There are two inescapable facts in American politics right now.
- More people earn their money from wages than from investments.
- Investors control both major parties.
The situation is similar to that of the 1890s. Strikes were broken by scabs and thugs. Farmers were driven under by high freight rates. Investors lost everything in the Panic of 1893. Anyone with a happy, gauzy view of that time has seen too many old movies. Hollywood memory-holed it to help win World War II.
Back then the interests of wage earners were divided between populists, representing the south and west, and progressives in major cities. That’s mirrored today in the Trump coalition’s religious wing, which represents rural interests, and the new urban progressives like Zohran Mamdani, who represent city wage earners.
What’s missing in this analysis are America’s suburbs. That’s where most Americans live. Most of our cities, including Atlanta, where I live, are overgrown suburbs.
It’s in these suburbs, which did not exist in the 1890s, that America’s political future will play out.
If you own a suburban home, you are in the investing class. Whether your politics are red or blue, they’re tinged by that fact. You’re not supporting radical solutions.
The Panic of 2025, and 2026, starts in the housing market. Prices fell in one-quarter of metro areas last quarter. Things are worst in what were the fastest-growing markets, like Arizona, Florida, and Austin, Texas.
Housing is a bubble bigger than AI, and it’s starting to pop.
When Homes Are Worth Less
America hasn’t had a real estate recession in over 50 years. The last one started in 1973, with the Arab oil crisis. No one in the market today was around then, but it ran for a decade. It was especially bad in northern manufacturing centers and central cities.
When the bubble pops in the suburbs, a lot of people will lose their place in the investing class. They won’t be saved by stock gains. The AI bubble is also in the process of popping. (Watch what happens to OpenAI.)
Suburban politics are going to be up in the air, for the first time in my lifetime. That’s going to matter, for the first time in anyone’s lifetime.
What are suburban voters going to do? Neither party represents their interests. The Democrats may do it on economic questions, but many suburbanites have been Republicans for their entire lives.
There is no figure on the political scene today who represents this coming suburban revolt.
The Suburban Revolt
What the AI Edgelords are proving is that wealth must be redistributed in our time.
Right now it’s all going to investors, to people who don’t need it.
Both parties are controlled by the investing class, Republicans overtly and Democrats covertly. It’s because wage earners aren’t represented that their anger will explode. It has exploded into Trumpism, but that was a manipulation. Some of those who followed Trump are now realizing that.
Where will they go now?
Answer that question and you know the future. Find me a suburban leader who can articulate and represent that demand and a movement will be built around them, organically, one that can turn our present politics upside down.
In the 1890s change started with William Jennings Bryan, a religious bigot allied with southern racists. He failed to break through because urban moderates wouldn’t tolerate him. This resulted in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. But his rise was an accident. He was placed on McKinley’s ticket to get rid of him, after Bryan failed twice to break the power of Wall Street.
Things will work out differently this time. I don’t know precisely what will happen. I only know that things will happen, and that they need to happen.
If American democracy is to survive, it must be run in the interests of the majority, the people who get money from wages.
