war effort, and he's very proud of that. It's just in his bones, it's in his DNA. He was one of the first people who really helped me understand what the populist ideology looks like from a working class perspective. For example, on something like minimum wage. I'd ask, “Gord, do you support a minimum wage?” On the one hand, he would say he can't understand how anybody could survive on less than $15, $16, $17 an hour — even that would be a struggle. On the other hand, he doesn't see that as a pathway to upward mobility. We just don't want to have a whole bunch of people stuck making $17 an hour. Where do you go from there? So, it seemed to him to sort of miss the point. He wouldn't say he's against a minimum wage, but it doesn't come close to offering the kind of stability, the kind of upward mobility, the kind of autonomy that working class people long for.

He spoke to me a lot about immigration and the way in which — you know, he has nothing against immigrants, of course, nothing against somebody seeking the American Dream. But every immigrant who comes here is going to need somewhere to live. As a working class person whose main impediment to achieving the American Dream is housing, he can't afford a home of his own. It upsets him very much. He doesn't see how he's going to be able to leave his daughters anything. He's very bothered by that. He feels there's a limited amount of resources and it's already being funnelled upwards.

He also helped me understand that working class people are keenly aware of the contempt that the over-credentialed college elites have for them. But Gord is one of those people who just couldn't care less. He knows that it's there, but the idea that he would take seriously the way they talk about him, he doesn't care at all. What he cares about is something like Justin Trudeau imprisoning political prisoners. The Coutts Four, who were imprisoned after the Freedom Convoy on trumped-up false charges in order to justify, post-factum, Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act. [EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a statement of opinion. The trial for two of these men, for conspiring to commit murder against RCMP officers during the Coutts border blockade, is now underway. You can read coverage of the trial here and here, and watch a summary of the charges here. The two other men previously plead guilty to other charges, with the conspiracy to commit murder charges withdrawn by the Crown.] The whole level of the discourse, people on cable news sneering at the working class, whatever, that's what they do. But it's the impact that it has in real terms that is most important here.

TH: I should say on that Coutts story, it is interesting. You published Gord writing about that at Newsweek. We really have no investigations, no facts on that story from our press corps. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this episode was recorded in April, there has been more coverage of this story.] So, it is an interesting one for you to reference. I want to just briefly, now, touch on the story of Nicole. And I do want to circle back to immigration, because that's also a very big conversation in Canada. But first, just tell us briefly about Nicole.

BUS: Nicole is one of the most humble people I've ever met. When I first met her, she had no teeth because she had gotten an infection from COVID and there was only one dentist in her county who took Medicare, which she only has because her son has Medicare. So, in two years she will have no health insurance, because she makes too much to get Medicaid and too little to afford healthcare. So, she had no teeth because there was literally no dentist she could go to and afford dentures. She drives for DoorDash, that's what she does. Her car had broken down and she had no money to fix it. So, she was driving her father's car, which had no windows. She was driving for DoorDash in a car whose windows were cardboard — and this was how she was making her living.

This is a person who wants nothing from the government, nothing from anybody else, except opportunity. She had previously at multiple jobs been pushed out and asked to train her replacement, who was a college-educated man. This had happened to her a number of times. She felt that there was just no opportunity for people like her who are smart, and capable, and invested, but just don't have a college degree. The idea of now starting and going into debt and so forth, it's unthinkable. She doesn't have the time. She has to make a living. She has to support her son. Amazingly, Nicole is married. So she was one of these people who had followed the success sequence and yet still exists in basically grinding poverty. They only have one car, so her husband also drives for DoorDash, but they have to take turns and they just can simply never crawl out of that. She doesn't see how she could ever get to some kind of stability.

Once every three months she has to spend a full day in doctor's appointments because of this infection she got due to COVID. So that stands in the way of her getting a job at a big box store or someplace where she would not be able to make a schedule where she could take off one day on a regular basis. Just the smallest things that all of us in the knowledge industry take for granted. Her desires are so modest. If she could get to $38,000 a year, she would feel like she had hit the jackpot. She would be able to cover all of her expenses and have that dignity. She works so hard. How could that person who works so hard not have such a basic, basic form of stability?

TH: The success sequence that you were referring to is graduating from high school, working full time, and getting married before you have children. There's a lot of data to show that that is very effective in keeping people out of poverty. Yet, as you say, it's not a fail-safe measure. I want to come back to mass immigration now, a topic that you tackle in the book, as it is very relevant to Canadian politics right now. We previously had near-consensus on immigration, but a massive increase in temporary workers and foreign students has taxed our system, particularly when it comes to housing and healthcare. That consensus has recently fallen apart. Many of the people you interviewed, they empathize deeply with immigrants — as you yourself do, as I do — and were still concerned about mass immigration depressing the wages of low-skilled workers. You refer to some really shocking data on what this has done to Black employment. Walk us through what you found there.