Canceling Student Debt Would Be a ‘Brahmin Bailout’

The Democratic Party looks to build policy around the interests of its educated elite voters.

The economist Thomas Piketty used postelection surveys taken from France, the U.K. and the U.S. to track a remarkable evolution in left-wing political parties: “from the worker party to the high-education party.” He noted in a 2018 paper that leftist parties in the mid-20th century relied on less-educated and lower-income voters to form their electoral base. But more recently these parties have come to rely on college graduates. Mr. Piketty refers to this new base as the “Brahmin left,” as in the Indian upper caste.

The transformation of the Democratic Party has been summarized aptly by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who in 2016 boasted, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The strategy didn’t work for his party that year, but in the 2020 presidential election it bore fruit.

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