AI has the power to realign politics

Last month, the US showed the world both of its minds about artificial intelligence (AI). The people building the most powerful systems, from Anthropic and OpenAI to Elon Musk, were asked to slow down. The heads of the two leading labs even carried that plea to the UN Security Council. The day before, at the same UN headquarters, US President Donald Trump declared that “whoever wins superintelligence wins” and signaled the US should charge ahead.

Between the builders’ plea and the president’s boast runs a fault line that could remake US politics. Big issues have done this before: slavery gave birth to the Republican Party, and civil rights turned the white South Republican. AI, one of the biggest changes in human history, could do it again, this time through a white-collar revolution.

Demand for AI has no ceiling, and no single company dares slow down alone. So the brakes would come from society. As Pope Leo XIV has said, AI’s challenge is “not technological, but anthropological.”

Nvidia Corp chief executive Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urges the industry to “run as fast as you can,” and the chips that would train the AI models of 2028 are already leaving Taiwan. Those chips would carry a new kind of intelligence, even a new civilization, that learns, copies itself and coordinates faster than any human society was designed to absorb.

People and institutions move at human speed: a degree takes four years, a career decades, a new social contract a generation. No one can retrain every time a better model ships. The speed and power of AI would upend how we work and live together, and social stability would be among the costs that spill out, onto people and into politics.

The US has lived through this once already. For three decades, globalization shipped factory jobs abroad, while a fiat-money economy of cheap credit inflated the assets of those who already owned them. Factory towns emptied, wages fell behind asset prices and the working class that paid the bill found its champion in Trump. That was the blue-collar revolution.

AI could spark the white-collar one. Globalization’s winners, the lawyers, coders, analysts and graduates who sell knowledge, face a rival that learns faster and costs less every quarter. So do whole economies built on exporting skilled work.

This spring, graduates booed commencement speakers for praising AI. In Festus, Missouri, voters threw out every council member on the ballot after the council approved a giant data center. The people absorbing the costs want a vote on the future they are being handed.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon now sounds like US Senator Bernie Sanders on AI, and Republican presidential hopefuls are courting the skeptics. A conservative need not change their mind about taxes to decide that their children’s future among the machines matters more.

Meanwhile, at the top of US politics, AI is starting to split along party lines. The Republican president wants to race and leaves the brakes to the builders. Summoned to the White House to talk safety, the industry’s chiefs signed a voluntary pledge to police themselves, which Trump called “morally binding.” Leading Democrats want public brakes. Former US president Barack Obama and former vice president Kamala Harris have embraced a slower pace, and California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered work on an AI kill switch.

Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, insists that a slower pace is no enemy of progress. Flying home from France, he even took aim at Huang: The man now touting AI “guardrails,” is the same one who wants no limits and no government regulation, he said.

Catholics are part of the US’ great swing vote: They backed the Democrats in 2020 and Trump in 2024. Their Church is drawing young converts, and their pope, who has already opposed Trump over the Iran war, is at odds with him on AI, too.

Voters have yet to decide which party owns the issue, and that is the Democrats’ opening. AI would disrupt society like nothing before it, and the white-collar revolution it sparks would need a champion. Trump rode the blue-collar revolution to power. If they play it right, Democrats could be the Trump of the white-collar one.

Taiwan might be the AI race’s factory floor, but it has reason to watch where this debate is heading. Taiwan relies on the US for its security and has always needed friends on both sides of US politics. If AI proves as disruptive as this writer expects, the voices calling for safety would not stay on the sidelines for long. Taipei would do well to start building bridges.

Taiwan’s values give it a head start. A society that takes universal health insurance for granted, and expects the state to cushion ordinary people through change, already shares the safety camp’s instinct that AI should serve people rather than the other way round. That common ground is also insurance.

“Whoever wins superintelligence wins,” Trump said. The booing graduates and the voters of Festus are asking a prior question: Wins what, and for whom? The party that answers first would stand on the right side of history, and might find a new majority there.

James Lee is senior adviser at the Taiwan External Trade Development Council.