The Absorber

What we remember today is also what the next generation will need and not have.

May 25, 2026

The parade started at nine. The VFW post led it. The volunteer fire department came next, then the Legion hall, then four churches in their Sunday best, then the high school band. A man in his eighties carried a folded flag for a brother he lost in 1968.

Somewhere this morning, that parade is happening. In a town in Iowa or Pennsylvania or Indiana. Likely the kind of town the people reading this article left for college and never moved back to.

I live in southern California. There may be a parade in my own town this morning. I have never seen it. Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, was already writing this story twenty-five years ago in his book Bowling Alone. We did not read it as a warning. We read it as a description of someone else.

This is the day to remember the dead. It is also the day to notice that the institutions the surviving generations built (the ones that absorbed the last big labor shock) have been dying for thirty years. Putnam saw it. Most of us did not.

What the Rust Belt actually absorbed

The last big labor shock was offshoring.

In 1994, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, opened the borders for manufacturing to move to Mexico. In 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization and the second wave moved there. Factories closed. Towns hollowed out. Whole industries shifted across borders over a decade.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two economists at Princeton, wrote a book in 2020 called Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. The data they assembled is the slow ledger of what happened in the towns the factories left. Rising mortality among working-class Americans without college degrees. The opioid epidemic. Suicide and overdose deaths. Family breakdown. Declining marriage rates. Falling life expectancy. The full social cost was paid quietly, household by household, over twenty years.

The political articulation of the betrayal arrived in 2016, when Donald Trump won his first election. Twenty years after NAFTA. A twenty-year fuse.

What needs to be said plainly: the Rust Belt did not “absorb” offshoring in any happy sense. It decomposed slowly enough to manage. Decomposition is what the absorber actually did. Not resolution. The cost was carried over time through people who knew the words for how to carry it and lived inside the institutions that gave the words a body. Those people mostly stayed in place. Their kids did not. The Whaling Collapse Came for New Bedford. We Said, “I Am Sorry.” tracked an earlier American precedent: a labor transition that an absorber actually worked for, in a port town whose surrounding institutions outlasted the industry that built them.

Theology and plumbing

The standard explanation for why the Rust Belt did not break the political system is that the people had a “Protestant work ethic” or a “turn the other cheek” theology that absorbed the suffering. That is half right.

The verses are real. From the New King James Version:

“But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” (Matthew 5:39)
“bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you.” (Luke 6:28)

Those verses were spoken from pulpits across the Rust Belt while the plant closures rolled. They were the operating manual for a kind of suffering the people experiencing it had not chosen and could not undo. The verses did not promise the suffering would lift. They told the listener how to carry it.

Doctrine in the head of an isolated person does not produce absorption. It produces an isolated person who knows the words. What was actually there, in those towns, was theology plus plumbing. The vocabulary metabolized through the physical, weekly, in-person social structures that operationalized it. The congregations that still met every week. The extended families that pooled resources when one family’s wage earner lost a job. The VFW posts. The Legion halls. The Knights of Columbus, the Eagles, the Moose, the Elks, the Rotary, the volunteer fire departments, the bowling leagues. The pastor who knew which families were hurting that month. The neighbor who noticed the kid coming home from school to a house where nobody was working.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, published in 2000 and updated in 2020, was the academic that named what was happening to that plumbing. People still bowled, Putnam observed. They just did it alone instead of in leagues. PTA membership down by half from its peak. Civic association membership across the board down twenty-five to fifty percent from the 1960s peaks. Every generation joining at lower rates than the one before. The trajectory was visible by 1980, well-documented by 2000, and not reversed since. In the 2020 update Putnam wrote that the decline of church attendance had not just continued but sharply accelerated, and that what he called “the rise of the nones” (people who claim no religious affiliation at all) was particularly pronounced among the youngest cohort of Americans.

The Rust Belt absorbed offshoring in the final generation when the plumbing was leaking but still intact. The absorber was already collapsing while it was doing its last job. The deaths of despair were the cost. The political reckoning came twenty years late because the cost was being paid slowly, in households the rest of the country was not watching.

The next wave hits a different class

The next wave is not in the factories. It is in the offices.

The credentialed white-collar class: lawyers, accountants, copywriters, designers, paralegals, engineers, marketers, analysts, programmers, junior consultants, mid-level managers. People who have credentials and degrees and are paid to think for a living.

In the past six months that class has started getting the same memo the Youngstown steelworkers got in 1985. Cloudflare laid off the “measurers,” the analysts whose jobs disappeared because the company’s own AI could measure things better. Meta cut eight thousand. Microsoft canceled internal Claude Code licenses, apparently deciding the AI was already cheaper than the engineers using it. Uber burned its 2026 AI productivity budget in four months. Salaries to Servers, published Saturday, walks the layoff cycle in detail.

Here is what is different about the cohort taking the hit this time. They built the system that is now hitting them.

This is the class that wrote the rules of the post-1980 meritocratic order: the SAT, the four-year college, the credentialed career path, the suburban arrival, the 401(k) retirement. They also did something the prior generation did not. They left their hometowns to chase that path. They left the extended family next door, the neighborhood church, the parish school, the local fire department they would otherwise have volunteered with, for an out-of-state college, then a metro area where the credentialed careers were. The credential was supposed to substitute for what they were leaving behind. The career was supposed to give them a new community of professional peers and a paycheck large enough to make the trade good.

They listened to the generation ahead of them say career is more important than family and they believed it. Hook, line, and sinker. What the Rust Belt cohort still had (extended family, neighborhood, parish) was not taken from this cohort by capital flight. It was traded by the cohort itself, at age eighteen, in exchange for the credentialed career. The decision was not dramatic. It was just sending the college applications out of state.

Adjacent thinkers have circled this cohort’s position without quite making the next move. Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019), David Goodhart’s Head, Hand, Heart (2020), and Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites (1995) each named pieces of the asymmetry. Distillation and Compression, an earlier piece in this Substack, ran the generational frame against AI as the new variable. None of those pieces has yet said the thing this one is about to say.

What filled the vacuum

The credentialed white-collar class does not have either leg of the Rust Belt absorber. The doctrine is largely gone. American religious affiliation has fallen from roughly seventy percent of adults at the turn of the century to under fifty percent today, with the steepest drop among the under-forty professional cohort. The plumbing is gone too. The professionals do not live near their parents. Their friendships are mediated by group chats and the occasional dinner. Their civic infrastructure is the office, the gym, the brunch place, the dog park. They have therapy. They have a Peloton. They have a dog.

The dog is real. The absorber is not.

But the vacuum did not stay empty. Categories filled it. Just different ones. And the categories that filled it are the load-bearing part of this argument, because they predict how this cohort will respond when the displacement arrives.

The categories this cohort actually has:

A category for billionaires as adversaries rather than aspirational figures. Post-Occupy Wall Street (2011), post-2008 financial crisis: a settled belief that billionaires and trillionaires are extractive rather than generative. That the zero-percent interest loans of quantitative easing, the asset-price inflation that compounded already-large fortunes, the 2008 bailouts that socialized losses and privatized gains. These inflated the 1%’s holdings as much as anything they personally built. Some of that is true. Quantitative easing did inflate asset prices held overwhelmingly by the already-wealthy. The bailouts did socialize losses. The point is not to dispute the partial truth. The point is to notice that the verdict extends further than the partial truth: for this cohort, no wealth at the top is presumptively legitimate, and the suggestion that a billionaire built anything is met with skepticism by default.

A category for the absence of an upper-middle-class on-ramp. The cohort has been told, persistently, since 2008, that home ownership and marriage and family are out of reach. Many believe it. Marriage rates are down. Home ownership among under-40s is down. Those things are still possible, in fact, but only for the cohort that valued them from the start, and this cohort was never taught to value them. The career-over-family programming had downstream effects.

A category for checks from the government when the system breaks. The COVID stimulus checks of 2020 landed in a cohort that had no other absorber. The experience was formative. The category (when something goes wrong, the check arrives) is now baked in for everyone under forty.

A category for universal basic income as reasonable. The previous generation, the one that built the absorber, would have considered UBI conceptually foreign. This cohort finds it intuitive. The check that supplements wages becomes a check that replaces them; the proposition is already in the air.

A category for healthcare as a human right and the American system as the problem. The cohort is fluent in this vocabulary in a way no earlier generation was.

A category for deep skepticism of American foreign engagement. Post-Iraq 2.0 (the 2003 invasion), post-Afghanistan (the twenty-year war that ended in 2021), and now the simultaneous conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran: the cohort watched the wars on television and concluded they were lies, badly run, or both. They have nearly zero nationalism. Volunteering for military service is probably the last thing they would consider. Memorial Day is, for them, a long weekend more than a remembrance.

These categories are not random. Each one has a formative event behind it: 2008, Occupy, the wars, the COVID checks, the post-2010 rise of the gig economy. The cohort came of age inside those events.

Notice what the categories have in common. They externalize. They expect rescue from outside. They cast the problem as a system someone else built and someone else should fix. None of them is a vocabulary for carrying suffering through. They are vocabularies for naming the perpetrator and demanding the rescue.

The Rust Belt cohort had vocabulary for the first kind. This cohort has vocabulary for the second.

I should say where I sit. I took a different path than the one this article describes. I stayed in my hometown. I chose not to pursue an undergraduate degree and entered ministry through a local-church apprenticeship at nineteen. Seminary came much later, on the back end of a pastoral vocation rather than the front end of a career. The religious leg of the absorber I never lost; the vocation has been my work for twenty-five years. But I pastor people who made the trade. I write for a credentialed-professional readership and build AI products alongside the cohort taking this hit. I watched the wider package go (the trust in American institutions, the patriotic ritual, the assumption that the next generation would inherit something worth inheriting) and I did not, until recently, notice that the absorber was bundled with what was being discarded.

What the displacement looks like, concretely

A reader of mine in his sixties has a daughter in her early twenties, an independent musician living in Nashville. For the past twenty-five years, independent musicians like her have uploaded their work to platforms like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and Spotify, building catalogs and accumulating the texture of their own voice over time. Their songs lived in the platforms’ libraries.

In the past three years, those libraries became the training data for tools like Suno, an AI music generator that produces a finished song in seconds from a few words of prompt.

The mechanism is precise. The labor of the human creator becomes the training corpus. The model outputs compete with the creator. The platform that hosted the original work captures the surplus. The creator is cut out of the loop her work originally generated. Liz Pelly documented this on the Spotify side in her 2025 book Mood Machine: the platform is featuring AI-generated tracks in algorithmically promoted playlists, where the streaming revenue goes to whoever owns the track rather than to the human artists whose work taught the model how to write music.

The RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America (the music industry’s trade group), filed copyright lawsuits against Suno and a similar tool called Udio in June 2024. The lawsuits make the mechanism legible in court language. They do not address the deeper question, which is: what happens when the surplus from a creator’s work moves to a party that paid the creator nothing.

The musician daughter is the canary on the creative side. Music is roughly two to three years ahead of the rest of knowledge work on the displacement curve because creative-output domains are where generative AI got good first.

Software engineers are the canary on the production side, and the irony of their case deserves naming. Engineers built these systems. They were also the first cohort to deploy them inside their own workflows, using AI coding assistants to automate and optimize their own work. The tools were built by the engineers, adopted by the engineers, and the systems then rose to the level where they could begin replacing the engineers who built them. That recursion is already arriving in production. It is not a 2027 forecast. It is the current quarter.

What is happening to the musician and the engineer now is what is going to happen to attorneys, accountants, copywriters, designers, paralegals, marketers, analysts, and mid-level managers in 2027 and 2028. The mechanism will be the same. The training data will be the cohort’s own emails, decks, briefs, and code. The model outputs will compete with them directly. The platforms (including the workplace platforms employees built their careers inside) will capture the surplus.

The class that wrote the rules

The Rust Belt’s betrayal was external. Capital moved away. There was a villain at geographic scale that the laid-off welder in Youngstown could point at. “China took our jobs” is a sentence that takes ten seconds to teach a child. The cohort that absorbed that wave had a tangible adversary, and twenty years of slow decomposition gave them time to build the political coalition that named the adversary out loud in 2016.

This cohort’s betrayal is internal. They did not just consent to the meritocratic system that is now eating them. They built it. They wrote the rules. They trained their children for it. When the system implodes for them, the villain is the system itself, and the system is themselves.

There is no China to point at this time. Nobody moved the offices to Mumbai. The work is being absorbed by software that the cohort itself trained, paid for, and excitedly demonstrated to their managers. There is no geographic adversary, only a data center in Quincy or Council Bluffs or northern Virginia running models trained on the cohort’s own output. The displacement does not move to another country. It moves to another building. Call that datacentering.

Here is the sharper prediction. The Rust Belt cohort took twenty years to bring its grievance to political surface because the cost was being paid through structures that distributed it. Slowly. Privately. One household at a time. This cohort has neither the absorber nor the patience the absorber required. The categories already in place (anti-1%, pro-UBI, government-as-rescuer, anti-American-system, anti-foreign-engagement) mean the political response to displacement is pre-loaded. The vocabulary is in the cohort’s mouth before the layoff letter is in their hand.

The compression is not twenty years to roughly five. The compression is closer to zero. The political demand will arrive in the same news cycle as the layoff announcement. The cohort will not absorb anything. The cohort will demand the check.

The Rust Belt cohort voted for a candidate who promised to bring the jobs back. The white-collar cohort will vote for the candidate who promises the check that maintains the lifestyle the jobs underwrote. Different demand. Different politics. Depending on whose check it is, a different political coalition.

The Memorial Day frame arrives here, quietly. The men in this morning’s parade came home from the wars they had been asked to fight and built the institutions that absorbed the next wave of displacement for their children and grandchildren. The current credentialed class has been busy dismantling and not rebuilding those institutions for fifty years. They would not march in the parade if it existed near them. Many would be more likely to protest it than march in it. They would not have built the absorber the parade memorializes even if they had been asked. The next wave hits a cohort that does not have a parade, does not want a parade, and does not have anything in the parade’s place.

What’s next

This is not a complaint about secularization. It is not a brief for the Knights of Columbus. The civic clubs of the 1950s are not coming back at scale. Sunday morning attendance is not a labor-policy plan. Volunteer fire departments do not staff themselves. The cohort’s rejection of the civic package its parents built had reasons (Iraq, 2008, the abuse scandals, the culture-war losses, the actual hypocrisies of the institutions being rejected), and many of those reasons were good. The absorber going with the package was the unintended consequence.

The question is what will be there for the credentialed white-collar professionals who are about to take the next shock. The therapy industry is not the answer. The Peloton subscription is not the answer. The dog is real, but the dog is not the answer.

The political vocabulary the cohort did keep (UBI receptivity, government-as-rescuer, healthcare-as-human-right, the check that arrives when the system breaks) predicts what the cohort will demand. The third article in this series, Wednesday, asks whether that vocabulary can substitute for what was discarded. Whether a check is an absorber.

Pope Leo XIV released his first major social-doctrine encyclical today, Magnifica Humanitas, a document that names the dignity of work, the problem of unemployment, an economy that values dignity, and what he calls “the social conditions for hope” for families and young people. Article 3 will draw on that vocabulary.

On a day for memory, today’s question is simpler. What did the surviving generations build when they came home? What is being built in our cohort’s place? The honest answer, today, is not enough. That is what the next four years are about.

Sources

This article was developed using AI writing tools I built to work with my voice, research, and editorial framework. The ideas, arguments, and theological positions are mine. The pipeline that helps me draft, evaluate, and refine them is something I created as part of my work at Nomion AI. I believe in building with AI and being honest about it. If you want to know more about that process, ask me.

Miles DeBenedictis

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