These swings have provoked soul-searching inside the ALP, once Australia’s working-class party. But whatever the party’s mistakes in the recent campaign, its changing vote is also a consequence of tectonic shifts in global politics, as a set of remarkable statistics produced by French economist Thomas Piketty reveals. Loading Piketty, famous for the work on inequality that informed his best-selling 2013 book, Capital in the 21st Century, has just published Capital and Ideology, a sequel which at 1200 pages is longer than War and Peace. An English translation is out in March, but a preview is available in a working paper: Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict. The paper examines the relationship between voting patterns and education, income and wealth levels in France, the United States and Britain from just after World War II until today. It shows how the political systems of these three countries, so different in many ways, have been transformed in an almost identical fashion. One chart captures the change. In 1956, French voters whose highest educational qualification was primary school - 72 per cent of the adult population at the time - voted more for left-wing parties than did those who had completed high school, and significantly more than university graduates. In other words, the lower the education level, the higher the left-wing vote.

Today, that picture is exactly reversed: the higher the education level, the higher the left-wing vote. In the 2012 French presidential election, the vote for left-wing parties was 13 percentage points higher among people with degrees than without. In election after election, Piketty writes, “voters with primary degrees vote more for the Right than those with secondary degrees, who themselves vote more for the Right than those with tertiary degrees”. So powerful is this trend that it shows up even within the set of tertiary degree holders. In the 1970s, voters with more advanced degrees - graduates of France’s “grandes ecoles” - voted more for the Right than those with less advanced degrees. Today, “the more advanced the degree, the stronger the vote for the Left”. The majority of tertiary-educated voters supported Hillary Clinton for the US presidency in 2016. Credit:AP When Piketty studied the impact of education on voting patterns in the US, he found an almost identical picture. For about 20 years after World War II, university graduates were much more likely to vote Republican than were other voters. In the 1948 presidential election, more than 60 per cent of voters who had not finished high school - but just 20 per cent of voters with university degrees - supported the Democratic Party's candidate. But from the 1970s, just as in France, the relationship between higher education levels and the Left vote steadily increased. In 2016 51 per cent of bachelor's degree holders, and three-quarters of voters with a PhD, supported Hillary Clinton.

In 1948 just six per cent of American adults held tertiary degrees; today about a third do. Nevertheless, only 44 per cent of Americans who did not study past secondary school voted for Clinton in 2016. Since this group constitutes 59 per cent of the population, its vote is one important way to explain her defeat. The long-run change in Britain is very similar: in 1955 people who were in the top 10 per cent of education levels voted strongly Conservative. By 2017, the most educated 10 per cent voted for Labour at a rate 13 percentage points higher than all other voters. Labour, writes Piketty, “has moved from the worker party to the high-education party”. Loading The economist notes a few exceptions. First, some groups strongly represented at the lowest education and income levels continue to favour the Left party. Notable among them are voters from key non-European ethnic backgrounds: African-Americans in the United States (about 10 per cent of the electorate) and Muslims in France and Britain (about 5 per cent in both countries). Part of the reason they do so, Piketty argues, is that they feel the main right-wing party is hostile to them. Another big complication is at the other end of the spectrum. Although high education and income levels usually overlap, a significant proportion of high-income people still votes Right.

This leads Piketty to construct his first scenario for future political systems: a high-education elite that votes Left (and runs the Left party) versus a high-income, high-wealth elite that votes Right. Piketty calls this the “Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right” system. However, even the top income earners in France and the United States are moving left. In the 2016 US presidential election, a majority of the top 10 per cent of income earners voted Democrat for the first time in history. Even if hostility to Donald Trump exaggerated the size of that swing, it leads Piketty to his second and even more sweeping scenario for political change, what he calls “the great reversal”. In this scenario, Left voters - once associated with low education and income - are strongly linked with high education and income, while Right voters are strongly associated with the opposite. If it came to pass, the traditional, class-based politics that have ruled most Western countries since the end of World War I – indeed, since the time of Karl Marx – would be overturned. The 2017 French presidential contest between Marine Le Pen (left) and Emmanuel Macron pitted nativist sentiments against globalist ones. Credit:AP In its place, Piketty believes, would be a contest between “globalists” and “nativists” – the first with high and the second with low levels of education and income. This is exactly how the 2017 French election between Emmanuel Macron and the National Front’s Marine Le Pen played out. It explains Brexit, and the rise of populist parties in Europe. It explains Trump’s election, and it almost certainly explains, to some degree, Australia’s last election result.

The rise of education as the most important marker of Left politics did not happen overnight, nor simply because universities radicalise young people. In the 1950s, most university students were children of the elite - in Australia, people who had gone to private schools. From the 1970s onwards, universities opened to a much wider range of students, including the children of factory workers and other low-income people. They brought their families’ politics with them. But in time, their political priorities changed, as the ALP election review points out. Graduates with generally higher incomes and more secure jobs “are more readily able to think about issues such as climate change, refugees, marriage equality and the rights of the LGBTQI+ community”. Piketty’s analysis presents serious problems for Left parties – above all, the sheer fact of being outnumbered if their support one day comes predominantly from people with university degrees. Despite huge rises in Australia’s education levels in recent decades – from 11 per cent of 19-year-olds enrolled in tertiary degrees in 1971 to 42 per cent in 2017 – graduates are still by a large measure a minority of the population. Secondly, if the major political cleavage is not about economic redistribution but about a society’s levels of openness to the rest of the world, then identity-based conflict about border control and immigration is more likely to dominate. The Brahmin Left feels instinctively warm towards migrants and refugees and suspects less educated people in its own countries of intolerance and racism. Less educated people, by contrast, can feel threatened by immigration and perceived competition with foreign workers, and that in general the Left elite has abandoned them.

The divisions between the educated and uneducated risk leaving us with a world in which elites of Left and Right living in inner cities fly regularly around the world for work and pleasure, but are cut off educationally, geographically and emotionally from people who live 200 kilometres down the road or even a few suburbs away. It’s a bleak prospect, one with potentially profound implications for the ALP. Since the election, Wayne Swan, Richard Marles, Clare O’Neil and Kim Carr are among a group of senior Labor figures who have looked at the electoral map and pleaded for Labor to reconnect with its traditional voters and not let its policies be driven only by the agenda of inner-city progressives. Labor's survival may hang on working out how it communicates with its traditional constituency. Graffiti in the Melbourne suburb of Preston depicts then Labor leader Bill Shorten torn between inner-city and blue-collar voters. While some among this group might want to turn the party’s platform in a less adventurous and more centrist direction, others, including Swan and Carr, have been explicit that they don’t think the policies Labor took to the election should change. Instead, they say, it’s about how Labor talks to its traditional voters, to ordinary people. In a recent speech, O’Neil called on Labor to engage in the conversation about political correctness:“Not everyone with a concern about the immigration rate is a bigot. Not everyone with a hesitation about changing gender roles is sexist. Not every social change is inarguably a good one. When our own people - Labor people of a lifetime - tell us that they feel they are not allowed to question new social standards that seem to be reset every other week, I think we need to listen.”