"The way the elites think of the economy is very related to green ideology. They picture an economy in which the top 20 per cent keeps making over $100,000 a year and lives in nice neighbourhoods and nice cities. All production is done in China. All service-industry jobs are performed by slave-wage Venezuelans brought in by cartels. And everybody making under $100,000 a year – who used to be the working class – is on universal basic income. That’s the view that a lot of so-called progressives consciously or unconsciously have of their ideal economic system."- Batya Ungar-Sargon, on how the working classes are being sacrificed to elite virtue-signalling
Batya Ungar-Sargon on how the working classes are being sacrificed to elite virtue-signalling.
www.spiked-online.com
Ms. Ungar-Sargon is not a right-wing Republican. She is an editor at Newsweek, also not a right-wing publication. From what I see in the political class, she is correct, and it's not necessarily just a Democrat view. Many Republicans have sold us down the river as well.
She's not a right-wing Republican, but from what I can gather, she's not a lib, either. She seems to be more in the newer camp of angry contrarians who like to adopt right-wing talking points and complain about the left while trying to convince themselves that they're not somewhere on the right.
Some of her points (I only read the excerpt, I didn't listen to the podcast) are just straight up nonsense:
Brendan O’Neill: Whenever you talk about the working class nowadays, someone will accuse you of making a racist dog-whistle. Why are questions of class and economic inequality being dismissed in this way?
Batya Ungar-Sargon: I consider myself a left-wing populist. Routinely, people on the left would say that I’m a conservative and that the points I make are conservative talking points. I always laughed at this because, first of all, I don’t think ‘conservative’ is an insult. People expect you to act like somebody just called you fat.
The other point is that it’s basically an admission that caring about class is now a right-wing position, and that being on the left no longer means caring about class.
I mean... What?!? Has anybody told Bernie Sanders about this? Between UBI, unionization efforts, welfare benefits, taxation, student debt, and a host of other issues, the left talks about class all the time. Saying that being on the left no longer means caring about class is like saying that being on the right no longer means caring about abortion. It's ludicrous. Who is shutting down discussions about class other than people on the right?
You see this a lot in the media as well. They take their unionising very seriously at these knowledge-industry jobs, where the average pay is $100,000 per year. I’m not saying those jobs shouldn’t be unionised, but don’t tell me you’re the proletariat if you sit behind a desk and make $100,000 a year. You’re part of the elites,
No, $100k/yr at a media outlet in a major city, where rent on a small apartment can easily top $2k/mo, is very much "middle class." The construction workers who built the office make at least that much and nobody is calling the electricians or iron workers "elite." That's an order of magnitude removed from being any form of economic elite.
While it's true the left has abandoned ordinary Americans, what's missed is that the left thinks they are ordinary Americans.
They ARE ordinary Americans. We ARE ordinary Americans. Over half of the country votes for Democrats. Over 80% of the country lives in urban areas. If anybody is an outlier, it's rural conservatives.
