Speak truth to power and be ignored, not heard, suppressed

Two books by Batya Ungar-Sargon

One pervasive myth of American exceptionalism is that the United States of America is a class-less society.

The grain of truth here is that much of hereditary, traditional, class distinctions became obsolete and inapplicable following independence from Britain. Furthermore, for several decades after World War II, there was a thriving middle class and a corresponding general belief in the reality of the classical “American Dream” of widely shared opportunity. But during something like the last half-century, there has come a rather obvious separation into two classes: the Haves, and the Have-Nots, distinguished most obviously in economic terms of income and wealth, but associated thereby with better or worse or even no health care; with great security or great lack of security, with college education or lack thereof; with much opportunity or lack of opportunity.

Two recent books by Batya Ungar-Sargon describe these circumstances: Bad News: How woke media is undermining democracy (Encounter Books, 2021); and Second Class: How the elites betrayed America's working men and women (Encounter Books, 2024).

I don't now recall how I learned of the first one; of  the second one I learned by looking for more information about the author.

As usual with books that interest me, I wanted to know what others had thought of them, and looked for reviews.

I found almost none; although readers at Amazon and Goodreads are quite positive (4.6 & 4.1, and 4.5 & 3.9 respectively [with 5 as maximum]).

I had long thought that every book from an established publisher would be mentioned almost automatically in Publishers Weekly and in Kirkus Reviews; yet I found neither of these books mentioned there. Nor are either of these books in my local Library (Montgomery County, VA), nor in the library of my University (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, commonly known as Virginia Tech).

Even someone lacking paranoid tendencies might suspect that the “woke media” and “elites” referred to in these books have been effectively ignoring them, thereby making them virtually unknown to the general public.

Bad News was given a perfunctory three paragraphs, descriptive and non-judgmental, in a joint review (titled “Press Gangs”) of four books in the New York Times [1].

The Claremont Review of Books [2] does have a full, worthwhile and overall positive review of Bad News, and mentions what I regard as one of the most important insights to be gained from both books: that they describe the circumstances that gave rise to the populist-Donald-Trump phenomenon — which is a crucial lesson for dealing with that phenomenon.

City Journal, “the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine, ‘the Bible of the new urbanism,’ as London’s Daily Telegraph puts it” [3], has a good review of Second Class [4].

A very useful insight into the research for Second Class is available on substack, written by the driver who accompanied the book’s author on her research travels [5].

I have inquired at Encounter Books for possible explanations for this paucity of reviewing. In the meantime, the insights in these books reminded me of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs (1927; The Treason of the Intellectuals; also published as The Great Betrayal). Benda denounced as moral traitors those who betray truth and justice for racial and political considerations — precisely what is being done routinely by the extremists of political correctness and wokeness.

I edited Virginia Scholar (#1-15, 1993-99), the newsletter of the Virginia Chapter of the National Association of Scholars [6], dedicated to rescuing American higher education from the ravages of political correctness. In issue #8 [7], the Editorial has more about the timeliness — still now, in 2024 — of Benda’s insights.

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[1]    Richard Stengel, “Press Gangs”, 7 October 2023; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/books/review/krakauer-mcgar-ungar-sullivan.html

[2]    Emina Melonic, “Anti-American Dream”, Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2021/22; https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/anti-american-dream

[3]    https://www.city-journal.org/about

[4]    Aaron M. Renn, “Struggling, Floating, Rising”, City Journal, 14 May 2024;
https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-second-class-by-batya-ungar-sargon

[5]    Autonomous Truck(er)s, "Second Class" - a short book review, 2 April 2024; https://autonomoustruckers.substack.com/p/second-class-a-short-book-review

[6]    nas.org

[7]    https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html