Sarah Smarsh
Appearances
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
So while I don't think it's a bad idea what you're talking about, I think it's two different realities in terms of a relationship to capital, how you build it, and how you value yourself.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
If a worker hands over just like the inherent value of her ability to fix a sink and now she's swimming with the real sharks trying to get ahead, swimming in the gravy, if you will, that's maybe a really precarious way to be because they've already got you beaten every other way. At least they don't know how to fix their sink.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Oh yeah. Like a scandalous percentage of let's say Walmart employees are on food stamps. The scandal, by the way, to be clear, is that Walmart is underpaying its workers, not that anyone needs to seek out assistance. It was my meaning.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Well, I think that we can... maybe answer the question by just pinpointing or teasing out who is that government? Who's there? It's mostly pretty well-off folks, affluent folks. A lot of them went to the same Ivy League schools. There has been modest but somewhat heartening and hopeful diversification of Congress and the ranks of government along gender and racial lines.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
If you look at class, though, very rare is the lawmaker who has a background with direct experience of poverty or the working class or throw in rural America and you're down to like people you can count on one hand.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yeah. I think it was a meat grinder.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Um, but, uh, but yeah. And God bless him. He had a good run. Um, So what I'm getting at here is I'm not so sure that it's that the structures themselves are unresponsive by definition, but rather the folks who are driving, who are behind the wheel have – Enormous class blind spots and often racial blind spots and gender blind spots as well.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
But across the board, there is just a gross inability to truly understand race. the day-to-day lives of the average American. And that's true in both parties, of course. I talked about the little trick that the Republicans pull off meanwhile earlier. But if the Democrats also have that problem and then they're telling you you're wrong, that the economy sucks, recipe for disaster.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yes, 100%. So when I moved to New York in my 20s, a question I often got was, how did you get out? And I think the idea was it was a compliment. And I actually love the place I'm from. I live there again now in rural Kansas, happily. But I had no choice in terms of my career path and my goals and my aspirations professionally and academically, but to leave.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
I'm kind of a homecomer, if you will, who returned home. um with the on the Odyssean journey um but uh that's how I ended up back in Jersey same thing Yeah, you get it. But yes, home and place. And I believe those things often kind of relate to class. But the capitalist and industrialized and globalized and urbanized way of looking at reality often leaves place out of the equation.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Boy, is that still a tie that binds, I find, when I talk to people about my work. um, all colors and ethnicities and, and, uh, uh, political stripes, even, you know, where I'm from, you just, you say, where are you from? And what, uh, so your daddy was down at, oh, you worked at that grain elevator. And, um, and there's different versions of that all, all over this beautiful country, of course.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And, um, if, if all of the policy and the aspiration that you're talking about, you know, something we haven't mentioned yet is how like, um, the Democrats, uh, throughout that campaign, uh, John, I don't think I heard him say the word working class once, the term. Maybe I missed it. It wasn't in an important economic policy speech.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
It wasn't mentioned in 82 pages of a policy book that I read about their economic plan. But the reason I point that out is because it's always about the middle class. We're talking about how do we get you in the middle class? We know you want to be in the middle class. We're jerking off the middle class with every overture we make with our messaging, exalting the notion that
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And meanwhile, we're defining like the demarcation line as a college degree.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And so the notion is, so if we know you want to make it and you want to get into the middle class, I know people that are perfectly happy with their modest lives in a rural landscape and they're proud to be doing the work of tending and protecting a piece of land. Yeah. And maybe they're extremely well self-educated, read a bunch of books.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
But if the current pathways are like, and now you've got to leave your home and go take this coding class and now enter this completely different world that you don't even want. I mean, you know, like another thing, of course, the What's the saying about New York? If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And what I would say is, well, there are people who could make it there, but they just don't want to. And that's like being completely, completely left out of the conversation about what sorts of aspirations or goals someone would have for a good and fulfilling life.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yeah, I think it's an important one. And I want to point out, by the way, that that choice that someone might make or that kind of rearrangement of traditional capitalist value sets in deciding where to hang their hat and how to live their lives.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
It's important for all of us, including urban and formerly educated folks that people are, you know, something I would like to point out, having grown up in a rural space and living in one again now. Yes, we are a majority urban population now, but 98% of the land of the United States is rural space.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And as someone who sees firsthand what's going on out there in terms of corporations and who's buying that land and what they're doing to it and extracting to it, It's good for all of us if we've got a little bit more of a sprinkle going on, somebody reasonable and sane who has that pride of place that you mentioned, who wants to protect that place. That actually affects all of us.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
If you eat, if you put gas in your car, if you care about the earth and the land that we share. People who are, you know, trying to keep the kind of agrarian lifestyle that is days gone by for a lot of families, but it's still alive and well in some. It's the fabric of our country. And I'm glad that some people are prioritizing being in those places.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yeah, well, what's wild is for all the electoral college privileging those rural states, as you point out, most folks I know in those parts of the country don't feel represented by their governments either. Part of that is due to just not really resonating with either side in this two-party system. And again, the largely rich people that run both of those parties.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Also, if you look at when you strip an issue away from those labels R and D and have a ballot measure for progressive ideas like legal weed or reproductive rights, defending those, Medicaid expansion, all down the list, they often pass in so-called red states. So there's something going on there about the identity has now become we're the red state and that's our majority politics here.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And sometimes that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In terms of now a heightened sense of desire to belong to your place. But that's not necessarily the same thing as reflecting precisely what you believe and want in the world. And that dissonance between political behavior and what people actually believe, you know, that's for sociologists and psychologists to parse. But I know it firsthand.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
I've seen it. Another thing about that kind of wobbly way that we get representation and how the rural folks have more, that red and blue map and that winner-take-all politics that it reflects is so toxic, I think, to our understanding of ourselves, whether you're rural or urban or somewhere in between.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
You know, in most you've probably seen before when someone takes the 50 states and instead gives them a gradient of purple rather than just showing who actually won the state in the way that we run our elections, but rather to actually reflect the sizable political minorities that exist in every state. And they're there in red states, too.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Even, you know, a place like my Kansas, I think in, you know, most states. general elections, there's about 40% of people vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. And two out of five people ain't nothing. So here's where, again, that the electoral college and the way we do our elections is damaging, even in those spaces that are disproportionately represented in
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
whether in the Senate or elsewhere, is that if you are one of those two out of five people in that place, my God, is that demoralizing. And it is so hard to keep hanging. And then meanwhile, if you're being sort of lumped in as though there's this stereotype or homogenization of your place in the cultural idea of it,
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And, you know, you're like a kid holding a Black Lives Matter sign in small town Kansas, and I've seen it. That's very brave work. That might be braver work than what's going down in Brooklyn. You know what I mean? Because it's like you're against the grain.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And then meanwhile, you keep seeing this red and blue map. And then meanwhile, you're where is your vote going? My God, does it even matter? And so and that's what I was alluding to about a self-fulfilling prophecy, because then those people might long to leave. And I'm sure that it works vice versa, too, with with folks in so-called blue states choosing to hang their hat somewhere else.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
It's a soft sorting. Yeah.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Well, I think it's a manipulation of the way in which we've been handling identity politics. And I don't use that term negatively. It's important that we're talking about racial inequality and gender inequality and the way that those things affect your probable outcomes. But if you're doing that, if your DEI statement isn't also talking about socioeconomic class. Right.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
If your definition of diversity is not also acknowledging wealth or, you know, I'm a first-generation college student, so I often find myself in, or college graduate, I often find myself in professional spaces where I'm the only person who has a background remotely like mine, regardless of color and gender. Right.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
First, thanks for having me, John. And yes, I do find I'm getting a lot of calls right now. That's been true to some extent for some time through the current political era. But this really feels like a moment when maybe my message about class and the way that we need to center it and discuss it as an identity unto itself is really critical right now. So yeah, I'm happy to be here to talk about it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And and and yet when when I was kind of, you know, crossing that bridge from, you know, one class experience or reality to another, if you will. And I contain both today. But that bridge was on that college campus as that first generation student. There were you know, they were rightly race and gender and other and other aspects of identity were being addressed.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
But there was something very specific about what I was that made a really hard go of it for me that was not being discussed. And so if we as a culture and a country are not acknowledging that class is also an identity, then... In that void, in that vacuum where deep pain of a valid sense of not being seen arises.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
There, there then comes in swooping, comes in writing on a demon horse Rush Limbaugh. There comes in writing the messages about death. The immigrants. Don't make me conjure up images. And the reason and the brown people. And so there is actually, in my view, a real... Now, I want to be careful here because when I talk about a grievance...
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
you can simultaneously have white privilege and economic disadvantage. My family would be an example. I grew up on a fifth generation wheat farm and we struggled to get by. And we were below the poverty line, as we say, I qualified for a Pell Grant. And it's also true that we owned a little bit of land. That land was stolen from indigenous peoples.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
People of color probably never could have owned it without being menaced and times gone by. And so in most, even poor white families, you can find traces of white privilege. But if you're only acknowledging the privilege of whiteness and you're not meanwhile discussing the fact that within the 40 million people in this country living in poverty, the largest group of them are actually white.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Just because we're still a majority white nation, you're more likely to be poor as a person of color due to structural racism. But if you're only talking about the privilege and you're not acknowledging the disadvantage within the white working class.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yeah, you know, this might sound crazy, but affirmative action such that it still exists. You know, rewrite that law to also include, let's say, household wealth. See what happens.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yes. Yeah. This is one of the reasons the conversation falls apart often is that the notion is that these ideas are in opposition to one another. But if we actually believe in an intersectional mode and march toward justice, then we can't make class secondary. And as you were alluding to, class –
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Right now, we're isolating it among discussing the white working class because that's the political moment and that demographic that has vexed so many. But class, as you were alluding to, it's an experience for people regardless of color, regardless of origin, regardless of ethnicity. And often, indeed, as you say, it's a tie that binds.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And it might have to do with place or day-to-day experiences or the job that you hold side by side. But any group that's really interested in change and justice is leaving a lot on the table if they're not acknowledging that. And not only does it not threaten our progress toward racial and gender justice, it is of a piece with both of these.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
I'm so sorry. Rush Limbaugh.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Can I add just one layer to what you just said, which is that while I'm with you about like, you know, let's welcome that identity and its, you know, rightful points about where they've been unfairly on the losing end. That's not the same thing as giving a pass to xenophobia or racism or sexism, misogyny and so on. No.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
in the politics, but it's instead going to the foundation, the ground level of that person's experience and saying, I see it, I validate it, and now let's build from there. And because it's in the lack of validation or being seen that those nastier permutations of the politics are enabled and manipulated.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Well, and you might even start with speaking to the millions of white working class people who aren't Trumpers. Believe it or not, they're out there. My family are among them. And make inroads in those communities and allow that to spread out. You know, I'm not a political strategist, but I know you got to go there and you got to talk to that group of people. And they've got some real concerns.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Well, I think we've been in a burn it down moment for some time, several election cycles. 2020 might have been somewhat of an anomaly. Biden, of course, won that general. And here we are again with Trump.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
I will say going back to 2016, you know, I felt it profoundly on the ground, even in places like rural Kansas, that a Democratic socialist from Vermont was sure getting a lot of traction and actually built an incredible coalition. almost got the nomination more than once, in fact.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
So that sort of anger, rage, you know, that's just been kind of on broil at ground level across, as you say, all sorts of identity markers, I do believe has a lot to do with class and the way that, as you say, it intersects with race, it intersects with gender. But it is an experience that every one of us has and contains.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
And if you're on the losing end of that power structure, that continuum, and far more people are on the losing end than not, of course, then to your point, indeed, saying we're now defending these structures that have had you and your family hurting for some generations is maybe a losing messaging strategy. Yeah.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yeah. Well, I think a way to kind of look at this in very specific terms would be the gulf between the message that the economy is actually great, dummy. You must not have seen the statistics. Are you saying that doesn't work? All right. You must not have read the latest report about the GDP. Most Americans don't own stocks.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Sure, you can say inflation has slowed down and there have been economic gains in all sorts of ways. But for the average underpaid American – It's not even just about prices. It's also about or spending. That's a measure that economists love to trot out. You might be buying all your groceries and your consumer goods with a credit card. I didn't hear a lot of talk about debt.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Most of the working class and working poor Americans I know hold profoundly disturbing amounts of debt, be it credit card, medical. I will say the Biden administration did talk about medical debt a little bit. Maybe they could have led with that. I think that might have helped.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Right. Yeah. So, yeah, people are hurting. And if you're looking at in the face and saying, actually, you're not in whether that's a move to kind of defend your own administration that, of course, the Democratic candidate was part of. And that's a very difficult to thread that needle, you know, the task she was handed to kind of
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
propose how it will change, but also still be riding with the last administration.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
But most people are hurting. And here's the thing, because I know that a lot of liberals and Democrats and progressives alike might be saying, but you're saying all that. And the Democrats have the better policies. They address all of those needs better, even if imperfectly in the end. Ain't the Republicans worse? And while I happen to agree with that, here's the trick.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
The Republicans, meanwhile, are the ones validating the pain. Right. And politics is an emotional business before it's a rational one. And that's why they win.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
It does. And, you know. just to go back to neoliberalism and the way that it crosses those party lines. NAFTA, I think, kind of originated with the first Bush administration, but was, of course, signed into law and celebrated as a major victory for the Clinton administration. And the person who held that pin, by the way, I think there's been a bitter taste in a lot of workers' mouths recently.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
around specifically the Democratic Party, even though both were complicit in NAFTA. But these moves toward globalization, which depending on who you are, means very different things. And yeah, the devaluing of the American worker without a real plan other than like, how about this coding program for people in Appalachia?
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
So it's really a wash. Come on. So there were big money and corporate interests involved in all of those shifts. But ultimately, part of that perfect storm of really pissing off the working class was that meanwhile, you've got the party who used to be on their side, at least seemingly, who now just flat out apparently don't get it.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Well, I think there was a very successful kind of messaging campaign some decades ago to not only get those laws through that the so-called right to work laws that were basically union busting, but also to kind of poison the water to really shift the culture around a worker's relationship to the concept of a union.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
As a child in the 80s, a lot of my family worked in the airplane factories in Wichita. That used to be a major center of that industry. Still is to some extent. And also in wheat fields and the agricultural industry. That would not be a sector that's traditionally so tied up in unions. But I have folks in the trades industry.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
in my family and communities who didn't want anything to do with unions. And I think it might have been that not just the laws changed, but somehow cleverly the culture also did. Those are imperfect systems themselves, of course. Labor and unions have historically also been rife with their own problems and been power structures of sorts. Right.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Sure. Sure. Yes. And that's fair. And nobody knows that better than a worker. But they remain, to my mind, the greatest perhaps tool that laborers have. And it has been stripped away from people in a lot of states, as you say.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
I think this might go back to culture actually and the way that that relates to class as an identity. So here's the thing. Even if you got in on that gravy, that gravy itself is unto a class and a mode of thinking and a relationship to economy that actually threatens your way of life and your place in your community and your skills. And so what I'm getting at here is like –
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
The folks who I know who do manual labor or would identify as members of the working class, even in the service industry and and all sorts of jobs, they're very proud of their work. They aren't actually trying to get out of work. Some of them like to work.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
Their identity has to do with that steel, or their identity has to do with that wheat field, or with that hammer, or even with that relationship they have with customers, waiting tables, and so on. So It's like trying to say to a bunch of folks that are looking at everything in a macro way, here on the ground, we're talking about the dignity of our work.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class
We're also defending our rights and we're trying to get more money and we're trying to get you to back off working us into the ground. But that's not the same thing as saying we actually don't, like our gig and feel very proud of the skills that we have. And by God, we could talk about AI all you want, but for the time being, we need people who have those skills and they know it.