There’s a hulking irony taking shape across the landscape of the 2026 midterms: After a decade of pundits bloviating about the menace of populism in our times, the material conditions that gave rise to American populism have upended the political consensus. In the tirelessly mythologized heartland said to harbor the recondite attitudes and mindset of MAGA-era populism, disenchanted citizens are staging an uprising over the plutocratic seizure of land and resources engineered by a new generation of robber barons. As AI data centers suck up water, land, and political capital—while spewing gas-generated carbon emissions at dangerous new levels—ordinary Americans in the country’s post-industrial interior are in open revolt. The backlash against data centers is now so potent that candidates in both major parties are scrambling to no longer be identified with the tech lords dedicated to disfiguring the country. 

The opposition to data centers in red states has grown so strident that President Donald Trump intervened on behalf of his benefactors in the AI industry. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump sought to browbeat his followers into submission, claiming the data centers poised to set up Borg-like in their midst will serve both their own economic self-interest and the dictates of national security. The MAGA nation should “let Data Reign,” Trump pronounced—unless, that is, its strongholds would prefer to be “backwards and poor.” “If we kill the Golden Goose,” Trump continued, showing that his mastery of fairy tales is equivalent to his prowess with capitalization, “you will have only yourselves to blame.” Perhaps sensing that any appeal to the alleged equal distribution of the wealth arising from the biggest and most oligarch-friendly investment bubble in human history would fall flat, the president tried to scold the MAGA faithful into recognizing their patriotic duty: “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!” 

It didn’t go over well. “This statement is insane,” went one typical reply on the traditionally Trump-idolizing platform. “I’m already on water restriction.” Another plaint got more personal: “You’re an idiot. You’ll be making money I expect. Meanwhile our lives get shittier with no water, more noise.” One of the more measured responses accurately summed up Trump’s outburst as “horrendous messaging.” 

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September 2026 Issue

Behind such unrest in the house of MAGA is a larger truth: Nobody wants a data center anywhere near them. A recent Heatmap News poll drives home how dramatically public opinion has shifted on the issue: A year ago, data centers won 43 percent net support and clocked 42 percent opposition. Now, in that same poll, 75 percent of respondents oppose the construction of data centers near them, and just 15 percent support them—a swing of 61 percent. Sorting through this seismic turnaround, Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect surmises that it’s part of a broader repudiation of the arrogant impunity of the tech-industry power elite: 

The AI rollout has been the ne plus ultra of Silicon Valley arrogance. A handful of billionaires—whose steadily more incomprehensible podcast appearances indicate participation in some truly unhinged group chats, or consumption of heavy-duty chemicals, or membership in literal, no-joke cults, or all three—declaimed that AI was going to revolutionize all human society, take everyone’s job, and/or maybe wipe out the human race. Therefore they needed to spend trillions and trillions of dollars building AI data centers everywhere, as fast as possible. When the tech barons blearily realized that this wasn’t the best sales pitch, and pivoted to ads about how AI had dull business applications, the damage was already done.

All true enough—yet the other, more immediate cause of the data-center revolt has to do with basic principles of communal self-protection: No one wants the austerity represented by water rationing, spikes in electrical bills, and general resource plunder to wipe out the quality of life in the places where you live and work. And this is where the precedent of 19th-century Populism–the real, capital-P article—becomes useful. When you squint a bit at the data-center uprising, its economic message is of a piece with the Populists’ crusade to rein in the brutal takeover of the American countryside by the twinned forces of the railroad and oil industries. The great Populist apostle of reform politics, Henry Demarest Lloyd, laid out the case against the oil and rail monopolies in an 1881 muckraking report for The Atlantic Monthly titled—yes—Story of a Great Monopoly. As he chronicled how railroads controlled farmers’ access to crucial markets—and how, in concert with the new Standard Oil empire, colluded to fix prices and drive up costs for farms already steeped in debt—he described a new first-order threat to the basic conditions of self-government in America. As long as the republic was in the grip of the railroad monopoly, most of its fundamental operations were throttled into oligarchic submission:

It is the railroads that have bred the millionaires who are now buying newspapers, and getting up corners in wheat, corn, and cotton, and are making railroad consolidations that stretch across the continent. By the same tactics that the railroads have used to build up the Standard [Oil Company], they can give other combinations of capitalists the control of the wheat, lumber, cotton, or any other product of the United States. . . . In less than the ordinary span of a life-time, our railroads have brought upon us the worst labor disturbances, the greatest of monopolies, and the most formidable combination of money and brains that ever overshadowed a state. . . . The common people, the nation, must take them in hand. The people can be successful only when they are right. When monopolies succeed, the people fail; when a rich criminal escapes justice, the people are punished; when a legislature is bribed, the people are cheated.

It’s striking to note how fully Lloyd’s indictment of the railroad monopoly maps on to today’s revolt against the data centers. Now, as then, legislatures are the plaything of the monopolists remaking the country into their own image—Republican candidates for Congress desperately want to memory-hole this data point, but the entire GOP majority in the House, minus just five dissenters, voted for a provision in Trump’s signature 2025 spending bill that would have forbidden states and localities from regulating the AI industry or its data-center infrastructure for a decade. That’s very much equivalent to the habit of Gilded Age railroad monarchs essentially purchasing compliant state legislatures to do their bidding. 

Then there are the resource squeezes. Just as today’s AI lords are making water scarce and electricity more expensive, railroads extended preferential rates to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil operations while driving other smaller market players out of business and erecting the resource cartels that Lloyd and other muckrakers tirelessly chronicled.

The data-center uprising also echoes the Populist campaign against monopoly in its cross-partisan appeal. During the first Gilded Age, the major parties were enmeshed in a plutocratic consensus not unlike the one that’s controlled our own politics during the past generation, with apologists for regressive financial policies such as the gold standard and the readily gamed tariff system occupying key leadership positions in both parties. The AI oligarchy has accordingly hard-wired much of the leadership faction across the partisan aisle to do its bidding; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposes a moratorium on data-center construction, just like his counterpart, House Speaker Mike Johnson, does. Establishment Democrats felt like they’d dodged a bullet when Wisconsin’s socialist candidate for governor Francesca Hong lost to former Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley—only to see Crowley’s general-election campaign thrown back on its heels by his support for data centers. Of course, the Populists sought to break the stranglehold of plutocratic governance by founding their own independent party, which was then a more viable strategy for reform politics; it’s an indictment of our duopolistic status quo that neither party, as a principled matter of political economy, can afford to divorce itself from today’s tech oligarchy. 

That, in turn, underlines the key difference between the anti-monopolists of the Gilded Age and the scourges of the tech oligarchy combating the far-reaching zoning putsches behind the planned construction of more than 2,000 new data centers: They had a clear policy objective, which was to advance the public ownership of the railroads and other utilities. “We believe the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads,” the Populists declared in their 1892 Omaha Platform. No political leader today has advanced a similar case for taking over the predatory and resource-hoarding tech monopoly, but ideas along these lines might take hold in a cross-party bid to reclaim the basic conditions of self-determination in our communities. And they might have gained far more serious traction by now if we’d been in the throes of an actual Populist insurgency over the past decade, as opposed to the phony reality-television one that our pundit class ritually deplores.