Trump, a Warrior without a Brahmin

By Thomas Piketty

In traditional trifunctional societies, the ardor of warriors was tempered by the wise counsel of Brahmins.

This alliance between the two ruling classes — warriors and intellectuals — was intended to balance strength with wisdom and ensure the harmonious development of society under the leadership of its natural elites.

Together, the so-called natural elites efficiently supervised the working classes, providing order and meaning while sharing prestige and privileges among themselves.

The anthropologist George Dumézil believed he had identified warriors, priests, and workers as the defining characteristic of Indo-European civilizations.

In reality, the structure is far more widespread and, above all, functions more as a normative ideal than an immutable social reality. It was typically articulated by priestly classes, whether Hindu Brahmins in the Manusmriti, written around the second century B.C., or Christian bishops in medieval Europe around A.D. 1000.

Its primary purpose was to discipline warriors and compel them to show at least some respect for the extensive knowledge and written culture of intellectuals — something that was hardly guaranteed in historical practice, where new warrior classes regularly seized power and displaced their predecessors.

At times, however, warriors themselves embraced the model, viewing it as a useful means of maintaining order and securing the consent of the governed.

Today, history appears to be replaying this familiar conflict among elites. On one side stands a mercantile, nationalist, and militaristic right that often presents itself as anti-intellectual, embodied in the United States by President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. On the other stands a highly educated, liberal, and internationalist “Brahmin left,” represented by Democrats and similar political forces across the Atlantic.

As in the age of trifunctional societies, this opposition between a mercantile right and a Brahmin left is, to a considerable extent, artificial. It allows nationalist and liberal elites to share power and preserve their dominance over working-class populations while preventing any genuine popular alternative from emerging.

Whatever their rhetorical differences, Trumpists also rely on hundreds of experts and academics gathered in influential think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. The hypercapitalist agenda they advance — a staunch defense of social hierarchies, the concentration of power and wealth, and tax policies favoring the affluent — differs less from the views of many liberal economists than either side is willing to acknowledge.

During the heyday of the liberal international order, military interventions such as the Iraq War demonstrated that force and coercion were hardly absent from liberal governance.

Beyond their public disputes, elites will always exhibit a diversity of aspirations, identities, and political styles, much as conservatives and liberals did under limited-franchise constitutional monarchies. Yet these competing elite factions have every incentive to exaggerate their differences in order to alternate in power, even when their fundamental policy commitments remain remarkably similar.

How did this situation arise, and how can it be overcome?

The world has not always been governed exclusively by elites.

Following the social upheavals of the 19th century and the triumph of universal suffrage in the 20th century, working-class movements, trade unions, and political organizations succeeded in transforming society.

In some cases, they attained power directly, as with the Swedish Social Democrats from 1932 to 1976, the British Labour government elected in 1945, the French Socialists and Communists in 1936 and 1945, and the Roosevelt Democrats after 1932. More broadly, they altered the balance of power between labor and capital.

During the golden age of left-right electoral conflict — roughly from 1910 to 1990 — political competition largely pitted privileged classes against working classes.

Across countries and elections, wealthier, higher-income, and more highly educated voters consistently favored right-wing parties, while working-class voters overwhelmingly supported left-wing parties.

Political alignments were largely class-based. Elites tended to vote together, and disadvantaged groups did the same, with rural workers often supporting left-wing parties nearly as strongly as their urban counterparts. This dynamic placed the reduction of social inequality at the center of political life.

That class-based political order fractured between the 1980s and the 2020s. Across Western democracies, income and education increasingly exerted divergent effects on voting behavior. Higher income continued to correlate with stronger support for right-wing parties. Higher levels of education, however, increasingly corresponded with support for left-leaning parties, even among voters with similar incomes.

Several structural factors help explain this shift. Social structures have become more complex. The expansion of higher education means that similar levels of educational attainment now lead to vastly different economic outcomes, whether by choice or circumstance. Territorial inequalities have also intensified. Smaller cities and rural communities often have less access to universities, hospitals, and economic opportunities, while facing greater exposure to international competition.

Yet the principal explanation lies in the political choices made by social democratic parties and their counterparts.

Over time, many abandoned ambitious redistributive programs, alienating large segments of economically disadvantaged voters. As a result, many working-class voters — particularly those with lower levels of formal education and those living in smaller communities — gravitated toward nationalist parties or withdrew from electoral participation altogether.

To escape the current crisis and move beyond this largely symbolic conflict among competing elites, the left must reconnect with its historic egalitarian mission. It must unite working-class voters across regions and communities while recognizing that elite factions often close ranks when their common interests are threatened.

Only by rebuilding such a coalition can democratic societies restore meaningful political competition and confront the growing risk of democratic fragmentation.

Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics and Economic History at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics. He is also co-director of the World Inequality Lab and the World Inequality Database. He is the author of several books, including Capital in the 21st century (2014), Capital and ideology (2020) among others.