Jess Bidgood and Catie Edmondson, reporting for The New York Times:

A new political era opened in Washington on Wednesday, as Democrats vowed to use their sweeping majority to check President Trump’s power, while prominent Republicans blamed their midterm wipeout on his agenda and party leadership.

Democrats were on track to secure at least a 50-seat majority in the House and solid control of the Senate after notching seismic victories around the country, in deep red House districts and long-Republican Senate seats.

Democrats won Senate and gubernatorial races in Texas, Kansas, and Iowa, along with Senate races in South Carolina, Michigan, Alaska, Georgia, and North Carolina. The results are truly seismic and historic.

There are a lot of angles to take with Tuesday’s election results. I choose the “Big Tech” one. Flocks of Americans turned to the polls to air their grievances with data centers, artificial intelligence automation, and the callous greed and indifference of technology leaders from Silicon Valley destined to put an end to the American way of life. Go to a good school, work a good job, buy what you want, and contribute to society — the Silicon Valley establishment campaigned against all four facets of the entrepreneurial and enterprising American spirit. Senator-elect James Talarico, Democrat of Texas, I’d say won purely by hammering Elon Musk on his hundreds of millions of dollars donated to Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom Talarico defeated. Musk’s “own personal senator,” he said of Paxton.

And yet, it’s hard to think the Valley will get the point. At 8:40 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, posted the following on his personal X account:

People should always be in control of the future.

OpenAI is against the notion that it would be acceptable for people to be relegated to a role of doing things that “AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans”.

People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.

The undertone of fear and desperation in this statement couldn’t be more palpable. For four long years, Altman and his cavalry of antisocial venture capitalists and opportunists have made it abundantly clear that they do not see a need for the middle class in American society. For four long years, Altman’s own company has said AI progress should not be constrained, lest America fall behind China in the AI race. For four long years, Altman’s most ardent supporters — themselves financially invested in unstable AI companies — have derided those who believe AI progress should be constrained by calling them third-worlders, troglodytes, and Luddites. For four years, Americans have had to endure constant headlines such as “Sam Altman says, ‘The world needs to accept that bad things will happen for AI to move forward.’”

On Tuesday, Americans from red and blue states — in addition to voicing their other gripes — cudgeled an elite hell-bent on cementing an impenetrable wall between the middle class and the reapers of capitalism. Those elites started by explaining how AI could help people do their jobs more easily so they could spend more time doing things they liked. Then they told them that maybe their jobs were becoming too trivial and that people don’t deserve to be paid as well for easy jobs. Then they told them that they shouldn’t study to get a better job like a software engineer, mathematician, or physician, because those harder jobs were actually the ones that ought to be automated. Then they said that none of this is an issue because money won’t be an issue once superintelligence arrives. (Also, it’s called superintelligence now. The president said so.) Then they said the people shouldn’t own anything because that would be an inefficient allocation of resources. That with their newfound free time, they shouldn’t buy new computers or play video games or do anything that gives them any satisfaction at all.

Silicon Valley spent four years telling these poor people that whatever they study in university will be automated away by the time they make it to their third year. That they’ll always be unemployed because machines can do their jobs better than they could ever dream. They leered at them and mocked them for being the “permanent underclass.” They cluttered the internet with AI slop designed to sow discord and pit Americans against each other. They bought up the CBSes and CNNs of the world to do the Party’s bidding and tell the people to reject the evidence of their own eyes and ears. They set up their own podcasts to speak for hours about how they were “post-economic” while everyone else just wasn’t working hard enough.

On Tuesday, the permanent underclass talked back. And no number of words can describe how loudly.