This week, I finished a remarkable book by Batya Ungar-Sargon. The book is called Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
If former President Trump and the Republicans want to win this election, I believe this timely book provides the best strategy to beat the Democrats. In this book, the author interviews many working-class Americans and discovers that neither party has an agenda that fully responds to their concerns.
“By and large, I met a lot of people who said they would never consider getting an abortion yet felt appalled at the idea of an abortion ban. Most people supported a moratorium on immigration, both legal and illegal, for the foreseeable future‚ but also supported a government-backed catastrophic health-care plan or even full health-care coverage. People were very pro-gay but very worried about transgender ideology. They supported taxing corporations and the rich, but not expanding the welfare state. There was a lot of frustration about people they felt chose to live off the government and not work — but also anger at corporations that maximized profit at the expense of their workers, and politicians who didn’t care.”
In the book, Batya explains that the Republicans and Democrats passed NAFTA and other policies that took away working-class jobs. While people stress the importance of a college education, the author believes our country is not doing enough to train the next generation of skilled tradesmen.
According to Batya, “Federal and state governments give a total of $150 billion every year to fund higher education — compared to a measly $1 billion to Career and Technical Education.”
The real question is which party will adapt to this new reality. Will the Republicans be more realistic about healthcare, or will Democrats abandon their support for open borders?
The answer to this question could decide the election. Right now, the Republicans have a slight advantage because they can claim that the Affordable Care Act is already in place. It is highly unlikely that the libertarian Republicans will ever have 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to repeal it successfully.
From a working-class perspective, the Republicans cannot make healthcare access worse. On the other hand, the Democrats, and their border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, cannot explain how their policies have resulted in nearly 10 million encounters with illegal immigrants from February 2021 to June 2024.
In 2016, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “We must have the courage to object when they use that term, ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ which ignores how Muslims have overwhelmingly been the greatest victims of terror. We must also have the courage to reject the term ‘illegal alien.’”
Working-class voters need a political party that can provide answers to their problems. Currently, the policies of the two major parties do not fully respond to the concerns of the working class, which is a majority of American adults.
In the book's first part, the author provides stories of people struggling to feed their families. In the book's second part, she offers some interesting ideas on how to solve some of these problems.
The American Dream has become more difficult in the last two decades with skyrocketing increases in healthcare, college and housing costs. In the coastal parts of the country, without zoning reform, buying a home has become impossible for many people.
According to Batya, “The housing shortage is a direct result of zoning: 78 percent of the land in the United States that is zoned as residential land is zoned for single-family detached homes.”
Batya’s book relies on the ideas of Edward Pinto, who is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Pinto and his colleagues wrote, “We define light-touch density (LTD) as housing including detached single-family houses with accessory dwelling units (ADUs), small-lot single-family houses, attached single-family houses, and duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes.”
In 2022, Pinto and his colleagues wrote a paper on this subject. “As seen in the charts below, the share of attached single-family houses and two-, three-, and four-family homes out of the total housing stock has shrunk over time, down from 26.5% in 1940 (the earliest year for which data comparable to 2019 is available) to 18.3% in 2019.”
There is no better way to expose the hypocrisy of a wealthy liberal from San Francisco than directly confronting her NIMBY (Not in my backyard) policies. The solution to this problem is to build more duplexes and triplexes to reverse this trend back to 1940 levels.
I have no doubt that the Democrats will continue to viciously accuse Trump and Vance of being racist, sexist, greedy, and anti-democratic. The Harris campaign has no other options.
The Democrats cannot win if the Republicans campaign on the ideas in this book. More importantly, they will deserve to win.
Robert Zapesochny is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on foreign affairs, national security and presidential history. He has been published in numerous outlets, including The American Spectator, the Washington Times, and The American Conservative. When he's not writing, Robert works for a medical research company in New York. Read Robert Zapesochny's Reports — More Here.