The fourth and final part of Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology” is intellectually rewarding and presents genuinely novel research and insight - even if at first blush it has little to do with either ‘capital’ or ‘ideology’. Piketty has assembled an impressive data set which correlates available information on class composition (namely income, wealth and education level) with voting behaviour in western democracies, in order to track the class composition of support for parties of the left and right over the last 70 or so years. In doing so, one of the world’s brightest commentators delivers genuine insight into the state of democracy around the world; he’s genuinely ahead of popular understanding of politics in these chapters - though again [and I’m speaking here to his editor], there are easily 100 pages of observations that could have been cut.
The Brahmin Left
Piketty thinks of class less in materialist terms than as a social position, defined by the totality of an individual’s relationships with others in society - their wealth, income, education level, occupation, age, sex, gender, religion and ethnic background etc. For much of the mid-20th century, Piketty writes, the political structure of Western societies was explicitly ‘classist’ - the left-right political cleavage mapped pretty well onto a social hierarchy defined by income, wealth and education, and these measures of economic privilege tended to run together such that high-income, highly-educated voted tended to vote for the right and lower-income, less-educated voted voted for parties of the left. Then, as now, wealth was the greatest predicator of right-wing political preferences, holding all other variables constant.
However, starting in the 1970s, this ‘classist’ political structure began to break down and, as of 2020, it’s effectively reversed. Slowly at first, but with ever-widening margins, highly-educated voters began moving to the parties of the electoral left (later in the UK than in the US or France) by margins of 10-15 per cent, which over time also meant that more high-income voters were also voting for centre-left parties. Indeed, in the last two US electoral cycles the average income of a Democrat was higher than that of a Republican voter. Piketty’s data demonstrates that this transformation of the class identity of left-wing parties is a long-term historical trend, visible in voting patterns across almost all European-style democracies, and it correlates, for Piketty, with the almost total abandonment by those parties of any support for economic redistribution. Interestingly, the prominence of Green political parties is strongly correlated with the rise of the Brahmin left - Green party voters [read also: ‘climate change’ voters] are overwhelmingly highly educated urban professionals.
The new leaders of left-wing political parties aren’t workers or union leaders; they’re lawyers, academics, teachers, public servants and workers in the NGO industrial-complex - the ‘Brahmin left’. Highly educated and employed in the knowledge sector, the brahmin left are primarily urban-dwelling cosmopolitans who share and enforce a strong set of liberal cultural values from a position of relative economic privilege. This transformation is the inevitable consequences of long-term trends, including the widespread access to tertiary education available to the children of social democracy and the mid-90s embrace of ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘opportunity’ framing by former social-democratic parties. The brahmin left owe their social status to their success at a certain kind of meritocratic intellectual competition, and their definition of justice is closely related to making sure that competition takes place on as fair a grounds as possible.
“The problem is that many who succeeded in this way developed smug and condescending attitudes towards the rest of the population; or, to put it charitably, they did not enquire too deeply into whether official meritocratic pronouncements corresponded to reality or not. Thus, the former workers’ party became the party of the winners of the educational system and gradually moved away from the disadvantaged classes. . .”
There are two causal explanations of the abandonment of the left by less-educated workers, depending on where the blame is placed. The first explanation, which Piketty favours, is that these newly minted-intellectuals gave up any pretension of fighting for economic redistribution that would benefit those left behind, abandoning the working classes and adopting policies that advantaged their own, middle-class children (partly out of self-interest, and partly because of the stultifying ideological climate after the end of the Cold War). The alternative hypothesis is that it was low-education voters who abandoned the left, not the other way around. They were simply too uncultured, too religious, too racist, and too reactionary to adapt to the newly globalised world and preferred to retreat into an imagined past than deal with a complex new world in which they would have to compete with workers who were black, immigrants or women - you might have heard this one before.
The strongest case for this second argument comes from the United States, where the Republican ‘Southern Strategy’ began peeling poor white voters away from the Democrats as early as the 1968 and 1972 elections and where racial identity remains a highly salient predictor of voting patterns to this day. But Piketty points out there is poor evidence of this occurring elsewhere - immigration and race were not highly salient electoral issues in Europe until relatively recently, when the “Brahmin Left” transformation was already well under way and largely complete. Moreover, the same transformation has happened consistently in countries with vastly different population structures and ethnic and religious cleavages. In other words, with enough data one sees there’s no correlation between eras of racial or xenophobic tension and the support of less-educated voters for left-wing parties.
I suspect that Piketty’s diagnosis of the ‘Brahmin Left’ is essentially correct. The divorce between left-wing intellectuals and their supposed working-class political base has cursed social democratic parties ever since Third Way turn of the 1990s and it’s clearer than ever in 2020 that mutual antipathy and resentment is driving the two sides further apart. In the absence of a robust pivot back towards redistributionist policies under socialist leadership [and Piketty offers hints in his data that under Jeremy Corbyn there were brief prospects for healing of the rift] the ‘Brahmin Left’ look to be an ongoing feature of our democratic politics going forward. What’s highly concerning for me is the explicitly ‘trifunctional’ or feudal structure of the new liberal elite - much like the former priestly caste, they are the primary creators and enforcers of moral and aesthetic rectitude, serving primarily to legitimise the status quo and discipline low-status workers. While some downwardly mobile brahmins might support more radical change [as many poor priests did during the Revolution], as a class the Brahmin left is almost totally dependent on the financial largesse of the capital-owning class for their material standard of living and social status, precluding their active support for meaningful social change.
Class collaborationism and the unification of the elites
And who are the brahmin left's partners in governance? Piketty counterposes them against what he terms the ‘merchant right’ - a group with similar life experience and social position, but who experience competition differently. “The Brahmin left values scholastic success, intellectual work and the acquisition of diplomas and knowledge [credentialism]; the merchant right emphasized professional motivation, a flair for business and negotiating skills. Each group invokes an ideology of merit and just inequality, but the type of effort expect is not exactly the same - not is their reward for that effort”. We all know the merchant right - they’re the type of person who understands that networking and subservience to authority provides a faster route up the corporate ladder than being the smartest kid in class. The ones who trade in their LLBs for soul-destroying jobs in corporate firms so they can retire at 40, rather than spending their lives writing papers no one reads about war crimes in sub-Saharan African for some generic NGO. People who take risks and start their own businesses, rather than acting as scribes and notaries for those that do.
In most modern democracies, electoral competition has in essence become a mechanism of sharing power between these two groups of elites - the brahmin left and the merchant right - who keep one another in check but largely share the mutual aim of preservation and extension of the status quo for as long as humanly possible. Both are, to quote Piketty, inherently conservative. “Both camps are strongly attached to the existing economic system and to globalization [sic] as it is currently organised, which ultimately serves the interest of both intellectual elites and economic and financial elites”. While in some countries the two sides [act as if] they’re at each other throats, elsewhere - notably France under Macron and most recently Italy under Draghi and UK Labour under Starmer - elites have developed new forms of class collaboration in which this ‘centre’ seeks to preserve and hold power against all others. While this ‘dual-elite’ system is powerful, Piketty warns us that it’s highly unstable and driving western democracy increasingly towards collapse.
In the eyes of both the ‘Brahmin Left’ and the “Merchant Right’, the working class are a backwards-looking cohort who are in impediment to efficient governance. The dismissal of non-elites in some respects represents a return to the ‘active vs passive’ citizenship debates of early liberalism and is an expression of the deeply anti-democratic values of modern neoliberalism. Piketty notes that many low-education voters simply don’t vote at all, and that this alienation and estrangement from politics means that the divorce of the left from the working class is much more severe than poll numbers suggest. This body of angry, dispossessed voters is not inherently reactionary or xenophobic, but is still out there, idle, waiting to be activated by any far-right demagogue or wannabe fascist with the basic commonsense to reach out to them. Piketty notes, and I agree, that centrists like Biden and Macron on some level want their opponents to be fascists. And the wannabe fascists, whether Orban, Le Pen, Trump or Bolsonaro - thrive on portraying their opponents are representatives of a unitary and unrepresentative cultural elite.
“[This] binary division is dangerous, because it casts nativist ideology with its potential for violence as the only possible alternative. The aim of such a rhetorical strategy is of course to keep the ‘progressives’ in power indefinitely. In reality, however, it runs the risk of hastening the success of the ‘nationalists’, especially if they are able to develop a social-nativist ideology - in other words, an ideology combining social and egalitarian objectives for the ‘native’ population with the violent exclusion of ‘nonnatives’.”
The Nazbol vortex
In my book, I refer to fascism as a sort of social cancer upon liberalism. Piketty refers to it as the ‘social-nativist’ trap - the potential for a successful ideological merger between in-group egalitarianism and out-group exclusion. In certain internet circles, the same phenomenon is called class co-option or the ‘nazbol vortex’. Whatever label we use, it’s clear that social fascism is an available solution to the social and economic weaknesses of late capitalism and the vast inequality it generates. The alternative - liberal but undemocratic elite rule - is recipe for social and economic paralysis, endless and escalating culture war and the delegitimisation of the entire liberal historical process.
While social-nativist parties have had enduring success in eastern Europe, Piketty points out that so far the nazbol vortex has not proved to be as bad as feared. In some countries (such as Japan, arguably the UK and I would add Australia) the existing conservative parties have managed to successfully co-opt nativist sentiment and create successful fusions between the merchant right and low-education voters. In India, according to Piketty’s data, the BJP remains an explicitly classist project of the Hindu elites against the lower orders despite ongoing efforts to co-opt lower-caste Hindus. And once in power, most wannabe fascists behave like traditional conservatives - both Trump and Bolsonaro largely failed to live up to their populist promises and focused largely on tax cuts and hand-outs for existing elites, which has likely dramatically shortened their respective time in power.
In other words, the real threat of ‘social nativism’ is year to appear - what we have instead is market-nativism, a more traditionally xenophobic form of conservativism that melds ‘strong external borders’ with a ruthless and highly inegalitarian domestic economy. In fact, I’d argue that this combination is potentially very ideologically potent from the perspective of liberalism’s meritocratic framing. Once foreigners and other ‘cheaters’ are expunged from the system, the ruthless competition of the market is able to accurately and fairly sort everyone to their just desserts. Of course, as we know from recent Australian political history, the primary purpose of such a narrative is to legitimise the continued exploitation of both foreign and domestic workers, and those contradictions cannot be resolved and will eventually be noticed.
Is there a risk of the nazbol vortex overtaking us on the left? It’s certainly non-zero. Piketty’s archetype of a social-nativist regime is, drumroll please . . . .the Democratic New Deal under FDR, under which white, male workers enjoyed the highest standards of living in the world at the same time as it reinforced patriarchy and literal racial apartheid. Some social-democratic parties, particularly in Europe, have in recent years given relatively free reign to nativist sentiments - not to mention the inevitable transphobia that accompanies it. r/stupidpol is [unfortunately] a thing, and the final defeat of Sandersism in the US seems to have broken the brains of many left-leaning social influencers with a strong attachment to the aesthetics of anti-elitism, including Matt Taibbi, Gleen Greenwald and Jimmy Dore. I like to think that the left’s own strong sense of self-identity and history - informed by our wide and deep pool of theory and commitment to ideological training - would forestall this kind of opportunist accomodationism, but it’s probably a battle we’ll be fighting as long as I’m alive.
In the final analysis, I share Piketty’s cynicism about the future of liberal democracy. The radical centrist blob is now a self-conscious project of elite collaboration, and there are increasing signs that those forces are willing and able to subborn popular participation in democracy in order to preserve propertarian liberalism for as long as possible. The emergence of the ‘brahmin left’ as a distinct social class is therefore inimical to the long-term success of any leftist project, and there’s certainly an element of truth to the idea that any successful left-populist project must find way to put such left-liberals in a decidedly subordinate political position. The values and aesthetics of the highly-educated urban elite cannot be allowed to become wholly representative of what it means to be progressive, because those values are at the present moment sympathetic to the economic and financial structures which impoverish the vast majority of workers, on the one hand, and which are driving our social and economic system into an ever-deepening spiral of crisis and chaos on the other.