Start with the first trend. Democratic politicians have come to understand that the base of the party is deserting the Jewish state. The atrocities in Gaza during the war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks resulted in a civilian death toll that has been too much to stomach for anyone on the Left — and for an many on the Right, as well, not least Tucker Carlson. 

Now the Israel consensus in the United States, once unified across the two major political parties, has been shattered by Trump’s war in Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly promoted war; Trump was all too happy to oblige; and as a result, America is mired in a global catastrophe that has been, at least in part, Israel’s making. The poll numbers are disastrous: almost 60% of Democrats and half of independents view Israel negatively, according to an NBC News poll released last week. This is a sharp increase from a few years ago, and it’s highly unlikely that the Jewish state will win back many of these voters, since the young hate the Zionist mission with the greatest intensity. This under-40 cohort will age and carry its views with it, while the more sympathetic middle-aged and elderly will die off. 

For many decades, criticism of Israel was the third rail in American politics, but leading Democrats are now unafraid to break with precedent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls Israel an “apartheid” state. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator, has sworn off donations from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby, as has Ro Khanna, a progressive lawmaker from California. Last year, JB Pritzker, the billionaire Illinois governor who once sat on the AIPAC board, voiced support for a Senate resolution that would have blocked American arms sales to Israel. Even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish and may end up the most prominent hawk of the 2028 race, has been sharply critical of Netanyahu.

The second Leftward surging through the Democratic Party, popular opposition to the Iran war, presents the party with a clear opening: Trump ran on opposition to Mideast regime-change wars, but he has now launched a large operation that may soon entail the deployment of ground troops — of which only 7% of voters approve, according to a Reuters poll last week. But it is yet to be determined if the Democrats will capitalize on this opportunity. Opposition to the war has been clear enough, but certain Democrats, especially the older legislative leaders like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, run the risk of merely stating their opposition on procedural grounds.

When Trump launched the bombing campaign in Iran, Democrats in Congress fumed that they weren’t consulted first. Israel hawks like Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, weren’t necessarily upset that a war with Iran was happening — it was more that it wasn’t sanctioned, that Congress didn’t get its say, as it did when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. These leaders suggested that if Congress could have signed off on the bombings, perhaps the chaos would have been more palatable.

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For Democrats to find a way forward, the party will have to be unequivocally antiwar, in the same way it is moving toward the position, soon to be entirely mainstream, that conditions must be placed on military aid to Israel, if it is to receive any aid at all. The Left will have to move on from lamenting the lack of congressional hearings to a clear and forceful denunciation of the war. Yes, accountability to Congress matters. But as Trump, like the two Republican presidents before him, immolates the Middle East, it’s hardly the main point.

Most crucially, Democrats will have to be the party that is, without question, against all war. MAGA must not outflank the Left on the isolationist front again. The always dubious proposition of a Republican “peace” president has lost credibility, and Democrats must take advantage of it.

The war in Iran is a reminder of just how badly Democrats, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in particular, failed in 2024. Biden, of course, was senile, and never should have run again; Harris was put in the unenviable position of replacing him without having competed for a single primary vote. But then Harris ran one of the worst campaigns in living memory, ducking the media and struggling to articulate any serious domestic policy vision.

When it came to foreign affairs, however, she equivocated less — and the hawkish posture she landed on gave Trump the opening he needed to best her in every swing state. “Make no mistake, as president, I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend American forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists, and I will never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Harris said in October 2024, in a call with Jewish voters. “Diplomacy is my preferred path to that end, but all options are on the table.”

All options are on the table sounds an awful lot like what’s happening now. Granted, Harris is not unstable like Trump, and the odds are far lower that as president, she would have launched such a controversial military operation. Yet it was rhetoric like this that allowed Trump and his followers to hustle to Harris’s Left and promise voters that MAGA, with its vow to put America first and end foreign entanglements, would be the less risky option. When Stephen Miller, in November 2024, posted that “Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves,” and that “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace,” plenty of Americans believed him. It was a lie, but one the Democrats allowed to pass unchallenged, especially as Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, an unreconstructed neoconservative who celebrated her father’s legacy.

The new generation of Democratic politicians is wiser than Harris. Despite an onslaught of scandal related to an alleged Nazi tattoo (since removed), Graham Platner, a proudly Left-wing oyster farmer, has been a fundraising juggernaut who could very well knock out Schumer’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, in a primary race for Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Maine seat. Platner is an Iraq War veteran who is unapologetically against the war in Iran. He has a fierce, compelling antiwar message that may well launch him to victory. Speaking with a CNN reporter recently, Platner likened Trump’s Iran bombing and troop deployments to Iraq. “We find ourselves here with another war that should not be happening, that is resulting in destruction and horror — all frankly on the taxpayers’ dime,” he said. “That is money that should be spent here in the United States on schools, on hospitals, on infrastructure.”

“Won’t that leave troops in harm’s way, if you vote to defund this operation?” the reporter asked. “No,” Platner said, “because the troops should just not be in harm’s way. End the war. Bring people home. Stop bombing. We can end it.” 

That’s all that needs to be said. Stop bombing, bring home the troops. If Democrats can distill this message plainly — if the party can equivocate less, and avoid the traps Harris laid for it in 2024 — it can quickly outflank a GOP defined by Donald Trump. Few wars in modern American history have been more unpopular at the outset than the bombing of Iran, and voters will only sour further on the conflict as energy prices remain high and the economy stagnates. Unlike in the aughts, today Democrats will take little political risk in being antiwar. During the Iraq War, politicians had to contend with the long shadow of 9/11. They had to beat back accusations of hating America or not sufficiently supporting the troops. They had to, like past generations of liberals, worry about red-baiting, and fend off implications that a belief in civil liberties or pacifism meant they wanted to comfort the enemy within.

Now all they have to do is speak like Platner. Stop killing — and stop wasting money. If Democrats truly want to be the party of peace, their future is plenty bright. 

The rise of AI, the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, is now reviving that old dread, but this time it portends a far more volatile political horizon than the last one. It’s now the college-educated, office-dwelling winners of the age of the internet and globalization, who are suddenly discovering that they, too, can become the needless things alongside the blue-collar manufacturing base that Trump and MAGA has thus far failed to revive. 

We will soon find out which way the political winds will shift in response. The first act of the AI revolution was a content explosion. Generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini flooded the internet in the early 2020s with cheap words, cheap images, and cheap expertise, warping media, education, and the economy of attention into something closer to a hall of mirrors. That phase began bending politics by accelerating misinformation, flattening expertise, and lowering the costs of persuasion. We are now entering a more destabilizing phase: job loss.

As of 2026, AI “coming for jobs” is no longer a speculative future-of-work panel at Davos. In a limited sense, it’s already here. By the end of 2025, AI had been cited as a contributing factor in nearly 55,000 domestic layoffs, according to executive-coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The January jobs report was rosier than expected, but the underlying data was grim. Healthcare and social assistance accounted for 124,000 of the 130,000 jobs gained last month, industries essentially dedicated to managing an aging, poorer population. An AI executive at a top consulting firm told me last week that end-of-year updates — Opus 4.5, the Anthropic model that launched at the end of November; and GPT-5.2, the OpenAI model that launched in December — have crossed a threshold and can be trusted to handle more complex tasks with fewer mistakes. “Most people don’t realize it yet. Now [AI] is at the level where I think we’ll start seeing real economic impacts this year, and it will snowball relatively fast,” she told me. Investors have noticed, and software stocks are being punished on Wall Street as markets begin to price in the possibility that AI handles the bulk of global programming.

The snowball may have already begun rolling. In January, American employers announced more than 108,000 job cuts, the worst start to a year since the 2009 Great Recession, with layoffs up 118% year over year and up more than 200% since late 2025. The casualties are not obscure startups. Amazon eliminated roughly 16,000 corporate jobs in a single month as part of a broader plan to trim tens of thousands of white-collar roles. Meta pruned 1,000 jobs from its virtual reality unit Reality Labs. Salesforce’s CEO acknowledged that the company shed 4,000 customer-support workers after AI tools absorbed roughly half of the workload. What we’re seeing now isn’t mass unemployment but a subtler erosion: fewer entry points, thinner career ladders, and a growing sense that the white-collar future once sold as stable and dignified is about to go the way of the video store clerk. 

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It’s about to get worse: CEOs aren’t hiding it anymore; they’re now openly advocating reorganizing firms around AI labor as a cost-cutting imperative. Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20% in the next one to five years and “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is sounding an even louder alarm, predicting that most white-collar work “will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” Progressives like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes are calling this development a deliberate class war by Big Tech CEOs against white-collar workers for being too uppity, but this is not a conspiracy against professionals. It is capitalism working exactly as intended. The software doesn’t have to be perfect; if it can get to “good enough” at drafting reports, writing code, moderating content, summarizing documents, or optimizing logistics, then the $120,000-a-year credentialed professional becomes extinct, as more profit can be extracted. Robots and conveyor belts did this to factories and will continue to do so; now models and chatbots are doing it to the cognitive economy, turning thinking into the next assembly line.

This will upend politics because jobs lie at the heart of America’s social contract. As Franklin Roosevelt warned a century ago, “people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” We have already seen how downward mobility reshapes politics because we’re still feeling the tremors of the last employment-quake. In the 50 years since Terkel’s Working, deindustrialized and job-starved blue-collar communities lost more than jobs. Factory closures unraveled unions, apprenticeships, and entire local economies, shunting displaced workers into a service sector defined by precarity and downward mobility. Elites sold the transition as inevitable progress and told blue-collar workers to “learn to code,” as if your uncle could simply download a new career. The promised “knowledge economy” absorbed a narrow slice of the workforce, leaving the rest to navigate wage stagnation, disability rolls, and social decay in towns that had lost their reason to exist. Over time, this produced institutional estrangement: trust in government, the media, and expertise waned; participation declined; and resentment grew. 

And so, the anxiety born of the previous wave of automation and the legitimate economic grievances of blue-collar communities were largely rerouted into a new political identity, one that fused material loss with cultural resentment. As unions withered and Democrats recast themselves as the party of the ascendant professional classes, many working-class voters concluded that no one in power was actually trying to rebuild the world they had lost. Into that vacuum stepped MAGA and a Right-wing populism that promised results but has instead given rise to a politics of recognition — an inverse woke — embodied in the unlikely avatar of Donald Trump.

So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile. 

Marx, the prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution, would argue that as economic obsolescence metastasizes into political instability, a revolution will soon be upon us. After all, yesterday’s bourgeoisie is soon to become tomorrow’s proletariat. That’s unlikely, but if AI brings about a college-educated jobs apocalypse rather than a utopia of zero work and universal high income, then we will see a more drastic political shock over the next decade than we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Call it W.H. Auden for the white-collar age. “The Age of Anxiety” was the poet’s name for a post-WWII world in which the old guarantees had collapsed, and everyone felt one missed-step away from the void: “the wolves will get you if the moths won’t,” he warned. Large catastrophe or nibbling decay: either way, your previous life is over.  

In the short term — the next one to three years — the primary victim of this upheaval will inevitably be the Republican party and the MAGA movement. Economy and jobs remain the top issues for American voters. Whether it is fully deserved or not, the electorate will blame the incumbent leadership for the AI-driven displacement. The current administration, having tethered its brand to a return to American greatness and a blue-collar resurgence, will find itself presiding over a white-collar bloodbath. The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be a massacre for the GOP as voters react to tariff-driven inflation and rising costs for everyone. By 2030, both parties will face the wrath of young people who are expected to build a life on internships, side hustles, and selling themselves on OnlyFans. 

But this isn’t necessarily a victory for the center-Left or center-Right. Mainstream democrats are trapped between worker-friendly rhetoric and donor-class dependence on the industries driving automation. Republicans are trapped between populist grievance, pro-market orthodoxy, and vying for Big Tech’s hand in political marriage. The lesson that the pandemic-era satire Eddington expertly captured was this pathology: social media trained Americans to see their neighbors as existential enemies based on voting behavior, while the political establishment quietly benefited from the infrastructure boom, tax abatements, and data-center gold rush that accompanied the platform economy. The culture war supplied the noise, and capital captured the signal.

But maybe not forever. We are already seeing the emergence of a new, non-partisan “AI Populism” where something like the “Humanists” square off against “Tech Accelerationists.” Across the country, local communities are already revolting against the construction of massive AI data centers, even without the sting of massive job loss. These eerie windowless temples of compute strain local power grids and suck up millions of gallons of water, and arrive with the footprint of a fleet of spaceships: alien, resource-hungry, and indifferent to local life. The political backlash is no joke. These fights are erupting in swing states and battleground districts, animating local elections and straining party coalitions. 

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In Pennsylvania this week, the Montour County commission denied rezoning for a proposed data center tied to a major tech company after residents warned it would hike utility bills and worsen energy insecurity in a region already wary of industrial disruption. In Arizona, grassroots groups gathered enough signatures to put data center siting decisions on the ballot, signaling that tech infrastructure could soon be one of the few issues that actually mobilize voters outside the traditional culture wars. These skirmishes are shaping up to be an early indicator of what the next phase of the AI revolution will look like politically. Not a clean Left-Right realignment, but a messy conflict between those who bear the costs of automation and those who harvest its efficiencies.

The Republican Party finds itself in a weird squeeze on the AI question. Many GOP lawmakers and governors have enthusiastically backed Big Tech’s AI build-out as an economic and national-security imperative. President Trump’s pro-AI infrastructure agenda — from rapid data center approvals to limiting state and local regulatory power — has been presented as a key front in a global competition with China. At the same time, rank-and-file voters in data center host states are increasingly troubled by the real costs — from utility bills to grid strain — that these facilities impose, leaving Republicans vulnerable to being tagged as defenders of distant tech interests at the expense of Main Street.

Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to make sense of this new landscape. Party standard-bearers like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro have heralded AI as the future of the economy of their jurisdictions, while also awkwardly defending the backlash. Some progressives have embraced calls to slow or regulate data-center construction, framing it as an issue of worker protection, environmental justice, and local control. Others worry that overt opposition to AI infrastructure will hand Republicans a cudgel to beat them with on innovation and growth.

There’s a bizarre alignment emerging where figures as ideologically opposed as Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis find themselves on the same side. In a post on X over the weekend, Sanders said that the key disruptors of the 20th century economy — automobiles, radio, TV, computers, the internet — pale in comparison to the revolution AI will bring about. This week, Sanders is traveling to Stanford, the heart of the Big Tech beast, with US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to call for a moratorium on construction of new AI data centers to “make sure AI works for workers, not just billionaires.” Meanwhile, in December, DeSantis proposed an “AI Bill of Rights” to safeguard Florida residents by addressing the misuse of personal data and allowing local governments to block new data centers. “I really fear that if this is not addressed in an intelligent and proper way, it could set off an age of darkness and deceit,” DeSantis said during a press conference. When a democratic socialist and Florida’s No. 1 Right-wing culture warrior start sounding like joint authors, something real is happening.

If we look a decade ahead, the AI revolution may force a complete rewrite of the old political spectrum of  “Liberal vs. Conservative”, which will collapse into incoherence. In its place, we could see a structural realignment around — to borrow from Marx — who controls the Means of Prediction.

As AI automates the “cognition economy,” the debate over Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) will shift from Silicon Valley pipe dreams to the center of the debate. Governments will be pressured to tax “robot labor” simply to prevent the total collapse of the consumer economy. If people don’t have wages, they can’t buy the products the AI is making. Just as the 19th-century state had to break up the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age, 21st-century politics will be a battle between the federal government and a handful of what Sanders calls tech oligarchies. These companies now control the world’s primary compute resources — the digital equivalent of oil or steel. Or we could see the opposite: a command-and-control economy, as the state and tech formally merge and the trend of state capitalism takes firmer hold. 

The danger, I believe, isn’t that AI will produce a single coherent political movement or a technofascist state (so put away your dog-eared copy of 1984). Instead, it may fracture the old coalitions faster than new ones can form, producing a volatile landscape of backlash, regulatory whiplash, and even more opportunistic demagoguery. On the far Left, we see a rise in techno-skepticism and a demand for the abolition of “bullshit jobs” — the idea that we should stop pretending we need 40 hours of work if the AI can do it in four. On the far Right, nationalist protectionism may not align with the needs of the global AI industry. The future, for better or worse, is up for grabs. 

From this vantage point, the AI revolution is the final insult to the American worker, but over the rest of the 2020s, it may also represent the final test for American democracy. The Third Industrial Revolution taught factory towns that the future could arrive without them; the Fourth is teaching the same lesson to the laptop class. And when millions of people are suddenly told, by code, that they are surplus, it won’t be the moths that get the elites. The wolves will find them first.