When it comes to representing the interests of the working class, Democrats and Republicans seem to have exchanged identities.
That’s the conclusion that JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin draws from the 2024 presidential election campaign, in which working-class voters form the base of support for former President Donald Trump.
Joining him to discuss this is Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of the ground-breaking new book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.
Her book examines the lives and opinions of blue-collar workers who were hurt by globalization that hollowed out America’s manufacturing base and created downward social mobility that led to an “enormous class divide.”
Supporters of these policies among leftist elites and the media have chosen to smear workers who suffered from bad trade deals and large-scale illegal immigration as “deplorable” racists rather than address their concerns or treat them with the respect they deserve.
Working people want jobs—not the welfare handed out by Democrats or the free-trade policies offered by the Republican establishment from whom Trump has taken over the GOP.
Ungar-Sargon has little patience with liberal Jews and organizations that claim that the Trump-supporting populists who appeal to the working class are enabling antisemitism. She says liberal Jews “bet on the wrong pony” by allying themselves with intersectional leftists. These “allies” of liberal Jews are, she says, “the people who want to kill us, the people who hate us and who have turned ‘Zionist’ into a slur and have taken over college campuses and the elite spaces and are trying to influence American foreign policy out of a hatred for us. And that is the side we backed. And even worse than that, we participated in the smearing of the American working class as racists.”
Tobin and Ungar-Sargon also discuss the way these issues impact this year’s presidential race; how the media lost what was left of their credibility in covering the Democrats’ ouster of President Joe Biden as their candidate; the impact of the Ukraine war; and the way the debate about Israel will influence the election.
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