Kupchan: Digital Automation ‘Hollowed Out’ Middle Class, Fueling Rise of Populists Like Trump

Reflecto News | Politics & Economy | Western Democracies

Professor Charles Kupchan, a leading transatlantic relations expert at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has argued that the digital revolution — not just economic globalization — is the root cause of the political upheaval sweeping the West, from Donald Trump’s electoral dominance to the rise of populist parties across Europe.

In a thread on X, the former White House official explained that the transition from the industrial to the digital era “hollowed out the middle class,” leaving working-class Americans behind and creating the conditions for a figure like Trump to seize power.

“In the shift from the industrial to the digital era, automation has hollowed out the middle class – leaving working Americans behind in a globalized economy. They’re angry & ripe for someone like Trump.”
— Prof. Charles Kupchan, CFR

🔧 Automation, Not Just Globalization

Kupchan argued that trade liberalization alone (NAFTA, China’s entry into the WTO) did not cause the collapse of the industrial working class.

The overlooked culprit is automation — the replacement of human labor with machines, robotics, and now AI. While globalization moved jobs overseas, automation eliminated entire categories of work — cashiers, call center operators, factory floor workers — that are not coming back even if trade deals are renegotiated or reshoring occurs.

Trump’s tariffs and anti-immigration policies may address the “visible” causes of job loss, but Kupchan suggests they do little to reverse the underlying substitution of capital for labor.

Kupchan observed that this phenomenon is not limited to the United States. The same “hollowing out” of the middle class is now happening in Europe — but with a lag.

• Germany’s industrial labor force has shrunk by 10% since 2015 (destatis)
• UK’s manufacturing sector lost 30% of its workforce between 1999 and 2024
• France’s “gilets jaunes” (2018) were the first major populist backlash against the new economy in Europe

Populist parties to benefit include the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, Fidesz in Hungary, and Brothers of Italy.

Kupchan characterized economic displacement as only one factor driving populism. The “erosion of the political center” is equally to blame. Mainstream center-right and center-left parties offered the same neoliberal prescriptions — trade liberalization, fiscal austerity, deregulation — for thirty years, failing to notice that prosperity was not trickling down to the displaced.

The result: voters lost faith in democratic institutions (Congress, the EU bureaucracy, the media), undermining the very foundation of liberal democracy in the West.

🔮 ‘We Will Return to an Era That Looks More Like Pre-Trump’

Kupchan is bracing but not fatalistic. The populist wave is not permanent, he contends. The digital transition will eventually settle; society will “map out the future of work in the digital age”; the political center will re-form.

“Once we map out the future of work in the digital age & rebuild the political center, we will return to an era that looks more like pre-Trump than post-Trump.”
— Prof. Charles Kupchan

He is not predicting a return of the pre-2016 Republican or Democratic parties. Rather, the conditions that gave rise to populism will be addressed by the creation of a new mainstream center — one that adapts the welfare state to the automation era, invests in education and retraining, and creates a new social contract that rewards labor rather than punishing it.

The timeline for this return is uncertain. It could take a decade or more. And the transition will depend heavily on whether mainstream parties can offer credible answers to the automation crisis—answers that neither Trump nor his European imitators can provide.

But Kupchan’s long-term optimism distinguishes him from more pessimistic observers. He sees populism as a symptom, not a terminal diagnosis, and Trumpism as a reaction to a transitional economic moment — not a permanent transformation of the American character.

🧠 Summary of Kupchan’s Framework

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