A Last Hurrah for the Brahmin Left?

It’s crunch time for a fading political model.

Since the latter part of the 20^th century, the left has had a plan. Well, not really a plan, it just kind of….happened. Call it, to use Thomas Piketty’s term, the Brahmin Left. That is his characterization of Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin Left has evolved over many decades and certainly includes today’s Democratic Party, Britain’s Labour Party, and the French left. The chart below illustrates this trend.

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For Brahmin Left parties, the temptation is great to lean into their emerging strengths and just hope they can retain enough of their working-class base to make the political arithmetic work. That is the natural inclination of the elites and activists who now dominate the parties. But these parties have been increasingly battered by right populist competitors who are bleeding off more and more of the left’s working-class support. That calls the viability of the Brahmin Left model into question. There is a point beyond which the loss of working-class voters cannot be plausibly balanced by increased support among college-educated and professional voters and the model is fatally undermined.

We’re certainly not there yet but we may not be very far away. We have two recent elections in France and the UK to look at and an upcoming one in the United States that provide a real-time update on where we are in this process. Is it a last hurrah for the Brahmin Left or a new stage in the model’s success? Let’s take a look.

France. After a stunning showing for Marine Le Pen’s right populist National Rally (RN) party in the EU parliamentary elections, where her party garnered far and away the most votes, President Macron decided to dissolve the national parliament and call new elections. (His motivations for doing so were complicated and perhaps not completely knowable.)

The result in the first round of France’s two round elections was another triumph for RN. Their alliance took 33 percent of the vote, compared to 28 percent for the New Popular Front (NFP)—a left coalition of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialists, the Communists, and the Greens—and 21 percent for the centrist Ensemble coalition, which includes Macron’s party. In the second round, the RN alliance actually increased its vote share but did not gain the most seats because NFP and Ensemble made a deal to pool their support against National Rally in districts where their candidates were trailing RN. The leftist NFP wound up with 180 seats, the most of any group, despite getting only 26 percent of the popular vote. Macron’s Ensemble got 159 seats with 25 percent of the vote and, bringing up the rear, the RN alliance got a mere 142 seats, despite their 37 percent of the vote. The seat result was a big disappointment for RN even though it represented big gains for them over the previous election.

The demographics of the vote for left and right in the election are instructive. NFP had a classic Brahmin Left profile: they did by far the best of the different political groupings among managers/professionals and those with the highest levels of education. The RN in contrast did by far the best among blue collar and low-level white collar workers and those with the lowest levels of education. Indeed, the RN got an absolute majority (57 percent) of blue collar workers despite the many ways in which the vote was split. In the view of Emile Chabal, an academic specialist in French political history, “the RN can fairly lay claim to being the party of the French working classes.” 

So are the French results a big victory for the Brahmin Left? Through the vagaries of the French electoral system and shifting alliances, one could say yes but it does have the air of a last hurrah. The right populists have barely been kept out of power and have considerably increased their overall strength and hold over the French working class. And the prospects for effective governance in France seem very poor. The program of the NFP, the group with the most seats, is ludicrously left-wing and seems on a collision course with the preferences of Macron’s Ensemble coalition, their presumed partners in forming a government. The NFP program includes:

…overturning Macron's pension, unemployment, education, immigration, police, guaranteed minimum income, and universal national service reforms, as well as his cuts to funding for low-income housing and his merger of French nuclear safety organisations; lowering the retirement age to 60 in the longer-term; implementing price freezes on essential food, energy, and gas; raising the minimum wage to €1,600 per month (representing a 14 percent increase) and personalised housing assistance by 10 percent; moving towards a 32-hour work week for arduous or night shift jobs; conditioning government support for businesses on adherence to environmental, social, and anti-discriminatory regulations; reserving workers one-third of seats on boards of directors; increasing financial transaction taxes; banning bank financing for fossil fuels; nationalising control over water; reforming the generalised social contribution and inheritance taxes (capping the latter), as well as nearly tripling the number of income tax brackets from 5 to 14, to make them more progressive; re-instituting a solidarity tax on wealth "with a climate component"; enacting an exit tax on funds withdrawn from the country; charging a vehicle miles traveled tax on imports; guaranteeing a price floor for agricultural products; cancelling the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement and any future free trade treaties; and forbidding the imports of agricultural products which do not meet domestic social and environmental standards.

Other key NFP proposals included raising the image and salaries of public healthcare, education, justice, and government jobs; strengthening the industrial sector in key strategic areas; establishing the right to menstrual leave; prohibiting new major highway projects; outlawing intensive animal farming and the usage of all PFASs, neonicotinoids, and glyphosate; re-examining the Common Agricultural Policy; providing partial or full government financing for home insulation; creating free public water fountains, showers, and toilets; constructing 200,000 new public housing units per year; requiring mandatory rent control in high-rent areas; introducing proportional representation; removing article 49.3 from the constitution; outlawing the usage of blast balls by riot police; continuing to supply weapons to defend Ukraine; recognising the state of Palestine along with Israel; and demanding compliance with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order against Israel and ceasing support for Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

OK then! It seems a bit much I’d have to say—though I do like the idea of free public water fountains. I mean, who doesn’t like a water fountain? Overall however the common ground between this program and that of the Macronist Ensemble seems close to non-existent. That suggests that it’ll be rocky days ahead for France with these mismatched partners and Macron still reigning as president. That further suggests that the RN, by being in opposition, will be well-positioned to benefit from dissatisfaction with chaotic government and ongoing economic and social problems, growing their working class support even further. The 2027 presidential election looms; the Brahmin Left and Macron’s center may have a hard time pulling off their trick again.

UK. The British election presents us with a different picture. Keir Starmer’s Labour gained a mighty majority, dethroning the massively unpopular Tories after 14 years of Conservative rule. Labour took 412 seats out of a possible 650, their second biggest victory since World War II, while the Tories crashed to their worst performance ever. However, Labour’s popular vote share was only 35 percent, the lowest-ever winning share and actually less than the 40 percent Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour got in 2017. The radical disjuncture between vote share (35 percent) and seat share (63 percent) is possible due to the UK’s multi-party, first past the post electoral system.

Despite Labour’s relatively low vote share, the demographics of Labour support represented a U-turn of sorts from the Brahmin Left playbook. Labour did better than the previous election among non-degree holders while actually losing some ground among degree-holders. This narrowed the education differential of the Labour vote from 42 percent degree/28 percent non-degree to 38 percent degree/33 percent non-degree. That’s quite a shift.

The Tories lost a massive 27 points of their non-degree support. However, the majority of that decline was picked up Nigel Farage’s right populist Reform party, not Labour.

A similar pattern can be seen in what British pollsters call “social grade,” an occupational classification ranging from A at the higher end to E on the lower. Here again the class differentials narrowed some with Labour making its biggest gains among C2 voters (skilled manual workers). That gave Labour an identical vote share between higher level professional (AB) and C2 voters.

Conservaives in contrast lost a shocking 30 points of their C2 support. But, as with non-degree voters, the majority of this lost support went to Reform not Labour.

Leaving aside the ways in which the vagaries of the British electoral system broke in Labour’s favor this election, do these results indicate a breakthrough of sorts, a move away from the Brahmin Left model? Perhaps. That has certainly been the intention of Labour’s chief campaign strategist, Morgan McSweeney. According to an interesting article in the Sunday London Times:

[McSweeney] believed Starmer would need to break with the hard-left to redeem Labour’s image and reconnect with the voters—including large numbers of working-class people without degrees—who had deserted the party for Boris Johnson at the previous general election….

McSweeney had developed a politics resembling the old Labour right: a combination of patriotism, social conservatism, and traditional left economics…As his politics sharpened, McSweeney fell in with advocates of Blue Labour, a philosophy created by Maurice Glasman, a Jewish academic from Hackney who advocated a renewed emphasis on “family, faith and flag” to regain the white working vote.

McSweeney had success melding these politics with Starmer’s reshaping of the Labour Party to face the next election after Corbyn’s drubbing in 2019. Things like the “Green Prosperity Plan” were scaled back, patriotism was emphasized, and there was an attempt to move to the center on cultural issues.

That and the Tories’ implosion was enough to deliver Starmer’s thumping victory. But now what? Are the working-class voters Labour has gained just visiting before they go back to the Conservatives or even to Reform (where, as noted, many of Conservatives’ erstwhile working-class voters have already decamped)? The UK economy is in sad shape, there isn’t a lot of fiscal space for big programs and the party is still committed to fairly aggressive action on a clean energy transition which seems more likely to strain than buoy the economy (and which, by and large, working-class voters are not terribly interested in). Moreover, cultural radicalism is alive and well within the party and Starmer will be under constant pressure to move left on these issues (which, again, working-class voters are either not interested in, or actively hostile to).

In short, there’s still a lot of Brahmin Left left in the party and it will be a challenge, even for a strategist of McSweeney’s acumen, to maneuver around that. As another Blue Labour analyst, Paul Embery, puts it:

I warn that we must act quickly to get a grip on the broken immigration and asylum system. Immigration has become a running sore in our society again because previous governments allowed numbers to get out of control, causing pressure on wages and public services, and undermining cultural cohesion and social solidarity. If we fail to reduce numbers quickly and noticeably, we will pay a huge price electorally.

I warn that we must not obsess about Net Zero or listen to only the most strident voices in the environmental movement. We need moderate, not militant, environmentalism. In these uncertain times, we must secure our energy independence. That means allowing for reasonable oil and gas exploration, fracking and nuclear power. Britons cannot be expected to pay a disproportionate price—through higher energy bills, unreliable supply, and the destruction of thousands of jobs—for a challenge that is global.   

I warn that we must reject the destructive creed of identity politics, which has done so much to divide and fragment our country. High-trust and harmonious societies are built around common bonds, not by constantly promoting the separateness of, and differences between, assorted groups.

I warn that we must restore the police to their proper mission of preventing and detecting crime, not acting as social workers or social activists. Not every crime has a sociological explanation, and we must not shy away from the language of punishment. Offenders who continually blight the lives of their fellow citizens should be locked away. It is not ‘reactionary’ to say so.

I warn that we must stand against militant trans ideology and defend the reality of biological sex. We must reject all attempts to undermine the integrity of single-sex spaces. A woman is an adult human female, and we should not be afraid to say it. Anything less makes us look like a bunch of cranks in the eyes of much of the public.

I warn that we must oppose the spread of cancel culture and the belief that there should be one established view on contested issues. Traditionally, the Left in Britain has stood against censorship of alternative opinions. Too often these days it supports it. That must change.

I warn that we must end our hostility to the nuclear family and unashamedly promote it as the foundation stone of a civilised society. That does not mean ‘stigmatising’ alternative models. But all the research shows that children achieve better outcomes when they are brought up within a secure and stable family home with two parents. That we fell into the trap of being afraid to state this simple truth is inexcusable.

We have been handed a second chance by the electorate. It is more than we might conceivably have expected and, frankly, more than we deserved. The trust that these voters have placed in us will quickly dissipate if we fail to recognise and act upon their desire for both economic and cultural security.

We shall see if Embery’s warnings are heeded. At any rate, it seems clear Starmer, McSweeney and company have their work cut out for them in carving out a new model that leaves the Brahmin Left behind.

United States. And now we come to the United States and our very own Brahmin Left party, the Democrats. While the election has not yet happened, with every day a breakthrough seems farther away and and we go deeper into last hurrah territory.

The polls were basically terrible even before the disastrous June 27 debate. Now Trump has widened his lead nationally and in most swing states, particularly the all-important Rustbelt states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Nate Silver’s model currently gives Trump a 71 percent chance of winning the election. A Trump landslide seems increasingly within the realm of possibility.

Of course, Biden may step down and another candidate take his place. Maybe that’d help. Maybe it wouldn’t. But most of the underlying problems the Democrats have would remain—problems that Trump is fully capable of taking advantage of.

I have emphasized for months the big problems the Democrats have developed with the working-class (noncollege) vote, white and nonwhite. Well, they’re not as bad I thought—they’re worse! In the latest New York Times/Siena poll Biden is behind Trump by an astonishing 23 points among likely working-class voters. That’s really bad; in 2020, he lost these voters are only 4 points. Of course, he is carrying college-educated voters by 18 points. But this is really pushing the Brahmin Left model to its breaking point. And this election, it may very well break.