Batya Ungar-Sargon is a high-up editor with Newsweek Magazine. This is a pretty prestigious position. I found out about her from an article in the Jerusalem Post. In the article, she professed that she had awakened from being part of the woke leftist side of thinking and opinion. I was so impressed by the article that I bought the book that was featured, Second Class. The book so well fits my argument on economics in my book Social Justice. Ungar-Sargon is a mystery person. She is an Israeli, but is she Arab or Jewish or a descendant of a mixed marriage? She keeps her history private.
I begin with what I argued in my book. I argued that believers are to be engaged in fighting for good laws in society that are more in accord with the Law of God but only evangelism and revival can change the consensus to have Law that is more in agreement with the Bible. We, the Body of the Messiah, are to be engaged in all of culture but live out according to one’s own unique calling in life. One part of my book argues that we should support the economic system that best lifts the greatest number of people to adequate provision. We are to be concerned for the poor, the working class, and the middle class but with policies that really work. In this, I argue that only a rightly regulated free enterprise system can create wealth expansion to lift people, but that the concentration and power of wealth in a very few is wrong.
Ungar-Sargon was a woke leftist but got more truly woke and was delivered from woke leftism. She was delivered by studying the working class, lower middle, and middle class, but also did not ignore the poor. She did address the attitudes and beliefs of the upper middle class and the rich, the elite. What she found changed her life outlook. I have often said that the woke are actually just the opposite of being woke but are more like the zombies who became such by being infected by the seedpods in the great sci-fi classic, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Ungar-Sargon found that the policies of the elite in both political parties have been bad for the middle and lower middle classes. It has deprived them of their potential to attain the American dream economically. The dream is that by honest work, one can own a home, provide for a family, have a decent modest annual vacation, and save for a comfortable retirement. This includes healthcare. This was much more attainable 40 years ago. She details the many policies that have undercut these classes. I will not detail them all. Three of them stand out. One is free trade. This has enriched corporate titans and stockholders at the expense of workers. The theory was that free trade would lead to specializations where countries would do what they do best, and the U. S. would have more high-paying tech jobs and services. I read this argument years ago and thought that someday in India they would do the tech jobs at a fraction of the cost, that good-paying union jobs would be shipped overseas, and that it would backfire. This was a big issue in the Ross Perot campaign for President in 1992. Indeed, the great industrial jobs were lost, China grew greatly and America’s high-paying blue collar jobs decreased. Wages were lowered over time and did not keep up with inflation.
The second is mass immigration which suppresses job opportunities. To say one wants to regulate immigration so as not to suppress the wages of the lower middle class is said to be racist. But it is not racist, but reasonable. Mass illegal immigration has been terrible for poor blacks and lower-middle-class citizens.
Finally, she comes against the direction of society that one must have a college degree. Job after job is limited to those with a degree though there is nothing in the job that requires such an education. Tens of thousands are spent on colleges with no purpose other than to enrich the education establishment. Jobs are refused to those who more than are capable of doing the work. In addition, training people for jobs in apprenticeships and through trade schools is much more fitting for most people.
She finds that working people have much commonsense wisdom. They really do not care about what political elites care about, are not racist, and want a social structure where all can get ahead. Then she finds that the concerns of the elite left are just not relevant to most people. She finds that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs make little difference in lifting people but cost a lot of money. Transgenderism is just not of concern to the working class who see it as a diversion from their concerns. They are more than live and live-oriented but want to see policies that really work. She finds that stable families are more important than race as a factor in success by far. White privilege is way overstated.
Then, horror of horrors, she found that Trump’s policies of bringing jobs back and expanding opportunity really worked. Ending free trade for fair trade, enterprise zones, and stronger immigration policies were good for the working class.
One could say that Ungar-Sagan became truly woke and is now a champion of the working class which has been abandoned by the Democrats and not yet adequality championed by the Republicans. For a Biblical worldview orientation her book is hardly adequate, but it goes in the right direction and is in my view closer to a Biblical social justice position.