Along with the acceleration of artificial intelligence, we are seeing an accelerating political response. This response seeks to limit AI in order to protect workers, families, and communities. It is not pro-China, anti-innovation, or “doomer.” It is natural, necessary, and inevitable. Radical social and technological change always generates a protective impulse. As AI accelerates, it also accelerates the social movements that aim to stop it, slow it down, or channel it in new directions.
To further complicate matters, Silicon Valley’s AI dream is now endorsed and advanced by the federal government. On July 10, 2025, the Trump Administration released Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan, which detailed how dozens of federal agencies will contribute to the United States achieving “global dominance in artificial intelligence.” The effort to engineer technologies that surpass human beings in every respect is now a state project. So, those who want to protect society now find themselves opposite the state that should protect them.
To make matters still more complicated, both of these impulses (radical technological change and social protection) are embodied by elements of the Trump coalition. This “double movement,” as Karl Polanyi called it, of change and protection splits the Republican Party down the middle. Reconciling these impulses will not be easy, but it is possible. The Trump Administration must incorporate into itself both sides of the double movement (Silicon Valley is already well represented), and then establish within the government vehicles for dialogue where the two sides can productively negotiate. We will need our dealmaker-in-chief to preside over what must be this generation’s most intense negotiation.
In The Great Transformation, Polanyi sought to correct the standard liberal story of how market society emerged. He showed that the market did not naturally arise from the unimpeded expansion of liberty and exchange; rather, it was a product of state action, which brought it into being by siding with the new merchant class and overruling appeals to pre-existing rights. The “double movement” describes the relationship between the transformation of pre-industrial England into the market society (the first movement) and the social reaction to preserve as much of the old ways as possible (the second movement).
Polanyi recognized that the false idea of a naturally “free” market continues to distort our politics. If the market is natural, it must be good for all of society to be drawn into it, no matter how damaging the process of commodification may be. Attempts to resist commodification are therefore either futile or damaging.
Factory laws, social regulation, land laws, agrarian tariffs, the birth of the labor movement were thus cast as an alien force imposed on the market from the outside. The desire to preserve established, natural human goods becomes seen, Polanyi writes, as a “covert action” and a “conspiracy,” as if it were contrived by secret and hostile powers.
Polanyi’s “double movement” anticipates the current struggle over AI. The radical transformation is underway; the state is enforcing it; the damage is mounting, and any efforts to stop it, channel it, or slow it down are morally illegitimate.
The accusations of conspiracy are back, too. A stunning exposé in The Wall Street Journal reports that “Silicon Valley is putting more than $100 million into a network of political-action committees and organizations to advocate against strict artificial-intelligence regulations, a signal that tech executives will be active in next year’s midterm elections.” Another PAC has pledged an additional $150 million. The industry is convinced that a “vast force” has been assembled to “slow down AI deployment.” Of course, this “vast force” mainly consists of everyday parents, under-resourced state lawmakers, child safety advocates, and the average person, who have nowhere near the power of their opposition. Conservatives (like me) who oppose the ten-year moratorium on state regulation of AI are seen as particularly dangerous.
The industry that this framing attempts to insulate and protect is the same one that economist Tyler Cowen—an AI enthusiast—recently described as causing the “most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced,” which will, he continues, force “our children and grandchildren” to struggle “to live meaningful lives in a world where they are no longer the smartest and most capable entities.” For AI accelerationists, all efforts to forestall or mitigate this future are complicit with “wokeness,” or capitulation to the bureaucratic logic of blue states and the European Union. Again, the protective movement is framed as a hostile, outside force.
Big Tech is correct that opposition is growing. It defeated the proposed ten-year moratorium on state AI regulation. It arose from institutions, individuals, and coalitions that were already actively responding to the harms caused by social media, smartphones, and infinite-scroll pornography. This movement has secured legislative wins, victories in federal court, and developed an innovative politics against which the accelerationists are struggling. It is responsible for dozens of state laws to address the problems of social media, smartphones, app stores, smartphones in schools, and pornography. And it has won a recent Supreme Court decision, Free Speech Coalition v Paxton, that ruled in favor of age verification of pornography, baffling the tech policy establishment by overturning nearly three decades of precedent. This movement has now trained its fire against abuses of AI.
America has long been attached to three doctrines about the adoption of new technologies: that it is inevitable, that it advances social progress, and that it will work neutrally. As recently as the 1990s, these ideas enabled the unlimited expansion of the internet, social media, and the screen. Now, belief in all three has been profoundly shaken.
Rather than assuming that the widespread adoption of a new technology is inevitable, lawmakers across the country now believe that there is an alternative. They are willing and able to regulate technology for the common good. This sense that we do have a choice has been extended to parents, school administrators, and religious communities, many of whom are going screenless.
“A pessimism about technology has set in.”
What of technological progress? Fifteen years ago, the belief that new inventions were always social improvements was an article of faith in America. Now, a pessimism about technology has set in, with even some very prominent AI executives and scientists like Dario Amodei crying from the hilltops that their own inventions will wreak untold disaster. A new poll by Ipsos finds that 47 percent of American adults agree with the statement that AI is bad for humanity. Seventy-one percent are concerned that it would cause too many people to lose their jobs; and 66 percent fear that it will replace in-person relationships.
As the myth of technological progress grinds to a halt, the myth of technological neutrality has collapsed as well. Now, the public’s view of technology is so fragmented that it is possible to identify “Republican” and “Democrat” technology. There are Republican and Democrat lightbulbs, cars, energy sources, showerheads, and social media platforms. Hence, the general suspicion, especially under the first Trump administration, of Silicon Valley as a whole, whose power was, quite clearly, Democratic power.
Today Neil Postman’s insight that every technology creates winners and losers, and that a new technology always grants some people power over others is the commonsense position. “Technology creates its own imperatives,” he wrote in Technopoly (1993), “and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives.” AI is so unappealing that it has to be sold to Americans as a national-security imperative: To beat China, you must be willing to part ways with everything—including, we learned earlier, a happy future for your children and grandchildren.
By endorsing the demands of the tech industry, Trump is ignoring his own base on the most important policy issue of this generation. Consider the AI moratorium. In a seemingly miraculous reversal, it was defeated in the Senate 99-1, in the wee hours of the morning, and yet it has already re-appeared in multiple regulatory and legislative forms. The White House is refusing to heed the voices of protection.
“Industry has led the administration into a legislative nightmare.”
Industry has led the administration into a legislative nightmare. When my employer, the Institute for Family Studies, polled the moratorium in June we found that it was wildly unpopular with Americans across the board. Overall, American voters oppose it 3 to 1. Trump voters oppose it 2 to 1. Younger voters oppose it by an astounding 7 to 1. In a second poll in September, we asked voters what they wanted Congress to prioritize, safeguarding children from AI chatbots or advancing the AI industry, and voters opposed industry by a whopping 9-to-1 margin. 96 percent of Trump voters want Congress to prioritize AI safeguards over industry expansion. This is a mandate, if the party wants it. But, by all appearances, it doesn’t.
The Trump administration, instead, is pushing the most unpopular AI policy conceivable. Blowback is likely, because the policy has implications for everyone’s lives and because it calls into question Trump’s claim to be a tribune for the people. If ever there were a time for populism, now would be it. The Trump administration can break out of this bind, however, by programmatically incorporating the movement of social protection into its own policy discussions. It must actively represent three groups to succeed: the pro-family movement, the religious faithful, and workers, all of whom represent wide swathes of Trump’s base and who have particularly valuable perspectives on AI.
First, the administration should establish an interagency Working Group on Technology and the Family, tasked with studying the challenges that technology in general, including AI, presents to the family, and counsel the president on how technology can empower the family without encroaching on its sacred domain. To strengthen the family is to strengthen society. Silicon Valley and the family are currently at loggerheads because they are rival claimants to the future. Silicon Valley fails to realize, however, that only the family can genuinely achieve the future. To undermine the family is to threaten the future altogether.
Second, the administration must reject the religion of AI. We should therefore support the proposal to establish an AI Council aimed at putting the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House Faith Office in dialogue, to inform AI policy with religious belief. By its nature, AI raises pressing questions about man’s identity, his place in the created order, and his relationship to the divine. Some Silicon Valley CEOs have openly wondered whether they are creating a god, and still others welcome it.
The spiritual instincts of the average American, however, align much more with Pope Leo XIV, who recently declared that “it will be difficult to find God in AI.” Americans should have a say in how new technologies affect their lives, especially given the intrinsic risks of a technology endowed with the authority to make autonomous decisions. The presence of orthodox religious voices would provide a healthy counterweight to the techno-optimists currently shaping policy.
Third, because employment has fundamental implications for the marriageability of working-class men, we must work to ensure that productivity growth from increased automation generates widespread prosperity. Automation’s effect on the livelihood of workers can vary dramatically, as history readily attests, and recent studies show. We must offer American workers something more than programs to help them transition after job loss.
It is particularly critical to develop a coherent plan to address the threat of rapid, unconstrained automation of the trucking industry. Trucking is a vital industry for the American family. It does more than just employ millions of non-college-educated men. Our research finds that, even in its current state of decline, trucking fosters significantly higher marriage rates compared to other blue-collar alternatives. Full-fleet automation is on the horizon. It could do untold damage to working-class families. The administration should convene a blue-ribbon committee to develop a coherent national plan to negotiate between competing interests, with a special emphasis on bringing management, truckers, and unions together. This will help secure buy-in from labor, which in turn can secure time for adjustments, retraining programs, national safety standards, and contracts to preserve trucking as a primarily human craft, albeit one that operates in a new form.
The Trump administration should also invite unions to participate in a summit on AI, automation, and labor. In a recent interview with American Compass, Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, pointed to the union’s crest of horses pulling a cart (from which the name “teamsters” is derived) as indicative of its orientation toward technological change. The Teamsters mission, O’Brien said, is not to stop technological change, but to ensure that workers have a say in its implementation. For O’Brien, the best way to ensure that technologies are not deployed abusively and, better yet, in service of widespread prosperity, is to give workers visibility into their operations. Unions have a long history of confronting technological change, and they should be treated as sources of experience and knowledge, rather than as historical dead weight and forces for anti-modernization.
If President Trump invited the two parts of the double movement into his administration and successfully oversaw a negotiation between them, he would go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents, if not the man who saved the future.