How does a softening white-collar labour market impact politics?
The thing about luxury beliefs is that they’re a luxury – one the Professional-Managerial Class may soon be unable to afford
US GDP grew 3.7% in late 2025 while job creation was revised down to one of the worst years outside a recession. White-collar employment in finance, insurance, information, and professional services peaked in November 2022 and has declined ever since. Entry-level hiring in AI-exposed occupations has dropped 16% and is still falling. The economy is growing. The jobs are vanishing.
David Shapiro, 26/2/26
When we say that we want the poor to be uplifted and the marginalized to live lives of dignity and inclusion, we’re not lying – this is a sincere set of commitments we have. But they’re not our only set of commitments.
Most of us also sincerely desire to be elites. We think our preferences and priorities should count for more – should carry more weight, should be deferred to – over the folks checking us out at the grocery store. We think we should have a much higher standard of living than the folks who deliver our packages every day…
These two drives, both sincere, are in fundamental tension: you can’t actually be an egalitarian social climber.
Musa al-Gharbi, 4/3/26
Here’s how things are meant to work.
You study hard, get a degree then land a good job that brings a decent income, a comfortable lifestyle and a reassuring amount of social status.
In a meritocratic society, you’re one of the winners. Life is good.
Even before ChatGPT dropped, that ‘success sequence’ was already looking rickety, due to the massive over-production of university graduates.
If you were smart and driven enough to get an impressive degree from a top-tier university, things were still likely to work out.
However, increasing numbers of graduates – especially those without impressive degrees from top-tier universities – have long been finding themselves in relatively low-paying, low-status jobs.
These individuals have been condemned to the pain of status inconsistency. They’re the overeducated, underemployed ‘downwardly mobile graduates’ and ‘surplus elites’ we’ve been hearing so much about of late.
It was the frustration and resentment of this demographic that fuelled much of the wokeness of the last decade.
After all, if you’re not deriving any prestige from your pay packet, you can always try to extract it from being morally superior. If you cannot be rich, you can at least be righteous.
But this is not yet another post about those who never achieved the status they expected. It’s one about what follows if AI starts collapsing the white-collar labour market and large numbers of previously successful professionals and managers find themselves slipping into the ranks of the credentialled precariat.
The Four Horsemen of the (white-collar jobs) Apocalypse
How do things play out when the labour market stops delivering for members of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)?
Expect the following four political shifts.
1. The Professional-Managerial Class’s post-materialist politics will abruptly become much more materialist
Post-materialist politics is what people focus on when they confidently assume the material basics are covered. Symbolic politics has long been catnip to the PMCers because their relative affluence allowed them to approach politics as a contest over meaning, norms and virtue.
But what if the relative affluence part of the equation goes away? History suggests there will be a lot less focus on gender fluidity and a great deal more on bread-and-butter issues, such as wealth redistribution. With unemployment rising, the PMC may also rethink its enthusiasm for high levels of immigration.
2. Much of the PMC will move harder left, some of it will shift harder right
From circa 1980 to 2008, ‘third-way’ politics – fiscal conservatism combined with social liberalism – reigned supreme. It was championed by both centre-left and centre-right parties throughout the Anglosphere.
This was the uniparty ideology – free markets, globalisation, privatisation and encouraging voters to aspire to “get ahead in life”.
But what happens when the broadly centrist – right-wing on economics, left-wing on social policy – PMC starts feeling the precarity that neoliberalism inflicted on the classes below it?
The university-educated typically have lower levels of authoritarianism and racial prejudice than their unlettered compatriots. So it’s unsurprising that downwardly mobile graduates have, so far, been more attracted to parties of the radical left than the populist right.
At least initially, political parties that couple social liberalism with a redistributionist agenda are likely to benefit most from an increase in the number of unemployed or underemployed PMCers.
This has been a winning formula for the UK Greens and Zohran Mamdani of late. There’s likely to be increasing support on the left going forward for redistribution, rent controls, higher taxes on wealth and inheritance, and a more confrontational stance towards corporate power.
But as the rise of right-wing populism – something that’s now even transforming the politics of my own Lucky Country homeland, as Eric Kaufmann recently detailed – demonstrates the economically frustrated can jump to the Right as well as the Left.
Some of the credentialled precariat will drift rightwards, backing politicians who promise much lower immigration, tougher law-and-order policies, and a less accommodating approach to what Kaufmann calls sacralised minorities.
3. Identity politics will take on a whole new flavour
Identity politics throughout the Anglosphere has largely been driven by well-educated, comfortably middle-class Caucasians advocating on behalf of racial, sexual and (some) religious minorities. Robin DiAngelo – academic, author of White Fragility and well-remunerated champion of DEI struggle sessions – is a classic example of the breed.
The risk, once politics becomes heavily organised around group identity, is that majority populations begin to mobilise in the same way. As any student of 20th-century history will be aware.
My fellow Substacker Rod Dreher has long warned that if you encourage minority groups to mobilise on the basis of their identity categories, majority groups will eventually conclude they have little option but to do likewise. Especially if they believe their group is losing status and access to scarce resources.
Forced to choose between a presidential candidate who is for “they/them” and one who is for “you”, they’ll be inclined to go with the latter.
4. The PMC will become increasingly anti-establishment
Since emerging as a distinct class in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the PMC backed ‘the system’ because, for most of its members, the system delivered.
But once that bargain collapses, so does their faith in establishment parties and institutions.
The coming years will see much more PMC support for anti-establishment insurgents and minor parties and a lot less loyalty to the ancien regime.
From symbolic to scarcity politics
Symbolic politics is politics organised around identity, values and moral signalling rather than the distribution of jobs, wealth and power.
If the PMC’s jobs, wealth and power continue to evaporate, it will soon become a lot less interested in performative gestures and much more focused on ruthlessly pursuing its material interests.