Left parties in US, UK, Fr depart working class in favor of urban elites

[Undertoad]

...and it's not really helping

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/...-and-populism/

French economist Thomas Piketty argues not only that inequality and populism are linked – but that both can be explained by dramatic shifts in the traditional two-party system that favour different elites.

Citing historical data from France, Britain and the US, Piketty suggests that left-wing parties, which used to attract and represent less educated voters, are now more associated with highly educated voters. Right-wing parties, on the other hand, have consistently attracted and represented wealthy voters. As a consequence, “low education, low income voters might feel abandoned.” In short, the rise of populism is related to what Piketty calls “the rise of elitism”.

Strikingly, he found the same major trends affecting all three. The increased influence of educational and economic elites over the party system, he argues, “can contribute to explain rising inequality and the lack of democratic response to it, as well as the rise of ‘populism’”.

Welcome to your new normal: one party is made up of poor/populist people and one party is made up of the elites and richer over time. The elite people party will try to elect a Socialist -- partly mostly because they want the non-elite people to be more like them. The populist people party will reject this, partly mostly because they don't want to be like the elites.

~ Politics makes us stupid ~