Oswald Clark, Review:

Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women
by Batya Ungar-Sargon (Encounter, $30, 225 pages)

White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy
by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman (Random House,
$42, 299 pages)

Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream
by David Leonhardt (Random House, $42, 492 pages)

Since Donald Trump’s surprise electoral victory in 2016, there has been no shortage of punditry to explain the dissatisfaction of the working-class whites that sent Trump to the White House. Books, articles, and studies have explored the frustration of lower income, lower status whites who feel that an out-of-touch governing class does not protect their interests, or worse, are hostile to them. Three new books this year could help explain this election but more importantly provide some insights on how to address these frustrated voters.

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman in White Rural Rage, and Batya Ungar-Sargon in Second Class, look at much the same people and issues from very different points of view. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, and Waldman, a former Washington Post columnist, are not only unsympathetic to the plight of the white working class, but are quite dismissive of the reasons for this population’s frustration-cum-rage. Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor at Newsweek, is much more sympathetic and provides ideas on how to improve their lot in life and status in society.

Schaller and Waldan admit in their introduction that critics are likely to question whether “two costal cosmopolitans” have the “right to offer this critique of White rural politics.” As Victor Davis Hanson responded, “no one questions the authors’ ‘right,’ but rather their competence.” These two “coastal cosmopolitans” are simply too urbane and dismissive of conservative viewpoints to give rural whites a fair hearing. White Rural Rage is a less scholarly and more condescending update of arguments first put forth by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Both books argue that rural whites are left behind in an information-based, globalized economy, and are frustrated by the growing inequality between them and their neighbours and kin on one hand, and the political and business elite on the other. A growing economy that has lifted many other working whites out of poverty (and into cities) and invasive immigration have shrunk this segment of the population so its relative political, economic, and cultural importance has shrunk.

The problem with Schaller and Waldman is that they will not take seriously rural white America’s worries about the radical transformation of society that progressive political ideologies have foisted upon the country. Their solution is for the aggrieved and frustrated to shuck their provincial concerns and let go of their prejudices. The working class failure to get with the times, the authors argue, borders on fascism and presents an existential threat to U.S. democracy, which is curious way to think about a group that the authors dismiss as ignorant, drug-addicted, and suicidal. One might think that “the 100,000 annual fentanyl overdose deaths” that “are disproportionately white, male, and rural,” would evoke some sympathy rather than elide disparagement. The authors find the plight of rural whites so off-putting that they want to see changes to the Senate where every state has two representatives regardless of population. The Founding Fathers thought it was necessary to ensure each state had equal voice in one of the two legislative chambers, but the current fashionable narrative is to deride the disproportionate representation of smaller, more rural states. That is the feature, not the bug the Senate’s critics believe it is but it is difficult to see calls for changes in the makeup of the Senate as anything but animus against rural whites.

Ungar-Sargon’s Second Class defines at the working class more broadly as anyone without a college degree and being in the bottom 80 per cent of income earners. She then divides this group into three tiers: the Struggling who are barely getting by, the Floating who can pay their bills but not get ahead, and the Rising, the successful working class that can afford mortgage payments and make strides to achieving the American dream through hard work in a good-paying, usually unionized job.

She supplies a plethora of data showing the difficulties encountered by the working class and offers solutions to their plight. Among them are: immigration reform because mass immigration reduces working class wages and bargaining power; eliminating the requirement of a college degree for certain jobs; private and public sector funding for training workers; reforming the social safety net, especially programs that claw back payments on a one-to-one scale when recipients earn money through their labours; zoning reform to reduce housing costs.

Some of these reforms might make more difference than others but they also illustrate the weakness of Ungar-Sargon’s argument: it is purely economic. Many people who live in poverty or precariously close to it have made bad decisions in life or are victims of broken homes. Many have not followed the “success sequence” followed by most college graduates of go to school, get a job, get married, have children. As Charles Murray pointed out in Coming Apart, many elite liberals do not live the rules-free, promiscuous lifestyle they publicly support, and many conservative and Christian working-class Americans do not practice what they preach. The difference is that the hypocrisy of Christians who do not live out their values materially harms them while the hypocrisy of the elite further entrenches their privileges.

Ungar-Sargon has a number of profiles of working-class Americans that show how dysfunctional home life with divorce or abuse has harmed them so it is curious that she did not spend some time exploring the cultural contributions to the economic crises of Americans who are falling behind. The difficulty for policymakers is that the levers of government policy are notoriously unwieldy to tackle cultural instability in people’s lives.

David Leonhardt, an editor at the New York Times, has written an excellent exploration of the stagnating standard of living for many Americans: life expectancy has fallen, economic inequality has grown, and the promise of progress seems elusive to many. Leonhardt is a pro-free market liberal but sees that capitalism as currently practiced in the United States favours the wealthy and leaves too many people behind. There have been good critiques by the American Enterprise Institute that show inequality is not the problem many opponents of capitalism suggest it is so it is unnecessary to litigate those claims here.

Leonhardt explores a number of policies that would make the American Dream more attainable for more workers, the central one being to make it easier to unionize. He looks fondly upon times in U.S. history when pushes to organize labour resulted in broader sharing of the wealth that companies created.

Proof of Leonhardt’s fairness in looking at those left behind can be found in how he deals with abortion, admitting what few partisans or activists will acknowledge: “Access tends to be more restricted than most voters favour in red states, and somewhat less restricted than what most voters favour in blue states.” Unlike hysterical critics of the conservative legal movement and pro-life groups, Leonhardt says that “the anti-abortion movement has nonetheless used the tools of democracy to achieve its victory” in getting Roe overturned. He also calls the legalization of same-sex “marriage” “arguably the greatest recent triumph of the political left” which he claims “reflects a successful democratic movement” ignoring that the Supreme Court struck down the traditional definition of marriage.

Leonhardt believes in American democracy. He writes, “if there is a central reason for the decline of the American dream over the past half century, it has been the lack of a strong political movement dedicated to protecting that dream.” Democratic capitalism, he says, has been abandoned and with it, “the most successful strategy for lifting mass living standards.”

Ultimately, Leonhardt believes that the progressive movement must become more “inclusive” in order to successfully promote a fairer capitalism. He advises Democrats to become more patriotic, less weird, and move away from the “Brahmin values of professionals and college graduates.” That includes being more respectful of the opinions of people with deeply held religious views. Sounds good in theory but there is no political impetus for this to actually occur as Democrats and Republicans are about evenly divided in the country and the political incentives are for both to torque their bases, not to expand them.

To Leonhardt’s credit, even though his background is an economics reporter, he takes culture and the cultural concerns of working-class Americans seriously. If more liberals took his tact, many conservatives would not feel the existential dread they do when contemplating a Democrat in the White House. It would also probably mean Democrats would coast to electoral victories.

If Leonhardt’s almost utopian view of politics or Ungar-Sargon’s policy prescriptions do not become reality, it is a safe bet that books explaining the white working class’s resentments and frustrations will continue to be a staple of punditry for years to come, and an even safer bet that most books will continue to misdiagnose their challenges.

Oswald Clark is The Interim’s Washington correspondent.