Technological disruption makes for strange bedfellows

Coalitions are a tricky business

The first attack surface for AI to replace humans is knowledge work. Elite overproduction can lead very directly to political instability. And we’re about to see the most dramatic example of it perhaps in all human history.
Micheal Hochberg, The AI Gründerzeit, 18/3/26

We are past the point where the question is whether artificial intelligence will exceed human capability across most cognitive domains. It already has. The remaining question is not if but when the full implications arrive, and the “when” is measured in months and years, not decades… It’s the $80,000-to-$400,000 household… that gets caught. Their skills are the most directly substitutable by AI, and their lifestyle is built on continuous high income rather than accumulated capital.
Sahaj Garg, 19/3/26

If AI displaces large numbers of jobs via automation, that will leave large numbers of white-collar, degree-holding voters without a means to finance the middle- and upper-middle-class lifestyles they are accustomed to… We should then expect the displaced white-collar worker and his/her family to react in the same way their blue-collar fellow citizens reacted in the last decade. They may swing to left-wing populists in greater numbers, but many will swing rightward. Any significant hollowing out of the remaining consensus voters puts the traditional center-right supporter in a massive bind. And we know from history what old center-right voters do when their only viable choices are a populist left and a populist right.
Henry Olsen, The Liberal Patriot [RIP], 25/3/26

Big and small owner-operators alike tend to share the view that their firm is their personal property. They feel attacked and insulted by government regulators, tax authorities, and workers who try to organize unions or simply demand higher wages. Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” when in fact they merely represent the propertied bourgeoisie in its century-long battle against the managerial-professional overclass… While demagogic populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can win over working-class voters upset with immigration or alienated by cultural progressivism, their core constituents and donors are the petty bourgeoisie as well as super-rich tycoons who answer only to themselves, like oil men and tech-company founders.
Michael Lind and Yacha Mounk, A Response to “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides”, 19/3/26

Politics makes for strange bedfellows.

The Religious Right and Feminist Left spent the 1980s and 1990s united in the battle against pornography. (Subsequent technological advances led to the seemingly total defeat of both the Evangelical morals campaigners and gender studies professors.) More recently, the Christian conservatives and agnostic/atheist/Wiccan women’s rights advocates have been on a unity ticket in opposing surrogacy and sex trafficking, while remaining bitterly opposed on issues such as abortion.

Progressive voters, especially the socially hyperliberal younger ones, have joined with socially conservative Muslims to support harder-left parties and candidates, such as the UK Greens and Zohran Mamdani.

The business owners who fund centre-right parties and the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) types who now make up the leadership class and core constituency of centre-left ones formed a political coalition potent enough to facilitate mass migration for decades, despite a majority of voters being opposed to it.

Can the elitists and populists unite in the face of a common enemy?
Until recently, the PMC was conservative, in that it continued to respect institutions and wanted to maintain the status quo. The class below the PMC was radical in that it had lost faith in institutions and was yearning for political disruption.

The rapid adoption of AI since ChatGPT dropped in late 2022 means the PMC now finds itself facing the precarity the open-borders, free-market consensus long ago inflicted on those further down the org chart.

The question that now arises is whether the long-disenfranchised commoners and soon-be-made-redundant knowledge workers can unite to protect their interests in the face of the business-and-asset-owning class.

When Anglosphere societies abandoned the Keynesian settlement and embraced what’s now called neoliberalism in the 1980s, they knowingly accepted a more inequitable distribution of wealth. Essentially, the deal was that ‘wealth creators’ would be allowed – indeed, encouraged – to grow vastly wealthier. This would then lead to living standards rising for everyone.

Those at the top – the plutocrats and many of their PMC employees – have got wealthier. Neoliberal economists argue that everyone’s living standards have improved, and they are not entirely wrong about that. But what were once broadly middle-class societies have bifurcated. Those at the Paris end of the Pareto distribution have done well for themselves. Those at the arse end, not so much.

If wages hadn’t become decoupled from productivity gains around half a century ago, the average worker’s pay cheque would reportedly be around 40 per cent larger today.

Until recently, PMCers didn’t see themselves as average workers and most of them earned above-average salaries. But growing numbers of PMCers are worried they could soon be joining the ranks of the left behind.

Few PMCers had much concern for the fate of the left behind when it was just physical labour being automated away. After all, it couldn’t be that hard for a middle-aged coal miner or factory worker to reinvent themselves as a software engineer.

But PMCers have come around to the idea those displaced from the labour market deserve to be treated with dignity. Maybe even provided with a guaranteed basic income.

A brief history of proletariat-PMC class antagonism
By the end of the strike-prone, stagflation-afflicted 1970s, plenty of PMCers felt the workers had had it far too good for far too long. They were receptive when a new generation of political leaders argued the Keynesian settlement had to be consigned to the ash heap of history and organised labour needed to be brought to heel. (Mission very much accomplished on that front.)

It would be uncharitable to suggest that PMCers wanted sections of the working class to be thrown on the scrapheap and the rest of it to experience more pinched and precarious existences than their parents had.

But they were OK with some distance opening up between the lifestyle a university-educated professional enjoyed and the one a non-college-educated worker could aspire to.

Among many other society-destabilising impacts, a combination of stagnant wages and ever-rising asset prices meant ever fewer workers – even those with relatively stable, full-time employment – could enter the housing market. In turn, that meant fewer working-class men were considered marriageable.

The status downgrade non-PMCers experienced was arguably even more punishing than the economic one. PMCers weren’t content with just occupying the upper tier of two-tier societies. They also wanted to make clear they were morally superior to those who weren’t making out like bandits from globalisation.

PMCers mocked the one group it still felt comfortable mocking for everything from its poor taste to its poor life choices. (The low-information voters’ failure to comprehend you talk the Sixties but walk the Fifties has long been a source of PMC bemusement.)

What’s more, the contempt the PMC expressed for their racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic social inferiors reached hitherto unprecedented levels during the High Woke era. That is, the decade before AI dropped and when PMC hubris peaked.

From a game-theory perspective, it’s straightforward to predict what should happen now. While AI is coming for the white-collar workers first, it won’t be long before it also begins vaporising blue-collar and pink-collar jobs.

The PMC bought into the system when they were part of the top 20 per cent in 20:80 societies. They’re unlikely to buy into the system when the ratio moves to being 5:95 or 1:99.

Likewise, the masses are incentivised to make common cause with the PMCers, who understand how the system works and how it could be transformed. This is how revolutions happen – disgruntled surplus elites ally with the despairing masses to attack the common class enemy.

If humans behaved rationally, we might expect to see those destined to lose from AI-facilitated automation mobilising to ensure a reasonable share of its productivity gains are distributed to labour and not just captured by capital. As has been the style, during neoliberal times.

But humans rarely behave rationally, which is why game theory has its limits when it comes to predicting political developments.

The worm turns
The PMC – especially in comparison to old-school elites – was never big on noblesse oblige. They “did all the right things” and were justly rewarded for their striving. If others failed to do likewise, well, in a well-functioning meritocracy they could only have themselves to blame.

After overseeing the creation of a more Darwinian economy, it seems the PMC will soon be in more regular contact with its sharper, more soul-destroying edges. It applauded, or at most shrugged, while unions were crushed, manufacturing jobs were offshored, housing was turned into a speculative asset class, and all manner of red lights – from collapsing fertility rates to rising deaths of despair – were blinking on the dashboard.

The class that turned expressive individualism into an art form now has to embrace solidarity. It must cast aside identity politics and pivot hard to economic populism. Most of all, it needs to convince the people it has thrown under the bus economically while sneering at culturally that it’s trustworthy.

It’s a big ask, on both sides.