Saturday subscribers-only post: Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, and the future of the global "Brahmin left"

An election in France shows how American political conflict is part of a broader realignment of the global political system

A long time ago, workers voted for left parties, and capital — business owners and well-paid, educated citizens — voted right. This is how, eg, you got a southern American political system in the 1960s which was dominated by conservative Democrats but had pockets of wealthy liberal Republicans, mostly in cities. And it is how you got socialist and communist uprisings against right- and center-left governments across Europe earlier in the century. In this era, more than anything else, politics was determined by ones’ class.

Of course, this is an oversimplification. But at the very least you can decisively say that things are much different now than they once were. There is a healthy mix of both left-leaning and right-leaning workers, and there are many rich leftists. Americans seemed to fully realize this new political-class system in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency largely off the backs of working-class white voters, who had previously supported Democrats, and rich white eli…