The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, the elites have betrayed America

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Long-held notions of the role of government, trade and economic policy, foreign policy and immigration are being challenged by populist thinkers and movements. They argue that the government has been captured by an elite, college-educated class, and their policies benefit a privileged few while ignoring the needs of the middle and working class. Populist’s critics argue that the rising tide in anti-establishment thinking ignores the incredible progress in health care, education, and tech that has been realized under the governance of these intellectual elites. Populist anger, they warn, represents a grave threat to western democracy and the trusted institutions that paved the post-war path to peace and prosperity. Arguing in favour of the resolution is Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor of Newsweek and author of the new book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. Arguing against the resolution is Joel Stein, journalist and author of In Defense of Elites. SOURCES: radiowv, Charlie Rose   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths  Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Producer: Daniel Kitts Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. The media has a frame, and the frame is Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed. I shouldn't be forced to acknowledge my privilege unless I desire for that to be part of my interaction with somebody else. What I know to be true and what all of my fellow Gen Z know to be true is that this is the most talented generation yet. With respect to every indesia of disadvantage, there is still a racial higher. And though I am, of course, an Anglo, certainly not a fucking Saxon. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day.

Our goal is to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Elites have betrayed America. The rich man north of rich men, Lord knows it all just want to have. Want to know what you think. Want to know what you do. And they don't think you know, but I know that you do. Because your dollar ain't shit.

And it's taxed to no end. Tones the rich. The song, Richman North of Richmond by the then unknown musician Oliver Anthony, debuted at number one in the charts in the fall of 2023, giving voice to the anger and frustration felt by a generation of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Populists argue that government agencies and our culture as a whole have been captured by an elite college-educated class whose policies benefit them the privileged few while ignoring the needs of working Americans. Here's Donald Trump's former chief of staff, Steve Bannon.

We want to talk about hate crimes? Economic hate crime on the working class people in this country. That's a hate crime. How the industrial base in this country has been eviscerated in the elites, the ascended economy of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., and she's got the gall to sit up there. Populism's critics believe that the rising tide in anti-establishment thinking ignores the incredible progress being made on health care, education, technology, all the factors and forces transforming our lives for the better, forces brought about by the skills, fortitude, the intellectual curiosity of elites. Populist anger, the critics argue, represents a grave threat to Western democracies, and the trusted institutions that have underwritten our security and prosperity. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these

arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved. Elites have betrayed America. Arguing in favor of the motion is Batya Angar Sargon. She's the opinion editor of Newsweek and author of The New Book, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women. Arguing against the motion is Joel Stein. He has a former columnist at Time Magazine and author of In Defense of Elites. Batya, Joel, welcome to the Monk Debates. Hi, thanks for having me. Hey, good to be here. Great debate today. It's one that we've wanted to do for a while now on the Monk Debate podcast, so the opportunity to dig into this meaty topic with you both is appreciated. Batcha, as per our debate convention here, we're going to

put two minutes on our show clock. Turn the program over to you. You're arguing for our motion, be it resolved. Elites have betrayed America. So in the next hour, I'm going to convince you that the elites have betrayed America. Who are these elites? You can define them economically, as people who are wealthier than the average American. You can define them as the expert class, people with credentials. You could define them culturally as the media or the political class. Here's the thing. However you define elite, the truth remains the same. The elites have betrayed the American people because the expert and the cultural elites have become the economic elite through an intentional plunder of the middle class. Of course, the experts betrayed America with bad

expertise too. Economists convinced us that free trade would be great when the truth is it devastated the working class. The medical establishment told us that the vaccinated can't catch COVID and that children would die of it, which was nonsense that led to social and economic devastation. The foreign policy experts told us that we needed to wage endless wars, fruitless bloody endeavors that made the world less safe, and the journalist cast told us that every Trump voter is racist. Well, the black and Hispanic voters fleeing. the Democratic Party for Trump would beg to differ. The real scandal, though, is that while giving us this terrible expert advice, the elites were engaged in class warfare against the working class,

literally lining their pockets with the proceeds of their policies. They exported good-paying manufacturing jobs to China and imported cheap goods for themselves and then created an economy that rewards knowledge industry jobs and destroys working-class communities. They smeared working-class Americans as racists for wanting less competition from illegal migrants and then open the border to demolish working class wages further. Back in the 90s, the average working class person earned an income commensurate to that of the average college professor. The majority of the GDP was in the middle class. Today, the top 20 percent, those same college professors and other elites, control over 50 percent of the GDP while the working class struggles to afford groceries. This

happened by accident, but by an over-credentialed elite who used their positions to create policy that actively undermine the middle class with an upward transfer of wealth to themselves. Be it resolved, the elites have betrayed the American people. Thank you, Bachela, for that opening statement. You're listening to our debate today on elites. Have they betrayed us or not? Joel's arguing against the motion. Joel, let's have your opening statement now.

That was a lot. Okay. I started worrying about populism back in 2008 when I heard Sarah Palin say, I'm never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I'm not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I'm going to fight the elitist. Sarah Palin seemingly was unaware there's a third option to learn something so you know something more than the next person.

This myth that the elite are selfishly rigging the system while doing it. nothing useful, conveniently ignores the fact that the system we built is awesome. If this were an argument for any other group of people besides the elite, I'd now list all the amazing things we've accomplished and contributed throughout history. But I don't need to do that because elites have created everything that ever existed, except maybe like Jello wrestling. And honestly, the ancient Greeks created wrestling. And I think Peter Cooper, who founded the university, discovered Jelodin.

So all the non-elites have ever done is put jello and wrestling together. That's their big accomplishment. And let's now go over the great successes of populism, where we define this kind of mythical, real American or real German, the working class who knows from their gut what is right. The accomplishments of populism include the Dark Ages, China's Cultural Revolution, North Korea, Pol Potts Kimmer Rouge, Andrew Jackson, Network television? Just disaster after disaster. No, the elites haven't gotten everything right. No one in every part of society that runs it is ever going to get everything right.

But they've done a hell of a job. Elitism is expertise. And in an ever more complex society, we need expertise. The attack on the elites is nothing but fear. It's the political expression of this anxiety that we would like to return to a simpler pre-modern life. And if we get rid of the elite, that's exactly what's going to happen and no one's going to like it. Thank you, Joel, for that opening statement. Now we move on to rebuttals about you, your opportunity to react to what you just heard from Joel now. You know, most working class people don't want to go back to a pre-modern time. They want to go back to the 70s when working class wages and productivity, moved hand in hand. What happened in 1971 is that productivity and wages decoupled and all of the

GDP that was created by increasing exponential profit and productivity went to the elites and not, and away from the working class who produced all of that profit. I mean, what they really want is a return to a very recent past in which it felt like the middle class was stronger because it objectively was. And to your point about the elites creating everything and populism being terrible, the populist vision is that when the majority of a country wants something, it should happen. That's really another word for democracy. The vast majority of working class Americans, which is the majority of this country, have a very clear vision of how their lots could be improved and how they have been sold down the river economically. They don't want to return to any cultural past. In fact,

they're much more tolerant than they have ever been. They're extremely pro-gay. They're into diversity and interracial marriage. The idea that this is being driven by, you know, this feeling of, you know, bigotry or racial animus and all of this. It's just nonsense, as you know, because you spent time with a lot of these people, Joel. So to me, what they want is what everybody wants, which is for a country to be built on a strong middle class. And it is the elites that have made that increasingly impossible. Thank you, Bacha. Okay, Joel, your rebuttal now. You can react to Batchez opening statement or her remarks in response to your opening? First of all, I am honored to be debating you.

You've written from New York Times. You've been on NPR. You have a PhD from Berkeley, and I believe the 18th century novel. So I love talking about elitism with you. The desire to return to the 1970s is definitely going back in time and to a time that we can't return to. The problem, I think you're conflating the word elite in a really, in a way that you shouldn't, which is there is an economic elite and there's a cultural elite.

And they're not the same people. There's plenty of people in the middle of the country who are entrepreneurs who started businesses where they own a bunch of gas stations, et cetera, who are part of the economic elite. What I think populace, at least in this country, tend to focus on is the intellectual elite. And to say that people, you know, it's a democracy and people can vote for whoever they want, the majority of people they vote for are experts. Most people in the Senate or Congress, they've almost all gone to college. Most of them, more of them have gone to Harvard than any other college.

This is who people choose because we know it's a complex society. We're going through a great shift to a knowledge economy, which has devastated the middle class. devastated men particularly in the middle class. And to just ask for things to go back is not the way to save it. I think elites know that the only way economically to improve the situation of the middle class is to move them on board into the knowledge economy. And there's great shifts coming again. And it's going to be hard, just like the agricultural revolution was hard for generations of farmers. And people, if we look at the industrial revolution, you had a bunch of craftspeople who went to factories and literally destroyed them with hammers and left notes from Ned Ludd.

It's where we get Luddites. It's a difficult period. But just to wish the pass back isn't going to help. We need to move people into the elites. We need to move people into colleges. We need to find a way to make men enjoy going to college and enjoy learning. Otherwise, it's just going to get worse. Thank you both for some terrific opening statements and rebuttals.

You're listening to our debate today, be it resolve. of elites have betrayed America. I'm going to join now with some questions kind of top of mind for our listeners tuning in. And let's just spend a moment with definitions. Because I think in a debate like this, definitions are important. So I want to hear from both of you,

your definition of an elite. What are we talking about here? Who is this? How do you characterize an elite in 21st century America or the West today? Baja, why don't you start? Well, so as I opened my opening remarks, you can define it sort of three ways. You can define it economically. You can define it

culturally or you can define it in terms of credentials. The thing is, is that that economic component now maps onto the cultural question and the expertise question. So if you get a college degree today, you are much more likely to enter into, to achieve the American dream. You're much more likely to be a homeowner. You will, on average, make $1 million more over the course of your career than somebody who doesn't have a college degree. You live longer. Your health outcomes are better. And that sort of piece of things where the top 20 percent controls over 50 percent of the GDP and getting into that top 20 percent involves getting a credential or multiple credentials. That, to me, is how you define the elites. And the working class would be people who work in jobs,

who are sort of the non-elites, you know, who work in jobs that don't require skills you would pick up in college and who are locked out of that top 20 percent. I will just point out that so, you know, the obvious question would be, you know, why isn't Joel right that we should just be sending everybody to college? If college is correlated with all of these wonderful outcomes, shouldn't we just send everybody to college? And the answer to that is twofold. The first piece of it is 50 percent of people with a college degree are, quote, what's called underemployed, which means they're working in jobs that don't require the skills that they pick up in college, although infuriatingly, they still make more than working class people in the same

jobs. This is just a statistic that the Wall Street Journal reported on a few months ago that's been born out again and again and again. It used to be 40 percent. Now it's 50 percent. In other words, we're overproducing already college degrees in terms of what our economy can sustain. We have a massive, massive shortage of skilled tradesfolk because President Obama defunded vocational training. We actually will always need people to be plumbering. We actually will always need people to be plumbers and electricians and truck drivers and certified nurses aides and work in working class jobs, whereas we pretty much hit our limit of accountants and gender studies podcasters, et cetera, et cetera, all of these things that come out of, you know, colleges.

And so by saying let's just funnel everybody into college, our economy can't sustain that. And plus, a lot of people aren't suited for that. They don't want that. And we are so lucky that they want to be janitors rather than wanting to be gender studies podcast. Do you know how lucky we are that there are people who get dignity out of cleaning the diapers of the elderly? You know, who's going to do those jobs? Oh, well, the liberals will say, we'll just import people to do those jobs. But then what are the 70% of this country who are working class supposed to do? No. The answer is, is that we should restore dignity to the working class and stop saying

you need a credential in order to achieve the most basic, modest version of the American dream. So, Joel, similar question for you. Do you accept Bata's kind of multifaceted, multi-layered definitions of elites. Do you see also her point that to define elite is to define a convergence? So it's a convergence of economic privilege, of educational privilege, of material privilege, one through credentialization. Is that how you see elites also, or do you have a different view? I think there are two different kinds of elites that we're shoving together here. but first, I want to object to the idea that there's people who are really eager to clean the

diapers of the elderly. I'm going to question the truth of that. And I'm also wondering, I was kind of timing on my watch to see how long it would take for you to mention plumbers and electricians. Because every time you have this debate with someone, they talk about plumbers and electricians. Those are well-paid jobs that you don't necessarily have to have a college degree for. There are not that many plumbers. We are not going to have a nation of plumbers. shut down factory jobs and assume everyone's going to be a plumber. That's not what happens. People mention plumbers because the populists love masculinity. And it's a masculine job, and it's a well-paid job, and it's a job that's expertise. If you don't go to college,

you don't become a plumber. We don't need a hundred million plumbers. What you become is either a service worker at a restaurant or someone who works in the healthcare industry, i.e., working in someone's house who's elderly and rich taking care of their diapers. You become a servant. And that's really the options left in the society. And when you move further and further into a knowledge economy, those are the choices. And we do not, you can talk about how great these kind of ancient masculine jobs are, but they're just not going to be around and to tell people that I think is doing them a horrible disservice. As far as the types of elites, I talk in my book about the boat elite versus the intellectual elite. I think what we really have right now is this fight

between two different kinds of elites. One is the kind that lives in an honor culture, believes in masculinity, in kind of an old-fashioned way, believes in power and money. And the other half is the kind that's your listener. It's the kind of person who would rather give a TED talk than own a yacht. And I think that's the kind that really threatens people, is the What was it, the gender podcaster? This is the kind of person who is considered not of the people, not American enough. And the elite are always contrasted with the true people who know in their gut what's right. And the elites, honestly, they're vilified as either feminist or gay.

And really, I think this is the heart of it, Jews. It's these kind of urban elite that everyone is threatened by. And this desire to get to a true national American populace that's somewhere in the middle of the country and knows right and wrong in their gut is a very, very dangerous idea. Hi, monk listeners. I wanted to tell you about our upcoming monk debate on anti-Zionism. On June 17th, author and journalist Douglas Murray and UK-based international law expert Natasha Hochstorff will debate. Former MSNBC commentator and columnist Median San and Israeli journalist. Gideon Levy on stage in Toronto in front of a live audience of 3,000 people.

The debate will be streamed, so if you can't make it in person, you can watch it from the comfort of your living room. Find out how to become a monk member and get your live stream access to the monk debate on anti-Zionism. Visit our website right now, triple w monk debates.com. You're listening to our debate today, be a resolved. elites have betrayed America. Batchi, I want to come to you just to push this conversation along the line that we're currently on, which is trying to define who elites are. A lot of this debate does it not seem cultural, as Joel said. It's about perceived grievances. It's about one group feeling left out, another group feeling that they want to defend their privileges and their

their powers. And if we accept that, if we accept that this is a cultural debate as much or more than it might be an economic or a political debate, doesn't that suggest that, you know, elites are here to stay, that this is a timeless debate. This is a debate we could have had 50 years, 300 years, a thousand years ago. We're counting angels on the head of a pin. So let me just get it straight. the elites plundered the middle class, now control 50% of the GDP, okay? And from that perch of extreme economic privilege, they look at the losers who can no longer afford a home, who don't have $400 to rub together and say, oh, this is a cultural grievance. Oh, this is racism.

Give me a break. This is purely economic. And I just spent the year traveling the country, interviewing work, class people for my book second class. And what I found was remarkable consensus between working class people who are Democrats and who are conservatives who vote for Republicans, although mostly they don't vote for Republicans anymore. They vote for Donald Trump. They have huge economic problems. The American dream is totally out of reach for them. By what right does the top 20 percent sneer at these people and say this is a cultural issue? I mean, that went out the window with Thomas Frank's book.

How could anybody still believe that? Looking at it. at people who can't afford groceries. What chutzpah? And by the way, the people in my book are of all races, of all religious backgrounds, in many, many industries. And I'm sorry, Joel, you should read the book because you'll meet people who take a lot of dignity and being a janitor and a lot of dignity and, yes, working in nursing homes and taking care of the elderly. I get that the elites think that that job is beneath contempt. But lucky for us, there's a lot of people who get a lot of dignity from doing that. And we should respect them instead of sneering at them and undercutting their wages by importing millions and millions of people from failed socialist states to compete with them and drive down their wages. Thank you, Batchez.

So building on this, Joel, and you can sense, you know, the anger that Batcha has around this debate and issue, and we know that that is shared amongst a broad section of publics in the Western world, isn't the issue, Joel, that it's become gross, that the economic inequality, the divisions, the, the hoarding by elites of these, you know, scarce social goods like highly credentialized. education at elite institutions where they intermarry with one another, usually in the same county or postal code. It's all just become too much. This is new. This is different now. We aren't the type of elite and the concentration of the elite economically, politically, culturally, has reached a level of toxicity that is now eliciting this backlash. I really do want us to be careful in conflating these two types of elites. the kind of elite, the cultural elite, who do control the media and went to certain colleges, or at least what used to be the media, in various aspects of government, that is an intellectual elite.

The money is controlled by a different elite that overlaps a little bit, but not completely. And I think we should keep these two ideas separate. I agree, the wealth inequality has become gross, although historically, you know, the 80-20 Pareto rule is in a effect. There was a period of time after World War II, where in certain Western democracies, it was not true. This is generally true. It's most probably going to be solved, most easily solved through taxation and redistribution, which the average populace does not want because they all think they're about to become millionaires. But that's truly the way to say this, because if you remove Silicon Valley and Seattle, where the elites control a lot of the world from,

this is not a hugely successful country. A lot of the wealth is being generated by a very small number of people in those two places in the elite. So, you know, I think there's a lot of dignity that can be had in all kinds of jobs, especially if you're helping people and working there. I just want people to have as much choice as possible in what they choose to do for a living. And that means at this point in time getting an education and going to college. So, Batchie, as we start to bring. this debate home, let's just spend a little time talking about solutions because, you know,

sometimes proving an assertion in this case that elites have betrayed the American people might be more convincing if there was a solution to, you know, a problem that Joel just outlined there, that elites are the product of underlying structures. They're in your society, in America, they are products of your global dominance in tech. And the, you can't cute, you know, concentration of wealth creation and a few select, you know, zip codes in Palo Alto and one or two other places in the country. You know, this is happening. It's real. We all get that. But what do you see as any kind of fair solution, something that could lead to greater equality? Is that what you're seeking between Americans without, you know, acknowledging the

structural features of this moment and the challenge that, you know, economies face today? and the potential cost of uprooting America's elites. What would that mean? What are the ancillary effects of that? How would that impact less fortunate Americans? The solutions are so simple that it is embarrassing that we are even fighting over them. I mean, control the border and drastically reduce the number of immigrants legal and illegal will immediately have an impact on working class wages, as we saw in the very recent past.

vocational training, get it back into high schools so that people have more choices and aren't told you're a loser if you don't go to college and there are pathways to the American Dream that don't involve that degree. Get rid of degree requirements for jobs that don't require skills you pick up in college, which is many, and make it illegal to use software that keeps people out of those jobs because they don't have a degree. Trade, it's hugely important to working class Americans. A trade war with China is incredibly important. them. Tariffs is incredibly important. Working class people will tell you tariffs on steel and aluminum. I mean, that puts money in their pockets. All of these things were choices that were made by leftist

elites to put money in their pockets. It was an upward transfer of wealth. And with five or six totally nonpartisan policy things, we could help the working class so much get rid of zoning laws that protect the property values of those couples you mentioned, rich liberal doctors married to each other who make it illegal to build a duplex in their neighborhood. You could immediately build a million units in one year and solve our housing crisis in a decade. Build a duplex so your cleaning lady can live walking distance from you. Why should that be unthinkable? It is unthinkable to the leftist elites who control these local boards. These are such simple, obvious things. You wouldn't have to uproot anybody. The thing that working class people don't want liberal and conservative,

who I interviewed, is taxes. They don't want handouts from the government. They don't want to live off the government. They don't want food stamps. They don't want affordable housing. They want the dignity that comes from being well paid for hard work. And it is very easy to turn that around. It's simple supply and demand. You limit the supply of workers. You get more wages. It's like the most obvious thing, although the entire economics expert class will tell you that this is not true. It is obviously true. Joel, do you see these solutions as as feasible? I mean, isn't at the end of the day this really about fairness? And I think you would concede that profit as it has been accumulated is shared more often with shareholders than with workers. Isn't it just a question

of rebalancing some of our assumptions about how our society works, how our economy functions? We could do a lot here to, I don't know, what's the word, de-elitize American society, do it quickly, do it relatively painfully, and have a more equal, just, and fair society as a result. I've heard populace called terrifying simplifiers. And whenever someone tells you there's a simple solution, I'd really, really question that. The idea that more vocational training is going to somehow create a 100 million job. for plumbers is just not true. It's just not where our society is going. And the idea that immigration is taking jobs from people, which Bacchu tells you,

every economist will tell you it was wrong, is clearly not true. The reason our GDP has grown over the last couple years is this enormous number of immigrants who have come, and they don't take jobs, they create jobs. And we have a shrinking population. So it's just a populist job to blame. immigrants, to blame the elite, and to wish a world into existence that somehow maybe existed in the past, but didn't really. I don't want to go back to the 70s. I was alive in the 70s. The 70s sucked. The idea that we should go backwards seems so, so insane to me. Butcha,

you're the opinion editor of Newsweek. How many of the last like 20-something columns that you've run were written by someone who didn't go to college? We run working class people every week. What's the last, what percentage of people do you run who didn't go to college? We run two or three pieces by working class people every week. Compared to how many who went to college? I don't know the exact numbers because there's a lot of us in the section. I would say it's about a quarter of the people that I personally run.

It's not enough, but it's 25% more than anybody else is doing it. I'm very proud of it and very glad that you asked me that so I could tell people. Yeah. No, that is impressive because I'm assuming they are hard to find. They're all around us. But they're not in, yeah, they're around us, but they're. But they have been silenced. I agree with you.

They have been cut out of American public discourse. I totally agree with you. Yeah. Of course, there are in other places. They're on YouTube. I mean, the media has grown to include a lot more people, I think. Yeah, because there's fewer experts. I'm totally with you on the idea that zoning has been a problem, and that should be fixed.

But, you know, the idea that the people who didn't go to college should be in our increasingly complicated times, be elected to the Senate or Congress seems really dubious to me. If you look at the people who didn't go to college, which seems to what we're talking about, who are in Congress, you get Lauren Bobert. you get, well, he's not there anywhere, Madison Cothorn, you get Matthew Rosendale. These aren't people who are solving our society's problems. Bachelors, do you want to respond to that? It's a kind of argument, you know, while standing goes back to Plato, the philosopher king, people are equipped through education to assume leadership. I feel very blessed because Joel is making my argument for me, like the contempt of the

working class in a democracy that suggests that they literally are not qualified to do what a democracy promises us can happen, which is a person by being elected. What makes them qualified is the fact that they were chosen by Americans to lead. And the expert classes I opened with, they have delivered so many faceplants. Just disastrous, disastrous policy. NAFTA was created by a bunch of eggheads with multiple degrees and devastated the working class. There was no reason to do that. There was no reason to ship five million good manufacturing jobs overseas. It's not like the horse and buggy. Those cars are still being made. They're just being made by Chinese middle class people now instead of by American middle class people. That was the, that's what happens when you have rule by elite. You want an oligarchy

of the credentialed. That is not a democracy. And it is fueled by contempt for people who work with their hands for a living of all races and of all occupations and of all genders. You've been to car factories. They're robots now. These jobs are not returning. And we have to deal with that. We have an opioid epidemic because we're not dealing with that. We have a problem with men because we're not dealing with these structural problems. And they're not just going to be fixed by giving people vocational training for jobs that don't exist. Let's go to closing statements. I'm conscious of our time. So, Joel. you've been arguing against our motion this debate, be it resolve elites have betrayed America.

What are the couple key arguments or points that you want to leave our audience with as they reflect on this excellent debate? Well, like a true elite, I'm going to bring up an old text, which is this 1901 treatise that called the rise and fall of elites, which was the first time this word elite is being used in the way that we're using it. this Italian economist, Velfredo Paredo, put forth this theory that there's a circulation of elites, which argues that revolutions never occur when conditions are so horrible that the masses like take to the streets with their guitars and paper mache puppets. They occur when one group of elites sees an opportunity to take power from another. The phrase he used was, history is a graveyard of elites. So this myth that the common people, the working class, are going to take over. over and run everything, never, ever happens. There's always going to be a group of elites running

things, and you better choose the right one. So Brato called them the speculators who are these innovative, cooperative, sneaky people who are like everyone I know, and the rentiers who are tough, loyal, hardworking, tribal, and traditional. I call them the boat elite and the intellectual elite. And the boat elite are steeped in honor culture. They're like the real housewives who throw wine faces at the hint of an insult. And the intellectual elite would never do that because our wine is too good. And the boat elite tend to win every dispute. They need to win every dispute.

Everything is either a win or a loss because they don't understand that humans win by cooperating. Whereas the intellectually, money isn't really our motivating factor. And I'll close with this quote from Thomas Mann, who dealt with the same issue when he traveled across America. in 1938 after fleeing Nazi Germany. And he gave this speech called the coming victory of democracy, in which he talked about how attacking

the elite is just a path to tyranny. And he said, there exists a modern anti-intellectualism, which is the contempt of pure reason, the denial and violation of truth in favor of power and the interests of the state, the appeal

to the lower instincts, to the so-called feeling, the release of stupidity and evil from the discipline of reason and intelligence, the emancipation of blackguardism, in short, a barbaric mob movement, beside which what we call democracy certainly stands out as aristocratic to the highest degree. So good luck without us elites. Thank you, Joel Stein, for an excellent closing statement. Okay, Batchett, as per debate tradition, you've been arguing in favor of our motion, be it resolved elites have betrayed America,

or we're going to give you the last word? For my new book, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, I spent the year traveling the country and interviewing working class Americans across the spectrum of all races, political persuasions, backgrounds, religions, and regions. And I found a deep, deep sense of betrayal.

Whether people were Democrats or Republicans, they felt that they had been left behind, abandoned to fend for themselves in an economy that no longer saw their hard work as worthy of respect, and the most basic tenets of a middle-class life, the kinds of things that the elites take for granted. And whether they were Democrats or Republicans, they knew who was to blame, politicians, the media,

the so-called experts, the people who sneer at them, exploit them, and smear them while selling out their futures. These people were remarkably unbitter. They were still deeply patriotic, but they knew that something had gone wrong since their parents' generation when people could achieve the American dream as a janitor or a barber or a trucker or a nurse's aide.

Whether they were white, black, Hispanic, or Jewish, they knew that things had been better for people like them a generation ago, and they knew that things would be even worse for their children. Who's to blame? The people behind the offshoring of manufacturing and the importing of millions and millions of migrants, the people behind free trade deals and the ballooning administrative costs of health care and education,

the people who defunded vocational training to give $200 billion to institutions that meant gender studies majors, and then pay off their student loans so they can become podcasters. None of this was by accident. Someone did these things. Someone betrayed the people in my book second class. You can call them whatever you want, but we know who it is.

Be it resolved. The elites have betrayed the American people. Thank you, Bacha Ungar Sargon. That was a terrific closing statement too. You've given us both so much to think about. And you've done it all with civility and substance. We won't say that's either an elite or a working class virtue, but it's one that we really appreciate here at the Monk debate community. So thank you again both for coming on the program today.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Bacha and Joel, for a terrific one-on-one debate. They certainly give us a lot to think about. If you have questions or feedback on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debates with an S.com. Also a friendly reminder for as little as $25 a year, 50 cents an episode or less.

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