What's Wrong with The Forward? (2): Batya Ungar-Sargon Embraces Trump Family Values in the NatCon Alt-Right Manner
David Shasha
The Forward’s Batya Ungar-Sargon chosen for ADL and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellowship
By: Forward Staff
Opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon has been selected for the 2021 ADL and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellowship.
Launched in 2019, the Fellowship gives the next generation of community leaders and problem-solvers the opportunity to refine and hone their leadership skills while building relationships across the issue areas and movements from which they come.
Ungar-Sargon is one of the fellows included in two new classes — one for 2020, one for 2021 — selected from a pool of approximately 200 nominees from across the country. The diverse group includes conservatives and liberals, and is made up of mayors, chiefs of police, educators, entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, journalists, lawyers, poets, athletes and activists.
This election year has highlighted the country’s polarization, and both the Forward and the Civil Society Fellowship believe civil discourse is needed now more than ever. Ungar-Sargon and the Forward’s Opinion section are committed to finding nuance in debate, sharing new perspectives on essential issues and lifting up the voices of those who are often sidelined from the conversation.
I’m truly humbled to be included in the 2021 @AspenInstitute@ADL#CivilSocietyFellowship. We are joining ADL and the Aspen Institute’s effort to double down on civil discourse in a divided America. It’s an urgent, sacred mission and I’m honored to be part of this inspiring group pic.twitter.com/5G7InGbBYM— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 16, 2020
The Forward’s Batya Ungar-Sargon chosen for ADL and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellowship
From The Forward, November 18, 2020
Progressives wake up: Eric Adams’ war on crime is about class, not color
By: Batya Ungar-Sargon
Wokeness is on the wane. After a series of horrific murders culminating in the Friday killing of rookie police officer Jason Rivera, New Yorkers are demanding Mayor Eric Adams make good on his promise to make the city safe again — and Monday he unveiled his plan to do so.
Vowing to “deploy more officers on the streets and in the subways,” Adams will go after gang members taking advantage of Raise the Age legislation to skirt gun-possession charges. “When it comes to guns, we must make sure there are consequences,” he said — an indirect shot at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who’s promised less prosecution.
And he’ll reinstitute a version of the anti-gun unit Mayor Bill de Blasio disbanded in the “Defund the Police” craze after George Floyd’s killing, with officers in unmarked cars but wearing NYPD-labeled gear.
With headlines constantly calling this unit “controversial” — The New York Times went so far as to ask: “Can Adams Rebuild, and Rein In, a Notorious NYPD Unit?” — the liberal media are working hard to turn this progressive loss into a tale of racism. But like so much when it comes to wokeness, this story is actually about class.
Adams, a former NYPD captain who pushed for reforms, insisted last year that “the prerequisite for prosperity is public safety.” That message won him the lion’s share of black votes in the Democratic primary — a whopping 63%. Adams beat Defund-the-Police-and-“create trauma-informed care in our schools” Maya Wiley and wealthy hotspot favorite Kathryn Garcia handily in Brooklyn and The Bronx, including in public-housing units.
Adams won by making crime his campaign’s center. Some voters worried a lot about the historic increase in violence heading into the primaries: Just 53% of New Yorkers without college degrees felt safe walking around their neighborhoods — compared with 72% of those with college degrees. And when asked how to deal with the surge in shootings and violent crime, college-educated voters were significantly more likely to select the “Defund the Police” option — “Move resources away from police to fund programs that deal with mental health” — than those without degrees.
Meanwhile, the same progressive Manhattanites who rejected Adams elected a district attorney who vowed not to prosecute crime. DA Alvin Bragg is the man representing the views of this liberal elite. He made good on his promise his first week in office with an infamous memo ordering prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for armed robberies, drug dealing and even gun possession and resisting arrest.
It’s one thing to say we don’t want young black men stopped because of the color of their skin. It’s quite another to tell working-class women that their jobs now involve being threatened with a knife and having the criminal walk free.
As is so often the case with today’s overeducated white progressives, the price of the policies that make them feel righteous is paid by the most vulnerable — poor and working-class people of color who have to live with the consequences.
Progressive newspapers catering to highly educated elites like the New York Times want you to believe that these tensions “reflect a broader political argument between centrist Democrats across the nation looking to soothe voters worried about crime and a movement of progressive prosecutors that has pushed for more lenient policies to make the justice system more fair and less biased.”
The truth is almost the exact opposite: This fight is as much about class as it is about crime because the two are deeply connected. Believing the nonsense spewed by the Times, that allowing lawbreakers to victimize poor people of color repeatedly makes the “justice system more fair and less biased,” a Brahmin left is voting to send career criminals back onto the streets, where they act with ratified impunity. It not only allows crime to proliferate but forecloses on the possibility for needed police reform.
With newly installed Bragg and Adams, New York was heading for a class showdown over crime. But after the spate of tragic killings — of Kristal Bayron-Nieves, Michelle Go, Roland Hueston and Jason Rivera — even Bragg is backtracking somewhat. “If you’re walking around Manhattan with a gun, you’re going to be prosecuted and we’re going to hold you accountable,” he said Monday.
Our struggle over crime has huge implications beyond New York City. The disconnect between Bragg and Adams reflects the larger divide in the Democratic Party, between white progressives and moderate people of color, and whether progressives’ right to their feelings of virtue will outweigh the right of poor people of color to lives unmolested by crime.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek and the author of “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.”
From The New York Post, January 24, 2022, re-posted to FAIR Substack, January 30, 2022
The culture war is a class war in disguise
By: Batya Ungar-Sargon
https://nationalconservatism.org/natcontalk/natcontalk-97-january-29-2022/
The idea that working-class Americans who vote for Republicans are ‘voting against their economic interests’ has become dogma on the progressive left. For the life of them, Democrats can’t understand why their proposals for an expanded welfare state do not appeal to the millions of downwardly mobile blue-collar workers in former union strongholds who turned states like West Virginia red.
In response to the mystification of the left, many on the right have argued that people don’t vote on economic issues as much as they do on cultural ones. The argument is that the left’s cultural battles against traditional gender roles, the nuclear family and gun rights, and for abortion rights, have alienated Christian Americans to such a degree that they would be willing to sacrifice benefits like free pre-childcare, paid sick leave and minimum-wage hikes at the altar of their values.
But something both sides seem to have lost sight of is the fact that a lot of what we call cultural battles are actually economic ones – or at least, they have an economic valence.
Take the question of marriage. The idea that marriage is a positive value, and an important grounding unit for families, society and the nation more broadly, is decidedly outré on the left, where marriage is viewed as an outdated institution. Liberal outlets are chock full of essays asking ‘What does marriage ask us to give up?’ and ‘Why marriage requires amnesia’. Divorce, meanwhile, is talked of as a form of ‘home improvement’. In 2020 Black Lives Matter had to scrub a page of its website that was a bit too honest. ‘We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children’, the page read.
But the debate about the value of marriage isn’t just a cultural one or a religious one. It’s also one with huge economic ramifications – because married people earn considerably more than those who aren’t married, by as much as 30 per cent. Married men on average make $80,000 a year, compared to just $50,000 for their non-married counterparts. And the same is true across racial groups. While the racial earnings gap persists across the board, married black men out-earn single white men and single white women. The median income for married heads of black households is over $90,000 – compared to just $38,000 for their unmarried counterparts. The poverty rate for black Americans in 2020 was nearly 20 per cent – but for black married couples, it was just six per cent.
Moreover, it is now uncontroversial that children raised by two parents do better than children raised in any other family structure. A state’s share of married parents is the best predictor of upward mobility for poor kids – better even than race or college education.
Of course, it’s difficult to say whether the link between marriage and higher earnings is causation or correlation. Some economists have argued that people with greater earning potential compete better in the marriage market, while others have argued that married people climb the job ladder faster. Others have argued that married men work harder. Still others believe that married people can take bigger risks in looking for better work while relying on their partner’s income in the meantime, or that the qualities that make people good workers are the same qualities that make them good husbands. On the other side of the equation, many poor and working-class people feel they just can’t afford to get married.
Whatever its cause, the economic incentive to get and stay married is something the upper crusts know well. The class divide in America is as much a marriage divide as it is an educational one. College-educated, affluent Americans are overwhelmingly likely to be married, while working-class and poor families are living increasingly precarious lives, both economically and in terms of their family relationships. For instance, just 11 per cent of babies born to college-educated women are born out of wedlock, as opposed to over 50 per cent of babies born to women who never went to college, and 64 per cent of women who are poor. Just 26 per cent of poor families and 39 per cent of working-class families are married – compared to 56 per cent of middle- and upper-class ones.
There’s a deep and troubling irony to the fact that the very people taking advantage of the marriage bank-account boon are the ones discouraging it in others, downplaying its importance in the economic mobility of poor children. The very people taking advantage of the economic benefits of marriage cast an attachment to marriage as a sign of cultural backwardness.
Working-class Americans may not have the data at their disposal to argue for the economic benefits of marriage. But they have eyes. They can see what’s right in front of them in their communities, which couples are making it and which families are not. But even if it’s correlation and not causation, it is still impossibly grating to have a bunch of rich, married liberals accusing them of selling out their children’s future by focusing on the very thing that seems like it might actually help secure a better future for their children.
Marriage is only one of the many issues in which a class war is masquerading as a culture war. Think for example about the Virginia race for governor in November 2021, which was waged and won over the economy and schools. Progressives eagerly cast parents voting on the issue of their children’s schooling as racists. But for many parents, they were not only concerned about the teaching of critical race theory in schools, they were also fighting simply to keep schools open. Many students in Virginia went a whole year without in-person teaching during the pandemic. For many working-class parents who can’t afford babysitting, keeping schools open was an economic concern as well as an educational one.
Or think about the vaccine mandates, which have pitted the work-from-home crowd against essential workers. The very workers who are targeted by the mandates had already braved the pandemic long before a vaccine was available. This looks like a cultural battle about freedom and autonomy versus government power and overreach, but at its heart there is also an economic divide between blue-collar workers and white-collar workers.
Or think of the battle over Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Bill, which envisages spending trillions of dollars on welfare and social policy. Moderate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who blocked the bill in the Senate, were excoriated by their progressive colleagues for supposedly not caring about their most vulnerable constituents. How could they deny them things like the universal pre-kindergarten childcare (pre-K) promised by the bill?
The fight over government-subsidised childcare is frequently cast as a cultural issue by the left, as part of the battle for gender equality. Free childcare, it is argued, will free women from the kitchen and help them to get equal representation in the workforce. Lost in the conversation is the fact that pre-K and other government programmes that subsidise a two-income family are in effect perpetuating the need for two incomes to keep a middle-class family afloat. In a very real way, these programmes have normalised what Elizabeth Warren used to call the ‘two-income trap’, whereby the nominal gains of having two incomes have been swallowed by a corresponding increase in costs.
Here we see how traditional gender roles, where the mother raises the children and the father works, have become yet another area that is cast as a cultural debate that hides a very real economic question, and one that the left doesn’t seem to have the right answer to. Working-class families are not necessarily better off with two parents in the workforce and subsidised childcare than they would be with an economy that provided upward mobility for a family living on a single income – the way that the American economy did in the 1970s. Certainly, this is a question working-class people can be trusted to adjudicate for themselves.
It’s not the working class that has abandoned its economic interests to wage a culture war. It’s progressives who have abandoned the economic interests of the working class to fight a culture war pushing their own values. So many of the ‘culture war’ battles of the day have an economic valence to them if you scratch just beneath the surface. It’s time progressives stopped lecturing the working class with ideas that will actually make them worse off. America’s working class isn’t voting against its economic interests. They just know what their interests are.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.
From Spiked, January 24, 2022, re-posted to NatCon Talk, January 29, 2022