We can debate Walsh’s numbers, but his conclusion is hard to argue with. College students are already outsourcing their schoolwork to AI. The most downloaded country song in America was written by AI, and an AI-generated ingenue has reportedly drawn interest from talent agents, alarming Hollywood actors. A few days ago an AI company promised to virtually resurrect the dead by generating avatars of family members during life that can live on indefinitely after they’ve passed. The tagline, like the concept, was pure Black Mirror: “What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future?”
And speaking of resurrection, “texting with Jesus” is also suddenly on the table.
“Our leaders aren’t doing a single thing about any of this,” Walsh complained. You would think that a country whose president and political class only recently had to manage a hugely disruptive, world-changing crisis would be more proactive about responding to the next one given how foreseeable it is. Nope. Not yet, anyway.
An anti-clanker coalition will form, maybe sooner than we all expect. In a year or two, my daily navel-gazing about how postliberalism and economic discontent are reshaping politics will probably look myopic in hindsight, a classic case of fighting the last war. The defining issue of 2028 could well be the AI takeover.
If it is, which side is better positioned to take advantage?
Advantage: Democrats.
I think the left is, largely because of whom the public is likely to blame for the clanker revolution.
Big Tech will bear the brunt of popular anger at this technology, and Big Tech is a more comfortable target culturally for Democrats than Republicans in 2025. That wasn’t always the case, of course—as surreal as it now seems, Twitter used to be despised by the right as an outpost of wokeness, a force-multiplier for the progressive politics that Silicon Valley then favored.
But now? Musk has turned his platform into a safe haven for Nazis, has gone around babbling about the Great Replacement Theory and impeaching judges who rule against Trump, and spent more money last year trying to elect the president than any other person in America. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook have all courted the White House to various degrees since January, sometimes even bearing gifts when visiting, to protect their companies from “retribution” by Trump’s government. The prospective new owners of TikTok are also presidential cronies, not coincidentally given the administration’s role in brokering the sale.
Vance himself is a creature of Silicon Valley whose campaign for Senate was bankrolled to the tune of $15 million by his friend and mentor, Peter Thiel. And so, contrary to what I said earlier, his answer to Hannity about AI really wasn’t that unexpected. It was terrible by the standards of populism but quite predictable by the more important standard of “saying whatever J.D. Vance needs to say to get Musk and Thiel to open their wallets for his presidential campaign in 2028.”
Simply put, Democrats can lash Big Tech with gusto over the next three years, whereas the presumptive Republican nominee cannot. That’s an advantage for the left as the battle to build an anti-clanker coalition begins.
Their side has a “structural” advantage in this fight too, though, which I alluded to a few days ago. Left-wing populism concerns itself mostly with economics while right-wing populism concerns itself mostly with culture. AI will obviously bear heavily on both, but if I’m right that the focal point of public wrath will be Big Tech plutocrats like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, progressives’ core message about eating the rich should gain traction more easily.
The script writes itself. Clankers will devour millions of jobs, if perhaps not 25 million, and those jobs will cut across class lines. Some blue-collar workers will be replaced by previously unthinkable forms of automation. Some white-collar workers will be replaced by chatbots who can do the same work in a fraction of the time. My editors insist this newsletter will never be usurped by AI, but who’s to say? No man can crank out as much bloviating punditry in a week as I can, but to borrow a line from Predator: This ain’t no man.
A lot of economic displacement will occur, and the benefits will accrue disproportionately to a group of unlikable maladjusted weirdos who are already wealthy beyond the human mind’s ability to fathom. To make matters worse, AI content will monetize emotional vulnerability to a degree no technology has ever achieved. The “resurrection” app I mentioned earlier is a nice example: It’s running the same scam as a psychic pretending to channel the spirit of a client’s deceased loved one, but the high-tech verisimilitude of which it’s capable will pack an emotional punch orders of magnitude greater.
There have already been love affairs with AI, suicides encouraged by AI, and psychosis triggered by AI. Child pornography generated by AI apparently also exists. The ruthlessness with which clankers go about manipulating fragile people so that some post-human goblin in Silicon Valley can afford to purchase his eighth home will add a visceral appeal to leftist demands that we tax Big Tech into oblivion and crack down on its predations. “Don’t think of it as taxation,” progressives will say. “Think of it as compensation for the professional and psychological damage done.”
Young voters, the cohort most at risk of being pushed out of the labor force by AI, will find that appealing. So will millions of jittery workers who worry that they’re next to be automated out of a job. So will parents who are furious that their teenage children are reading at a grade-school level because they’ve relied on a technological crutch to bear the weight of their education.
The anti-clanker coalition is potentially a big one.
Advantage: Republicans?
I can imagine a populist right-wing case against AI that some people will find more persuasive, though.
The problem isn’t fundamentally Sam Altman or Elon Musk, the argument would go. You can hate them, seize their money, and shut down their companies, but the clankers will still be there. Foreign powers, most notably China, will continue to produce them. It’s not the villains behind the technology who should be targeted, it’s the technology itself.
The right will fold its critique of AI into its broader cultural critique that modern life lacks the rich sense of purpose that Americans used to feel. Faith, family, and financial security on a single earner’s paycheck: Every time a “RETVRN” bro hallucinates about the spacious homes and comfortable life that the average dad supposedly enjoyed 75 years ago, he’s complaining that capital-P Progress has disordered society and that fulfillment won’t return (er, RETVRN) until that progress is undone and the rightful order is restored. It’s what “making America great again” is all about.
It’s a potent enough message to have won two of the last three presidential elections. And it’ll be more potent when millions of people are suddenly clanker-ed out of their jobs and sent home to languish, resorting to porn, online gambling, and conspiratorial web surfing to fill the void now that their last shred of purpose has been snatched away.
For numerous reasons, the left isn’t comfortable making “RETVRN” arguments. Anything that smacks of cultural nostalgia makes them nervous, as it dares them to fondly remember aspects of life before feminism and the civil rights movement. It also cuts against their materialist view of politics, in which all social ills are ultimately due to the rich having too much wealth and the poor too little. And it confounds their pride in being champions of scientific progress in contrast to the benighted populist right. A Luddite approach to AI wouldn’t suit them.
The right has already had lots of practice perfecting its “RETVRN” message from the debate over illegal immigration. The argument against illegals is to a substantial degree the argument against clankers—they’ve stolen American jobs, upended the culture, and made the country less safe. There are no racial or class dimensions to the AI issue that compel the left to support artificial intelligence to the degree that they’ve supported illegal immigrants, but awkward questions lurk. If they’re okay with a worker from Central America displacing an American, why aren’t they okay with AI doing it? If we’re all about restricting sources of cultural upheaval, why stop at technology?
I suspect the right will also be able to speak more effectively to the social consequences that ubiquitous AI will have on America.
Both sides worry about the so-called loneliness epidemic (or absence-of-loneliness epidemic, as Derek Thompson aptly puts it) but Republicans have been noisier about its most visible episodes. It was the right, not the left, that railed against lockdowns that drove Americans indoors and kept children out of school during the pandemic, damaging their social development. And in my experience it’s the right more so than the left that’s willing to forthrightly identify declining birth rates as a major social problem. That topic is uncomfortable for liberals since the solution inescapably involves women having more children, which gets into knotty questions about abortion and sacrificing one’s career for motherhood.
Needless to say, the clanker revolution will make our antisocial country considerably more antisocial. The most optimistic thing one can say about it is that having lonely people interacting with AI instead of seeking out virtual communities of chuds online for companionship might lead to less political radicalization. But then again, it might not: A clanker that’s been programmed to radicalize its users into an ideology will do so more effectively than an Internet message board, I’d bet. (Recall that Grok, J.D. Vance’s favorite chatbot, already had a brief Nazi phase.)
And even if AI doesn’t turn American politics further toward militancy, it’s hard to believe anything good socially can come from millions of people suddenly having their companionship itch scratched by machines. Porn offers a simulacrum of sex to consumers, and social media offers a simulacrum of friendship, but at least there are actual people on the other side of those. In the clanker era, you’ll be able to meet your social needs without interacting with anyone.
It’ll be literally dehumanizing. Which side is better positioned to critique that? The one that’s moving ever onward toward “progress” or the one that’s eager to “RETVRN”?
The pro-clanker coalition.
Frankly, I wonder if the anti-clanker coalition might grow so big that it’s easier to list who won’t be in it.
The youngest young adults probably won’t be. If you’ve grown up relying on ChatGPT to help you with your schoolwork (or to do it for you), the thought of your tutor suddenly being regulated or banned is a “from my cold dead hands” moment.
Many workers will be in a similar boat, having landed fortuitously in a sweet spot where AI hasn’t been able to replace them entirely but has made their work better and easier. Who would want to give up a free virtual assistant that’s saving them a boatload of time? Who would want to deny scientists a tool that might plausibly expedite many life-saving breakthroughs?
There are bound to be China hawks who support the technology if only for the sake of averting a “clanker gap” with Beijing. This Pandora’s box has been opened, like it or not; either we disarm unilaterally and let the Chinese use it to their advantage or we compete. It’s no different from nuclear weapons in the end.
The main constituency, though, will be business owners who are dazzled by the productivity gains that ensued after downsizing their human labor force and shifting work to AI. Again, there’s an obvious analogy to illegal immigration: If you’re making bank by not having to employ Americans, you’ll fight hard in Washington to protect your ability not to do so. And if the new technology ends up producing a net gain to GDP, the case will be made that it’s in our country’s interest on balance to embrace the “clanker economy.”
Insofar as we haven’t done that already, I mean.
But practically everyone else will be on the other side, clamoring for forceful restrictions on what AI is and isn’t legally permitted to do and in some contexts calling for outright bans on the technology. Democracy is a market, I’ve observed before, and in any market strong demand for a product will eventually encourage some clever entrepreneur to provide a supply. The demand for regulating artificial intelligence is coming, in spades. At the risk of agreeing with Matt Walsh, we’re overdue for some political entrepreneur to meet it.
