“'In democratic peoples, where there is no hereditary wealth, everyone works to live, or has worked, or was born of people who worked. The idea of work as a necessary, natural and honest condition of humanity is therefore offered to the human mind on every side."
Thus wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America" about the reverence with which this country's citizens in the 1830s regarded remunerative labor. The great French writer compared aristocratic societies, among whose elite work was regarded as a thing to be done for honor but not money, with the nascent bourgeois society of America, in which gainful employment was an unavoidable part of life. Half a century ago the average college-educated American would have endorsed Tocqueville's remark and marveled that anyone would think otherwise. In the 2020s many Americans evidence a deep confusion about the nature and purpose of work.
The weakening of America's Protestant work ethic, to use a contested but irreplaceable phrase, is a complicated story, but you could trace its beginnings to the 1960s. No one has chronicled that story more incisively than Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. In November Mr. Eberstadt published "America's Human Arithmetic," a collection of essays mainly on the subject of labor. The book includes a 2014 address about Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, that assortment of programs begun in the mid-1960s -- Head Start, Medicaid, expanded food stamps and many others.
Did the "war" bring victory? On the one hand, today's poor live vastly more prosperous lives by any material measure than the poor of the 1960s. Talk of citizens living over or under a "poverty line" is meaningless, Mr. Eberstadt shows, the de facto line having risen so dramatically upward -- a fact that has little to do with government transfer payments and almost everything to do with rapid economic growth in the postwar period.
On the other hand, antipoverty programs have left more or less the same proportion of the citizenry dependent on welfare and disinclined to join the workforce. So private-sector growth has made today's "poor" rich by comparison with their forerunners two generations ago, even as government antipoverty measures have ensured that today's poor, however well off by comparison, remain dependent and resistent to upward mobility. The War on Poverty hasn't only failed; it has weakened virtues its originators took for granted.
Three decades after the War on Poverty began, congressional Republicans passed, and a Democratic president signed, the most sweeping reform yet made to America's welfare state. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 conditioned the most important forms of direct welfare payments on employment or the search for employment. Opponents predicted disaster. New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, formerly a critic of America's welfare state, predicted that his colleagues who voted for the bill would "take this disgrace to their graves." In fact, the reform succeeded. It moved millions off welfare rolls and into the labor market.
The law mainly reformed Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which it renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. But expansions and liberalizations of other safety-net programs in succeeding years have negated the gains made by the 1996 law. Is a similar reform possible in 2026? Not a chance. The culture has radically changed.
In the mid-1990s, politicians and commentators could still speak of America's work ethic without apology. In the 2020s, America's cognoscenti constantly suggest something baneful in the bourgeois idea that gainful toil is virtuous -- movies romanticizing manipulated workers and vilifying rapacious corporate executives; intellectuals contending that the five-day, 40-hour work week abuses wage laborers; academics suggesting terms like "work ethic" are racist; journalists ready to portray every worker-management relationship as exploitative. A steady stream of freshly published books crosses my desk in which the authors insist that the American workplace jades employees and managers alike. Recall also the Covid-era glorification of "quiet quitting" -- in which employees simply stop doing the jobs they were contracted to do -- and the scores of think pieces claiming that Americans' "work-life balance" is less than optimal.
Note the tacit premise that "work" is opposed to "life." Evidence abounds that many Americans no longer consider gainful work a natural and necessary part of life. The sudden explosion of online sports betting bespeaks a nation of young men looking for ways to pocket cash for no work. The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Murphy v. NCAA struck down a federal prohibition from 1992. By the time of that ruling the stigma attaching to sports betting had all but disappeared and widespread legalization seemed destined one way or another.
Pandemic-era measures that kept able-bodied men in their homes, bored and looking for ways to pocket a few bucks, enhanced the attractiveness of wagering on games. Americans bet $5 billion on sports in 2018. In 2024 they bet $150 billion. The sports-betting phenomenon reveals, if nothing else, the loss of any notion that income should bear some relation to a product or service rendered. The bettor produces no product or service for his winnings. Indeed, that is the draw -- money for nothing, or nothing that benefits anyone but the bettor. Such an ethic bothered previous generations. It bothers ours much less.
Ponder also the sudden ubiquity of advertisements for personal-injury law firms that promise to get their clients ample reward for damages. All over the country one encounters them on television, radio and billboards, with phone numbers leading to call centers that weed out weak claims. Have so many people really suffered bodily injury? An unknowing visitor to the U.S. in 2026 might be forgiven for wondering why more Americans aren't hobbling around in leg casts and wearing neck braces. Some personal-injury suits are right and just. Yet any moderately observant person can see that the industry, if that's the right term for it, has tapped into a massive market of Americans no longer ashamed to avoid work and rake in unearned cash.
We've known for years about the slow flight of working-age men from gainful employment. Mr. Eberstadt's "Men Without Work" (2016) documents in painful detail the moral and psychological costs of men leaving the labor force since the mid-1960s. New and frightening is the phenomenon of "disconnection" among the young, both male and female. About 1 in 7 Americans 18 to 24, according to a recent Rand study, are neither working nor looking for work. Many young people support a "universal basic income" -- a government payment to every American, regardless of income or employment status.
In 1996, 30 Democrats in the House and 25 in the Senate voted to reform welfare laws, and a Democratic president signed the bill. Today, approximately zero Democrats exhibit any interest in changes to welfare programs that don't involve spending more on them. Since the death of George Floyd and attendant protests, moreover, the nation's cultural arbiters decided not to question the premises of the Great Society and War on Poverty and instead to double down on welfare-state fundamentalism. If Republicans wish to do anything about America's declining work ethic, they will have to do it alone.
The public knows there's a problem. Stories about the theft of billions of dollars from Medicaid and other programs in Minnesota have revivified the idea that welfare programs dole out money to undeserving recipients and need reform. The fraud in Minnesota, perpetrated mostly by members of the state's Somali population, is stupendous in its scope and cost -- so much so that the center-left press, including the New York Times, felt obliged to cover the story. But similar stories of welfare fraud have emerged in Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, all covered by local media.
Millions of ordinary Americans, moreover, saw the bogus ways in which large parts of the public sector used the 2020-21 pandemic as an excuse not to work. They also see the major disincentives to productivity -- the exploding use of marijuana, thanks to the federal government's refusal to enforce its ban; the ease with which undeserving applicants may receive benefits from programs like Women, Infants and Children, among many others; and the channeling of ambitious and industrious college graduates into jobs that create no useful product or service: academic instructors in arcane subjects, sustainability advisers, diversity coordinators, development and communications managers for activist organizations, and on and on.
The rebuilding of America's work ethic is a politically saleable theme ready for use by any candidate brave enough to talk about a subject requiring a few sentences of nuanced explanation. But most Republicans avoid the subject, or address it, when they must, obnoxiously. Last summer, when GOP lawmakers passed a budget bill that imposed modest work requirements on able-bodied recipients of Medicaid payments, they defended the provision in one of two ways -- either by misleadingly claiming that illegal aliens' use of Medicaid dollars justified the reform, or by referring sardonically to "able-bodied men in their parents' basement playing videogames" or some such phrase. America's work-ethic deficit goes far beyond illegal migrants, who know they risk deportation if they get caught taking benefits, and dudes living with their parents.
It's true that any suggestion of reforming a federal welfare program to encourage its recipients to achieve greater financial independence will invite accusations of heartlessness, cruelty and racism. That's politics. A genuine concern for lives distorted by unreformed welfare programs can make those accusations sound empty.
Two further circumstances complicate a coherent GOP message on work and welfare. First, a small but influential part of the party rejects the conservative insight that public handouts tend to distort incentives to work. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, the most vocal exponent of this viewpoint, last year fulminated at the overwhelming majority of his fellow Republican lawmakers who voted for a modest stiffening of Medicaid eligibility rules. He calls Medicaid "working-class social insurance" and cheers its expansion. Aligned with Mr. Hawley are Vice President JD Vance and an influential coterie of socially right-wing but state-friendly conservatives.
Second, the Trump administration has made its chief policy objective the expulsion of illegal aliens. The president's political advisers show every sign of making that effort, for all its problems in execution, the central Republican message in this year's midterm elections. The great majority of Americans support the effort to deport illegal immigrants who have committed crimes other than crossing the border unlawfully, and probably a majority assents, in the abstract, to the defensibility of deporting all illegal aliens regardless of criminal record.
But in rounding up law-abiding migrant workers, the administration has found itself targeting men looking for work in Home Depot parking lots -- men who want to engage in gainful labor and who, whatever zealous Republicans might say in an election year, don't draw welfare checks. Hispanics -- overwhelmingly the object of zealous immigration enforcement -- consistently outperform all other groups in labor-force participation rates. The administration's highest priority, to put the point bluntly, appeared to be to deport guys who hang drywall, install shingles and generally contribute to economic growth.
None of this need stop GOP officeholders and -seekers from making the case for the Protestant work ethic in 2026 and beyond. Since the pandemic, American society has seemed to turn away from its presuppositional faith in remunerative labor. Our belief in work as, in Tocqueville's words, "a necessary, natural and honest condition of humanity" is no longer a tacit assumption but a disputed viewpoint. Elected leaders can't solve that problem by passing reforms to welfare laws, but they can force the public to consider the subject. That the public will reward them for it isn't certain, but a proud nation generally likes to be reminded of its old virtues.
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Mr. Swaim writes the Journal's Unruly Republic column.” [A]
It is funny to see when both American culture and German culture alarm about sacredness of work for money at the same time when many young programmers and other highly educated office workers are kicked out of their jobs by AI. The idea is: You are not a victim. You are a lazy animal. Be ashamed. Keep quiet. The longer you keep quiet, the more money we will grab before leaving for New Zealand.
The narrative surrounding the "sacredness of work" is facing a significant contradiction in 2026, as high-skill office workers and programmers face displacement, according to data and reports from early 2026. The tension between urging productivity and the reality of AI-driven workforce restructuring has created anxiety, particularly for entry-level workers and recent graduates, who are bearing the brunt of these shifts.
Here is a breakdown of the current landscape based on these points:
1. The "Work is Sacred" Narrative vs. AI Displacement
The Shift: By early 2026, AI has transitioned from a tool that assists developers to autonomous agents capable of completing tasks that previously required human juniors.
The Reality for Programmers: Junior developer roles are vanishing, as AI agents can handle "grunt work" like debugging and documentation faster and cheaper.
White-Collar Impact: While some experts suggest AI-related layoffs are partly "hype" or a correction after COVID-era hiring surges, others report that 37% of companies expect to replace jobs with AI by the end of 2026.
The Psychological Toll: There is a growing sense of "survivor's guilt" and anxiety among professionals as they use AI tools to automate their own jobs, with some reporting "prompt fatigue" and burnout.
2. The Cultural "Shame" Narrative
Targeting the Young: The narrative that younger workers are "lazy" or "entitled" is being used to mask structural economic changes.
Displacement of Entry-Level: Companies are increasingly avoiding hiring recent graduates, citing a lack of experience, despite many of these workers possessing necessary tech skills.
The "Victim" Rhetoric: The narrative that workers are responsible for their own obsolescence, rather than being victims of massive technological displacement, is a major source of frustration among the tech workforce.
3. "Grab Money and Leave" (Wealth Inequality Concerns)
Increasing Anxiety: In the U.S., 35% of Gen X and 33% of millennials feel worse off than their parents, with AI job loss joining soaring housing costs as key factors.
Profit Over People: The trend toward leaner, tech-ready workforces is driven by a desire for cost efficiency, often prioritizing shareholder value over workforce stability.
Inequality: There is growing concern that AI will further concentrate wealth within a few tech companies, widening the gap between those who own the technology and those replaced by it.
4. The 2026 Outlook
Leaner Teams: Companies that once hired 10 developers may now only need 4, who can use AI to do the work of the previous 10.
Re-skilling Focus: The advice being given is to focus on soft skills—adaptability, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence—as technical tasks become increasingly automated.
Survivor Guilt: The workers who remain often feel a sense of betrayal as they see colleagues laid off, creating a "culture of silence" and fear.
While some reports suggest that AI will create more jobs than it destroys, the short-term impact in 2026 is widely seen as disruptive, particularly for the younger, highly educated workforce.
The political backlash is coming anyway, no matter how “lazy” the young are.
A. America Loses Its Will to Work. Swaim, Barton. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Apr 2026: A11.
