Brahmin Left Vs. Populist Right

[Celerity]

Last edited Sun Aug 13, 2023, 01:05 AM - Edit history (1)

Welcome to Your 2024 Election

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/brahmin-left-vs-populist-right

The basic contours of the 2024 election are coming into view. The two sides might be loosely described as “Brahmin Left” and “Populist Right.” “Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize 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.

Consider the class split in the latest New York Times/Siena poll. Among college-educated voters, Biden is favored by 22 points. Among working-class (noncollege) voters, Trump is favored by 13 points. That’s a 35-point gap. Compare to the 2020 election, where the gap was “only” 22 points (plus 18 points for Democrats among college voters and plus four for Republicans among noncollege voters). And in that election, modeled estimates by the States of Change project indicate that Trump carried the working-class vote in 35 out of 50 states, including in critical states for the Democrats like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that are slipping away from the party like Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. The results from the NYT/Siena and other polls suggest Democrats are unlikely to do better among working-class voters in these states in 2024.

Another indicator of the Brahminization of the Democratic Party is the current distribution of congressional seats. Democrats now dominate the more affluent districts while Republicans are cleaning up in the poorer districts. Marcy Kaptur, who represents Ohio’s working-class 9th district and is the longest-serving female member of the House in American history, has said of this pattern:



How indeed. Kaptur has a two-page chart that arrays Congressional districts from highest median income to lowest with partisan control color-coded. The first page is heavily dominated by blue but the second, poorer page is a sea of red. You can access the chart here. It’s really quite striking. Overall, Republicans represent 152 of the 237 Congressional seats where the district median income trails the national figure.

snip


On edit, I forgot the link

Now added

[raging moderate]

1. Hey! I have a master's degree, but I went hungry a lot, as a child and as an adult.

Last edited Sun Aug 13, 2023, 08:45 AM - Edit history (2)

I am NOT an elite person. At age 30, after many years of struggle, I finally got a master's degree in speech pathology & audiology, so I could be a traveling speech therapist in rural Illinois schools. I have NEVER been rich. I lived in slums and went hungry a lot in childhood. My mother had lived in slums and gone hungry a lot in her childhood, starting in the two Great Depression crashes. And yes, there WERE two crashes; my mother's family was starting to be okay when the second one threw them out on the street and into starvation again. My mother very slowly worked and studied her way up from dime store clerk to stenographer to secretary, and then to legal secretary around the time I reached high school. She took us to the library a lot, she read good books to us a lot, and she spent her off hours writing poetry and reading history and philosophy. I went to college on a small part-scholarship, and I worked at the Chicago Public Library several years to save money to go back to school, and I went hungry half the time I was earning my degrees and sometimes even after that. I am NOT an elite person. I am also not a Republican. My family used to be Republicans, starting when the Republicans were the party of the Abolitionists. President Johnson worried that his reforms would cause some Democrats to become Republicans; it had the opposite effect in my family. I will never forget the bewildered look on my mother's face, the last big election of her life, as she said, "I guess I am voting for all Democrats this time!" The Republican party has changed. It is like one of those caterpillars who get wasp eggs laid in them; the wasp eggs hatch and the larvae grow inside, slowly eating the caterpillar inside out. Fascists have infested the Republican party. They have used some of the vast fortunes of the wealthy right-wingers to mount huge propaganda campaigns all over our country. They have convinced some of the poor people that they are suffering because the Black people are taking all the money in welfare checks. I always knew this was a lie, because every time I go out, I see Black people working all over the place, just as much as I see white people working all over the place. Also, I was paying attention when Bill Clinton reformed the welfare system, many years ago. We need to strengthen our resolve and work harder to get the real facts out there. Hillary Clinton was right about that vast right-wing conspiracy.

[OhNo-Really]

2. Empaths vs Sociopaths

There, I fixed it for you.

Or

I’ve got mine, I want to help others
Vs
I’ve got mine, I want more.

Or

Sharing
Vs
Greed

[OhNo-Really]

3. Empaths vs Sociopaths

There, I fixed it for you.

Or

I’ve got mine, I want to help others
Vs
I’ve got mine, I want more.

Or

Sharing
Vs
Greed

[usonian]

4. What the heck?

The GOP wiped out the middle class and has kneecapped the low wage earners with their welfare for the rich when they were in power and grinding government to stalemate halts when they weren't in power.

The resentment has been transformed with the magic of racism in a cult-like Stockholm Syndrome worked on the low wage class.

The coalition formed during past decades, methinks starting with a reaction to the "hippie" revolution of the 60's, is documented by others here:

“Democracy in Crisis: We’ve Been Headed Here for Decades.” Part 1of 8
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/6/2044226/-America-2021-The-Good-the-Bad-the-Ugly
Read all 8 to get the "plan" in detail.
This is all a Russian plan. Started years ago.
https://pastebin.com/raw/evbnN5y7

Don't forget, the Nazi Party is the byname of National Socialist German Workers’ Party, political party of the mass movement known as National Socialism.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nazi-Party

Yes, SOCIALISM.
Lies upon lies upon lies.
And as for the "Christian Nationalism" part, lees1975 nails it.
https://democraticunderground.com/1016360174

In short:
cult
fascist playbook

They screw the workers into the ground and get them to say "Thank you Sir! May I have another?"
Deranged cult.

[betsuni]

5. The more educated, the less vulnerable to angry racist culture wars Republican propaganda which is

the only reason to vote for Republicans if you're not very wealthy.

"Elite" as an insult is really old and stale. Still have no idea what's "elite" about Democrats and Democratic policy which obviously helps the working/middle classes and has nothing to do with Republican policies. I guess what it boils down to is that Democrats aren't socialists and therefore somehow BOTH SIDES and that makes some people mad because they're convinced the majority of Americans are secretly socialists. Their populist fantasy revolution or whatever.

[Celerity]

10. Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict

(Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017)

Thomas Piketty

March 2018

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2018.pdf











snip

[Sympthsical]

6. Potent article

I suspect it will fall mostly on deaf ears.

I've been beating a similar drum for quite awhile. That distilling everything down to tribal identity associations is not great. Not for our party, not for the country. But it's so ideologically baked in - highly radical ideologues have a very firm grip on things - that I'm not sure how to undo it. But there are a lot of quarters of ideology we defend to the hilt that I often watch and think, "How do you think this is a good idea? No one outside of whatever bubble you're in thinks this way or wants this. People actively hate this shit, and they ain't all galloping right-wingers."

But, that's just shouting into the wind.

We should be absolutely cleaning up electorally. Nothing should be close in this country as the Republican party is busy so thoroughly imploding. And yet, we're not. And people point many fingers outward for why that is so. White supremacy. Half the country is a cult. The electoral college. There's just a complete inability to look inward and start asking a few questions.

Entities that cannot course correct do not weather well medium and long term. People hate Trump, but I think he's this kind of bizarre lifeline, a temporary reprieve from an electoral reckoning. As long as he's around and repulses enough people - and he does - we're sliding by on account.

That isn't going to last forever. I think 2028 is going to be some shit. It's already been starting over the past five or so years, but Trump has sucked all the oxygen out of our politics and commanded everyone's attention. Once he's gone, and people start examining more closely what our politics look like, I think there are going to be some questions where our answers are not going to be anything close to what people want to hear.

And, weirdly, everyone will be super surprised.

(Your OP didn't have the link to the actual article, so I googled it up)

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/brahmin-left-vs-populist-right

[Ex Lurker]

7. You see the tribalism in this thread

I think an early sign will be if a reliably progressive city like Portland or SF takes a sharp turn to the right in a municipal election.

[Sympthsical]

9. SF's interesting

Mayor Breed has been doing some backpedaling and making a lot of anti-crime sounds. She's been moderating, but that's still fairly progressive in this city.

However, what does really interest me is what's going on within the AAPI community in the city. They're just kind of tired of a lot. Tired of the crime. Tired of a school board that is worried more about activism than education (the school board recalls should've been a wake up call). Tired of billions going to combat homelessness, yet the money always mysteriously disappears into various connected organizations (and friends and relatives) and nothing much changes. They're getting ready to flex their political muscle, and that'll be some shit.

There's a lot of grumbling. Even in Oakland there's a sense that something's up, that the populace is getting close to done with the way things are being run.

You can get elected on ideology in many places, but you can't run a city on ideology for very long before things invariably go south. Eventually effective policy must reign. I think because we're so liberal in the Bay Area, we've let ideology run wild for a lot longer than many other places would've tolerated. But Covid started shifting things. It's in the air.

Ideologues don't sense it, because they never sense anything beyond their own beliefs. People online don't sense it, because they never have to live with it.

But as someone who does live here, something's up. I'll be interested to see how next year's mayoral election in S.F. goes. Thing is, I don't love any of the other candidates, so if Breed makes the right noises, should could very well remain. But her shift away from ideology is clear and notable.

[Celerity]

8. Thanks! And I can't believe I forgot the link. Grrrrr

[keep_left]

11. There's a line of thinking that suggests the reason we're in so much trouble...

...is because a lot of the Cold War politics never actually got resolved at the end of the Cold War. The paranoia and xenophobia was turned inward when there was no longer a monolithic external enemy. That's around the time that I first began to notice some worrying trends in our politics. The Republicans' obsession with Kulturkampf became really destructive with the end of the Cold War, when far too many Americans started looking around for internal enemies to replace external ones.

Add to that an increasingly "meaner" capitalism that developed with the fall of the USSR, and it's not too surprising that we're in this situation.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=17865591