- 31 Aug 2018 13:05
#14943588
I came across this interesting article. Please read it first before voting.
Roughly there are two different elites battling for power: the "Brahmins" and the "merchants".
Roughly there are two different elites battling for power: the "Brahmins" and the "merchants".
The battle between two elites: the haves and have-yachts
Today’s politics is dominated by leftwing intellectuals and a wealthy rightwing merchant class
Simon Kuper
“Elite” is the political hate-word of our time but, during a rant in Fargo, North Dakota, this summer, Donald Trump said something interesting. “They call it the elite,” he complained. “We got more money, we got more brains, we got better houses and apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are and they say they’re the elite.”
Trump was on to something: in western politics, there isn’t one elite, but two. There’s the liberal “cultural elite” that he despises, and his own big-boated, rightwing moneyed elite.
In a strangely overlooked recent paper, French economist Thomas Piketty — famous for his 2013 tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century — anatomises the rival elites in the US, UK and France. Piketty has merged post-electoral surveys from 1948 to 2017 with data on voters’ wealth, education, income and so on. The story for each country is similar. The cultural elite and the moneyed elite (“Brahmins” and “merchants”, as Piketty calls them) are both growing. Both have captured their chosen political parties. On left and right, politics is now an elite sport.
The big change since 1948 is the educated elite’s shift left. “The trend is virtually identical in the three countries,” notes Piketty. In the US, for instance, from the 1940s to the 1960s the more educated people were, the more they voted Republican. By 2016, the situation had reversed: 70 per cent of voters with masters degrees backed Hillary Clinton. British graduates moved left more slowly, but now mostly vote Labour.
The educated elite is relatively young, urban, increasingly female — and growing. Marx would call it a “rising class”. Take the US: in 1948, only 6 per cent of voters had any university degree. By 2016, 13 per cent had a masters degree or PhD. In France in 1956, 5 per cent of voters had tertiary degrees; by 2012, 16 per cent had advanced degrees. In short, this isn’t some tiny elite concentrated in Brooklyn’s Park Slope or Paris’s Left Bank. Brahmins are everywhere now. Many of them are well-off professionals, but others are librarians and lumpen-intellectuals with terrible boats.
While Brahmins moved left, the wealthy stayed exactly where they were: on the right. “Wealth” is the operative word here. Piketty shows that high-income earners are split between right and left. But people with wealth (some of whom simply own their own homes outright) are much more predictably rightwing. “Wealth is a stronger determinant of voting attitude than income,” writes Piketty. “To my knowledge this simple fact has not been established in previous research.” Like the educated elite, the wealthy elite has kept growing. Incomes may have stagnated, but heirs abound like never before. Families have amassed nest eggs over 73 years of peace. Ever more people inherit homes. British and US stock markets have all both record highs since May.
Piketty’s “merchant” class (which includes many business owners) probably skews relatively male and suburban. Its members are regularly snubbed by Brahmins because they are generally less educated, older, and out of touch with today’s fashionable restaurants, clothes and language. Merchants typically regard their wealth as their own achievement (or at least that of their families), whereas Brahmins tend to attribute it to impersonal economic forces.
In short, Brahmins and merchants have a natural enmity. True, many people have a foot in both elites: picture the feminist who majored in philosophy at Princeton but is now an heir working in finance. Some feel torn. In Uneasy Street, sociologist Rachel Sherman describes liberal Brooklynites mortified by their own wealth: one rich interviewee believes that many rich people are “total assholes”. But most elite members eventually choose one camp over another.
The elite battle plays out differently in each country. In France, Emmanuel Macron was elected by Brahmins, but has increasingly won over merchants, partly by scrapping the wealth tax. If he can combine both elites, that would probably be enough to win a quarter of all first-round votes and be re-elected president.
But British and US parties need nearly half the electorate, so they woo underprivileged people as voting fodder. Both right and left parties have to do this without giving most underprivileged voters what they want. Leftwing parties won’t bash immigrants, while rightwing parties refuse to redistribute money.
The underprivileged watch helplessly, sidelined in politics as in most professions. No longer do non-graduates like Harry Truman or John Major lead governments. Even Italy’s populist prime minister is a law professor, who faced allegations that he embellished his educational CV. Today’s politicians are elitists educated by Brahmins, chastised by Brahmin commentators, and funded by merchants. Piketty remarks: “Maybe unsurprisingly, the massive increase in abstention… in all three countries between the 1950s-1960s and the 2000s-2010s arose for the most part within lower education and lower income groups.”
Rightwing parties have won recent elections, partly by savaging the Brahmin “elite”. But two can play this game. The left needs to own the word “elite”, but turn it against the merchants. The big question in today’s politics is which elite wins.