A specter is haunting socialist politics — the specter of the “Brahmin left.” The renowned political economist Thomas Piketty, with Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano, discussed this group in an influential 2022 research paper on political cleavages in Western democracies since the mid-twentieth century. This group is referring to highly educated voters, typically employed in professional occupations, whose allegiance to center-left and left-wing parties has grown in recent decades.

By calling them “Brahmins,” Piketty and his collaborators likened them to the religious figures and intellectuals who occupied an elite position in India’s traditional caste system. In their framework, these educational elites of the rich capitalist world face off against an economic elite they call the “Merchant right,” while the needs of the vast majority go unacknowledged and unmet. Faced with such a dismal choice, working-class voters are either dropping out of politics entirely or shifting their allegiances from the Left to the Right.

This process of “class dealignment” has become a staple of analysis and commentary across the political spectrum, including the socialist left. It’s clear that electoral patterns in rich capitalist democracies have changed, in some cases rather dramatically since the postwar years. But it’s not always clear what exactly is happening in electoral politics, nor why, or what socialists could do to shift political conflict onto a more favorable terrain.