‘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.