Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality?
Five years ago, for example, Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford, published “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” Economic theory, he wrote, holds
that “inequality should be at least partially self-correcting in a democracy” as “increased inequality leads the median voter to demand more redistribution.”
Starting in the 1970s, this rebalancing mechanism failed to work,
and the divide between the rich and the rest of us began to grow, Bonica, Nolan McCarty of Princeton, Keith T. Poole of the University of Georgia, and Howard Rosenthal of N. Y.U.
In a January Power Point presentation, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right,” Piketty documents how the domination of the Democratic Party here
(and of socialist parties in France) by voters without college or university degrees came to an end over the period from 1948 to 2017.
Shafer’s white collar constituency is, in fact, what Piketty describes as “a higher education” or “intellectual” elite — his “Brahmin left.”
In support of Piketty’s argument: In 1996, according to exit polls, the majority of
voters who cast ballots for Bill Clinton were what demographers call non-college.
The result, Piketty argues, is a political system that pits two top-down coalitions against each other:
In the 1950s-60s, the vote for left-wing (socialist) parties in France
and the Democratic Party in the US used to be associated with lower education & lower income voters.
