Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

A personal, journalistic ethnography of the modern American working class, based on the travels and interactions of the author through the American heartland.

"Second Class is the most important book you will read all year. A political realignment is coming, and it’s my hope that the end result will work in favor of our all-too-neglected American working class. When that realignment comes, Batya and her book will help lead the way."

—Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind

Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life? 

While writing this book, Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working-class fighting tooth and nail to survive. In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them. Second Class combines deep reporting with a look at the data and expert opinion on America’s emergent class divide, in which the most basic elements of a secure and stable life are increasingly out of reach for those without a college education. 

America has broken its contract with its laboring class. So, how do we get back to the American Dream? How do we once again become the land of opportunity, the promised land where hard work and commitment to family are enough to protect you from poverty? It’s not that hard actually. All it would take, as this book illustrates, is for those in power to once again respect the dignity of work—and the American worker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Apr 8, 2025
• ISBN: 9781641774512

Batya Ungar-Sargon

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek and the author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. She lives in Brooklyn.

Book preview

PREFACE

I started working on this book when it became clear to me that it was missing. I had written a book called Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy about how American journalism had gone from a working-class trade to an elite, over-credentialed caste. Once crusaders on behalf of the havenots, those locked out of power because they worked with their hands, journalists became the haves, the most overeducated profession in America and part of the economic elite. Over the course of this ascent, they abandoned the concerns and values of the working class to which they once belonged and on whose behalf they once toiled.

Bad News was focused on journalism, but for me, it provided a window into a larger class divide that has come to define the United States, a country we like to think of as a classless society. This class divide has become entrenched: having a college degree is predictive of how long you’ll live, how likely you are to own your own home, how healthy you are, and whether your children will be better off than you. As the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have pointed out, mortality itself is diverging by education. Deaths of despair, morbidity, and emotional distress continue to rise in the United States, largely borne by those without a college degree—the majority of American adults—for many of whom the economy and society are no longer delivering, Case and Deaton wrote in 2022 of the two-thirds of Americans without a college education.¹

The class divide has become the defining characteristic of American life in the twenty-first century. Yet the working class is a cipher in American politics and media. Despite the fact that the largest share of Americans are working-class, their voices have essentially been erased from the public sphere and public debate. How do American workers view their chance at the American Dream, their struggles and triumphs, and their place in American society? What do working-class Americans want? What do their lives look like? Do they believe they have a fair shot at the American Dream, or do they think that the system is rigged against them? What does the American Dream mean to them?

These are the questions that I have tried to answer in Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. I spent a year traveling around the country interviewing working-class people to get their sense of whether they had a shot at the American Dream, and if not, what might make it more of a reality, or even a possibility. I spoke to people from across the political spectrum, people of different genders and races and family structures and religious creeds from all over the country. It is their stories you will read in what follows.

I went into this project expecting to find a situation that was dire. My own friendship and family circles included a lot of people in the higher strata of the working class, people who were either solidly middle-class or close to it. But I assumed my friends and family members were unrepresentative. I expected to find that the deaths of despair described by Case and Deaton were the norm, and I initially gave the book the title Unpromised Land because of the broken compact it seemed to me we had made with working people.

What I found was a much more complex picture. People do believe they can achieve the American Dream. But they have to work twice as hard to achieve half as much as their parents did, or as the college-educated caste working in the knowledge industry do. And still, many lives are defined by precariousness.

A few things came up in nearly every one of the interviews I did, which also surprised me. The first of those was the value of hard work. I can’t think of a single person I interviewed who didn’t tell me that working hard is a value they learned as children and is central to their identity. Work means dignity and independence and autonomy and pride. It means having something no one can take away from you, even when work is scarce, even when the conditions aren’t ideal. The Marxist view of work as inherently exploitative, something people would ideally be freed from, has taken on new life on the American Left as well as the free-market Right, with ideas like Universal Basic Income. But the working-class Americans I spoke to over the past year didn’t view work as exploitative. They viewed the value of hard work through an almost spiritual lens, as though it were a precious inheritance that continued to connect them with their parents, who as children they saw getting up every morning and going out to provide for their families. It is essential to how they see themselves as Americans, and a great source of pride, no matter what they did for a living.

The flip side of the dignity of work is the impatience that most of the people I spoke to have for people they view as choosing not to work and living off government benefits—and the corresponding inability of working families to get the little help they need which would make their lives so much less stressful. No one I spoke to wanted to live off the government, temporarily or permanently. They didn’t think big government was the answer, and spoke frequently about government waste and welfare fraud, things they saw a lot of firsthand. What they did want was a system that rewarded those who work hard, who still can’t get a foothold in the middle class.

As for who could get them there, I found a deep distrust of both political parties. The Democrats were seen as the party of the educated elites and the dependent poor, the party behind the mechanism that conveyed their hard-earned tax dollars to people defrauding the system. But the Republicans were seen as the party of the rich, the party of corporations, the side pimping out the working class to achieve the goals of conservative elites.

The majority of the people I spoke to have views that don’t fit with either party. Whether liberal or conservative, most people I spoke to supported significantly limiting immigration but also majorly expanding access to health care. They supported gay marriage and were very pro-gay, but also very worried about the spread of transgender ideology, especially the spread in schools. They were anti-woke, but it wasn’t a topic they thought about a lot; instead, they thought a lot about housing, and why they couldn’t afford it. An extreme moderation, tolerance, and practicality threaded itself through their views. For example, I heard often from women that they personally opposed abortion but they could understand why someone would get one, and they were very much against the idea of banning it.

Most of all, the people I spoke to across the board were appalled at the divisiveness of our politics, when they themselves were part of such a politically, ideologically, racially, and religiously diverse world. Working-class Americans simply don’t have the luxury of hating people for their political beliefs—nor do they have the appetite for it.

Every person I interviewed for this book had a unique story and perspective. The stories I ended up including in what follows reflect people whose circumstances seemed to me to represent a larger piece of the puzzle in the portrait I was trying to paint of the working class. The words in italics in part 1 are derived from direct quotes from my interview subjects, things they told me they thought about frequently. In part 2, I used quotation marks to reflect their direct quotes, because their quotes in part 2 are interspersed with quotes from experts and my own analysis.

I am deeply grateful to everyone who shared his or her story with me for this book. Some names and identifying features have been changed to maintain anonymity for people who feared they would lose their jobs. I also committed a journalistic crime and paid some of the respondents for their time, which is common for academics but a big no-no for journalists. I just couldn’t bring myself to ask people whose only asset is their time to give it to me for free. In fact, lots of the subjects in this book became friends, another big journalistic taboo. I was constantly aware of my own immense privilege while speaking to people whose lives are so much harder than mine, and in more ways than one, I couldn’t help but try to do more than most journalists consider prudent. I admit to you my sins so you can judge them for yourself before proceeding.

INTRODUCTION

When I sat down to write Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, I did not think of it as a political book. I was trying to capture something I had noticed in my first book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy—namely, that the real divide in this country is not Left vs. Right, or Black vs. white, but rather, the class divide separating out the college-educated from the working class. A college education has become predictive of a host of benefits we once believed every American had a right to: a home; a retirement in dignity; adequate health care; upwardly mobile children. These have become privileges hoarded by the elites, a caste composed of the top 20 percent that now controls over 50 percent of the GDP, and who are passing along their status on to their children. Meanwhile, working-class Americans are being left out in the cold, increasingly unable to buy a home or retire, unable to access high-quality health care or an education for their children, and plagued by insecurity, precariousness, and deaths of despair from alcoholism, suicide, and drug overdoses. The great American middle class is shrinking every year, as a few become part of the educated rich and the rest are sentenced to a life of struggle.

I wanted to write a book that captured this divide and answered the question that had been plaguing me since I wrote Bad News: Who is the American working class and do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream?

To answer these questions, I sought the help of Professor Joe Price at Brigham Young University, who helped me get a bird’s eye view of the working class. Based on census data from 2000 and 2020, his graduate students compiled for me a data set that laid out who America’s working class is, where they live, what their demographic breakdown is, what jobs people are working and which jobs and states have the best homeownership rates and wages, among other things. From there, I set out to find people whose stories could capture this data and illuminate the struggles of everyday Americans living paycheck to paycheck, people who represented the trends in the data but were also unique and compelling enough to carry the narrative. It is their stories I told in the first half of Second Class, and together with them, I explored a series of obvious, nonpartisan, easy policy proposals that would help improve their situation in the second half.

What I found surprised me. As I wrote in the preface, the majority of the people I spoke with have views that don’t fit with either of our main political parties. Yet among themselves, there was a huge consensus on even the most allegedly polarizing issues of the day. Whether liberal or conservative, most people I spoke to supported significantly limiting immigration but also majorly expanding access to high-quality, affordable health care. They supported gay marriage—even the Christians and conservatives I interviewed were very pro-gay, but at the same time the liberals and Democrats were very worried about the spread of transgender ideology, especially the spread in schools and sports. They were anti-woke, but it wasn’t a topic they thought about a lot; instead, they thought a lot about housing, and why they couldn’t afford it. An extreme moderation, tolerance, and practicality was threaded through their views, regardless of their political self-identification. For example, I heard often from women that they personally opposed abortion but that they could understand why someone would get one, and they were very much against the idea of banning it outright.

They also felt a high degree of hopelessness and despair about their lot—and about the possibility of improving it. They longed for a party that put them first, but neither the Democratic Party nor the GOP seemed to care about them. They saw both parties as deeply committed to the interests of the elites and utterly unmoved by the difficulties of the lives of America’s hardest-working citizens. The GOP was seen as out of touch, the party of corporations and free trade and the Chamber of Commerce, while the Democrats, which in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations had been the party of labor, was seen as the party of the rich elites who looked down on them.

Of course, they are right. The Democratic Party has strayed from its working-class roots. Democrats now represent nine of the ten richest counties in America. Over 65 percent of Americans making over $500,000 a year are represented by Democrats. The vast majority of hedge fund donations and Silicon Valley donations now go to Democrats, who significantly outraised President Donald Trump with billionaires in 2024. The Democratic Party has become a party polarized between the educated rich and the dependent poor, with an economic vision based on raising taxes on the former (the educated rich love paying higher taxes) and distributing the money to the latter, while importing millions of cheap foreign workers to do service industry jobs and further offshoring manufacturing to import cheap goods. The working class has been totally cut out of the picture.

While the book was not political, it was written in a very specific political context. I wrote it in 2023, during the latter half of the Biden administration. It was a brutal time for working-class Americans. Inflation was through the roof, and people found themselves unable to afford the basics, including things like frozen pizza, gas, and chicken. Biden had decriminalized illegal border crossing, flooding American cities with illegal immigrants who were being supported by the American taxpayer—who, in many cases, was struggling to pay for the kinds of benefits being gifted to illegal migrants, including housing, health care, and groceries. Biden’s foreign policy was the worst of both worlds—hawkish on issues that had nothing to do with America yet dovish when it came to America’s actual enemies. And Biden was extremely radical when it came to social issues, promoting student loan forgiveness for college graduates, Title IX protections for transgender athletes, and third trimester abortions.

It was the opposite of the agenda the working-class Americans I interviewed wanted, whether they were Democrats or Republicans. If they could have designed a party, it would have been hawkish on immigration and dovish on foreign policy; it would have supported expanding health care access but not raising taxes; and it would have been tolerant on issues like gay marriage and abortion but strict when it came to expanding transgender activism in schools, women’s sports, or women’s bathrooms. If I had to summarize it in a sentence, I would say that America’s working class is anti-war, anti-immigration, anti-trade, and socially moderate.

And then, during the 2024 campaign, a candidate emerged who embodied that exact set of policies: Donald Trump. It wasn’t totally out of the blue, of course. Trump’s signature achievement during his first term was controlling the border, bringing illegal immigration to a record low. He also imposed record-high tariffs on China and started a trade war. And he renegotiated NAFTA, a trade deal that resulted in the destruction of much of America’s working class. Trump had taken a party defined by the free-market policies of the Reagan era and transformed it into a protectionist party with an America First mentality, meaning America’s workers come first.

And he promised during the campaign to restore the prosperity of his first term, during which working-class Americans saw the first wage increases in a generation, while inflation was at a record low of 1.8 percent. Indeed, Trump was the first American president to shrink the wage gap in sixty years.

He was also the first American president to initiate no new wars in modern history, and he stressed his anti-war bonafides throughout 2024. And during his campaign, he humiliated the far Right, taking the pro-life and anti-gay marriage language out of the GOP Platform, extending his transformation of the party beyond the economic realm into foreign policy and social issues.

He took a party, the Republican Party, which had been committed to free trade, American exceptionalism and foreign interventions, and social conservatism, and ran on a platform that was pro-union, anti-war, and socially moderate. In other words, he remade it in the image of America’s multi-racial, multi-ethnic working class. This was no accident. It was very intentional: Trump courted unions. He courted Black voters. He didn’t hide his pro-gay feelings, and he routinely sidelined the pro-life Right, embodied by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, insisting that he believed abortion should be legal for twelve weeks and that it was a state’s rights issue.

The working class took note. Seven months after Second Class came out, Donald Trump proved my thesis correct that the real divide in this country is not Left vs. Right or white vs. Black but the working class vs. the elites. He won the majority of Americans making under $100,000 a year—while Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee after the Democrats collectively shivved President Biden and all but forced him to step down, won Americans making over $100,000 a year. Trump made massive inroads with Black and Hispanic voters—while the only group the Democrats gained ground with was white Americans. Harris’s only major victory was with college-educated white women, while Trump won the majority of Hispanic men, 25 percent of Black men, and the vast majority of working-class voters.

The realignment of the political parties along class lines was complete.

I had seen Trump’s victory coming. Having kept touch with the people I interviewed for my book, I could see how discouraged even the Democrats among them were with the Biden administration. Not everyone voted for Trump—many disliked his character too much—but he made big inroads with former Biden supporters, who were desperate to get back to the 2019 economy, when the bottom 25 percent of wage earners saw a 4.5 percent wage increase and groceries were affordable. And in uniting working-class Americans of all races, Trump showed how fallacious was the narrative that his supporters were racists or white supremacists.

Cast as a divider, Trump had united the working class around the idea that they should still have a fair shot at the American Dream. His victory revealed that the real divide in this country was the one separating the economic interests of the elites from those of the working class.

The grid of American politics has been forever reshaped in the last decade by Donald Trump’s populism. We used to talk about Left and Right. To be left-wing on social issues was to support the LGBTQ agenda and unrestricted abortion, while to be left-wing on economic issues was to support redistribution and expanding welfare. To be right-wing on social issues was to oppose abortion and gay marriage, and to be right-wing on economic issues was to support free trade. This grid has to be thrown out.

The polarity is now between a unified working class and a polarized elite. The left-wing elite wants much higher taxes and much more welfare, free trade, an open border, and foreign interventions. The right-wing elite wants to cut social security and Medicare and ban abortion and gay marriage. But the working class wants protectionist economic policies—much less trade and much less immigration—and a moderate social agenda represented by legal first trimester abortions and gay marriage.

In a democracy, the majority should get what it wants, not the elites.

Since Trump’s victory, the Democrats have been scrambling to understand where they went wrong, how they lost touch with the working class, and how they can recover their image as the party of middle America. If they are truly looking for a roadmap, they will find one in Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women—described by working-class Americans in their own words. The first party to combine greatly reducing immigration with greatly expanding access to health care, dignity for gay Americans but limits on transgender activism, and much less free trade and no more wars, will have a ruling majority for a long time.

Both parties should be fighting for the votes of America’s hardest-working sector. In Second Class, I argue that this should be done at the level of policy: Light-touch density housing policy would solve our housing crisis. Vocational training would help men achieve middle-class status across the nation. Ending degree requirements, tariffs, and controlling the border—the supply of labor—would immediately raise wages for the working class and shrink the class divide.

These are the policies that give working-class Americans dignity, and they should be the top priorities for both parties. You can’t have a stable democracy without a middle class. We owe it to our neighbors—and ourselves—to ameliorate a situation that has become intolerable economically, morally, spiritually, and nationally. Second Class shows the way.

PART 1

Who Is the American Working Class?

INTRODUCTION TO PART 1

The roads are black and empty at 4:15 in the morning when Gord Magill sets out for what will be a thirteen-hour workday in his truck. It’s early summer in Upstate New York, and up in the sky, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn have taken to lining up in a neat little formation running from one side of Gord’s massive windshield to the other. It’s the kind of sight that makes a man feel his insignificance acutely. When you get up real early, you have some intimate contact with the heavens, Gord thinks, one of the fringe benefits of his job. He thinks about other unfathomable night skies he’s seen throughout his career as a trucker—the aurora borealis in Alberta, the massive night sky of the Australian Outback. By the time the sun rises, Gord’s windshield will be covered in the tiny bodies of recently hatched flies, as numerous as the stars. For now, it’s still sparkling clean from having been washed the night before. The planets blink at him in the moonlight.

To hit the road by 4:15, Gord woke up at 3:15, showered, and packed a lunch—butternut squash and lentil soup in a thermos, kippers,

Reviews for Second Class

[thewanderingjew_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Second Class, Batya Ungar-Sargon, author and narrator
Batya Ungar-Sargon describes herself as a Trump supporting Democrat. In this book, she explains why she has soured on the policies of the left, in some instances, but remained with them in others. She explores life through the experiences of several working-class families and has discovered that the causes they support also make them support Trump, though they may be Democrats. They would not have an abortion but believe in abortion rights. They would not close the border to legal immigration but are against illegal immigration. They believe in doing a job well but cannot get a job because of artificial requirements set up by certain politicians. They believe in social programs, but would rather not be the recipients, though they have often been forced to take part in them because of unexpected disasters.
The author has appeared on many television shows to express her views, and she does it fairly, in a way everyone can understand her point of view. It is hard to object to her ideas, even when you don’t agree completely, because she is so level-headed. Her book is a deeper dive into her personal philosophy as it examines the lives of real people and their suffering. She explores the idea of the American dream and what it means to those searching for it.
The first part of her book emphasizes the plight of several individuals and families. Most are into their middle age; they are both male and female; they are from all different backgrounds. Many had troubled backgrounds that may have perpetuated their situation unintentionally. Many made choices that were definitely going to set them on a path to failure, rather than success, but I didn’t get the feeling that many understood that their own choices were part of the problems in their lives. Some excuses seemed frivolous to me, because I had to make similar choices, but did not run from the job as they did. If the commute was too long, I did not quit, if the boss insulted me, I turned the other cheek in order to stay solvent. Deciding to become a parent, with or without a partner, definitely had negative effects on some of the people that had trouble managing. Single parents struggle more, regardless of whether or not they were alone because they had a child out of wedlock or were divorced or widowed. I think we have all been in situations that require hard choices, how we handle them often decides our fate. Still, many of the reasons that people left their jobs were honorable, like wanting to devote more time to their kids, or being forced to care for a sick relative, etc. Some simply did not have any better choices than the ones they made.
Most of the people interviewed made choices that were not the recipes needed for success, but often they were their only options. Others simply blamed their circumstances on others, or on outside circumstances, and did not assess the wiseness of their own actions. Most insisted that they did not want handouts; most believed they deserved them when they accepted them, however, and believed they should have been greater, offering a real chance to return to society as a productive participant.
The second part of the book was about the ways poverty and second-class citizenhood have been promoted by society with its rules and regulations, and standards and requirements for ultimate success. The author particularly pointed to Obama’s demands that everyone worth his salt had to have a college education, whether or not the job being sought warranted it. She also pointed to Hoover’s zoning laws which purposefully isolated communities, so they became homogeneous created communities of those who lived in particular bubbles. The elite isolated themselves. Red-lining and the requirement to build only single-family, unattached homes on certain parcels, in certain neighborhoods, effectively eliminated the possibility of home ownership for many in the working class. It also limited the number of housing units, ultimately leading to today’s high prices and shortage of housing options. I, myself, grew up in a multifamily, attached house, and it helped my parents survive and provided me with a happy and safe space in which to live.
The author has done a great deal of research into the lives of real people and has followed them to see if their lives have improved or declined. She found examples of both. Some were living better, but many were not. She made positive suggestions to improve the situation for the working class, so often overlooked and looked down upon. She addressed the idea of coupling salaries to the standards of living in the places of employment, instead of a mandated minimum wage. It seemed the most sensible to me. For instance, in NYC, the salary needed to live is simply much higher than it would be in a small town, outside of a major city or state. It would require far different salaries for a family to not only survive, but to succeed in different places.
In the end, I did not feel that the American dream had turned into a nightmare or had disappeared. I believe that those who still dream of it have to make choices that do not preclude it. If you are unwilling to put in the time or effort to succeed, you simply will fail. Those who work hard and fail, sometimes put their efforts in places that do not reward them fairly. Others are defeated by the system and the draconian rules and regulations that the lawmakers should definitely change. The author points out that in Las Vegas, workers are thriving.
Las Vegas is a place where workers are needed and courted by both agencies, schools and businesses. The workers are guaranteed good salaries and benefits. They do have a union, but it does not defeat its own purpose. They do negotiate. The casinos need employees, the restaurants need employees, the hotels need employees, so they work with culinary schools and high schools that have students who wish to enter their workforce. They pay for their further studies and provide training. However, if a person looking for employment chooses to reside in a city with vast numbers of illegal immigrants, they will likely fail to find a good position. The illegal immigrant gets benefits that American citizens do not, and the immigrant works for far less money than an American needs to survive.
Programs need to be mandated that even out the playing field for Americans vs Illegals, singles vs marrieds, with or without children. There is also a need for programs that deal with the unexpected disaster, so that those suffering can return to their former place in society without losing everything. There is a need to reward the two-parent family to encourage more people to marry. Married couples seem to enjoy more successful, happy lives. Two men seem to earn more than two women in a family, however. Social change is necessary, but social change is hard to come by. Having children out of wedlock makes it harder to succeed. Single parents have a harder time when it comes to deal with any crisis because there is no one else to lean on for aid. Zoning laws have to be changed so that more multifamily dwellings are built to house the homeless. Not all homeless people are homeless because of crime or drug addiction. Some fall on hard times too. Trade schools have to be built, and attendance has to be encouraged. We need to bring employment back to America for Americans.
Not every job requires a college education so it should not be forced upon the job seekers because it excludes those without one. Obama’s idea to make everyone work in a knowledge industry, and his need for globalization, forced out all the trade industries and has negatively affected the workplace and the middle and lower classes. It has made it impossible for the middle class and lower class to improve their lot in life. Mass immigration has made the supply too great and has driven down wages. He opened the borders too wide and dramatically changed the playing field. Biden followed his negative example. The Democrats have not only caused identity politics to harm society, but they have also increased the class divide with their elitism, although they pretend that they are not the elite. Americans who work in a trade are not the ignorant. The Americans who go to restaurants like the Olive Garden, should not be ashamed of being able to take their family there, instead of a fancier establishment. They should be proud of what they have accomplished and encourage others to follow their example. They have succeeded and are working toward their American dream.
The author refers to the diploma divide and blames the disappearance of jobs that we used to encourage on that principle. It has caused an increase in anxiety in the working class and an increase in the number of suicides that are tied to the loss of self-worth, the loss that Obama encouraged when he made it dependent on your education choices and subsequent employment. His new standards not only destroyed the working-classes, it made them ashamed to be part of it.
For these reasons and others, the author is a Trump-supporting Democrat. The book is enlightening, informative, compassionate and balanced.

[brianinbuffalo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

[3.25] Given the amazing potential this book possessed with its riveting and timely topic, the end product was a tad disappointing.

The author deserves credit for spending a year traveling the country and interviewing a large and diverse group of people who share some truly compelling stories. The book touches on important issues that include our “diploma divide,” the impacts of mass migration, our astonishing housing crisis and the “benefits cliff.”

However, “Second Class” soon began to feel more like a disjointed array of anecdotes than what Ungar-Sargon described in a broadcast interview as a deep-dive into the notion of whether working class individuals “still have a fair shot at the American Dream.”

What’s more, the writing in some sections is downright sloppy and maddeningly repetitive. “Second Class” would have definitely benefitted from a more diligent editor.

Having said all of this, “Second Class” provides some insights. Ungar-Sargon, who occasionally appears as a commentator/analyst on TV, shared one insight in a recent appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” She said she was surprised to discover how many working class individuals were outraged over government “waste, fraud and abuse.” Some complained that “the people who deserve help don’t get it, and the people choosing not to work are able to scam the system.”