The Hippie Dog Whistle Work Ethic Silent-Majority Counter-Offensive
The Hippie Dog Whistle Work Ethic Silent-Majority Counter-Offensive
Following up on my last post, I was searching for coverage of Ronald Reagan’s infamous “strapping young buck” comment from 1976 and found this wonderful commentary by Ian Haney López on Bill Moyers’s show.
In his book, Dog Whistle Politics, López mentions the “work ethic” angle several times.
The narratives promoted alike by the ethnic turn and racial-demagogues—a lack of work ethic, a preference for welfare, a propensity toward crime, or their opposites— reinvigorated racial stereotypes, giving them renewed life in explaining why minorities lagged behind whites…. they became the staples of political discourse, repeated ad nauseam by politicians, think tanks, and media.
…
In accord with the stories spun by dog whistle politicians, many whites have come to believe that they prosper because they possess the values, orientations, and work ethic needed by the self-making individual in a capitalist society. In contrast, they have come to suppose that nonwhites, lacking these attributes, slip to the bottom, handicapped by their inferior cultures and pushed down by the market’s invisible hand, where they remain, beyond the responsibility, or even ability, of government to help.
…
Many older whites nostalgically pine for the days when a solid work ethic meant a good job, a decent home, a new car every few years, an affordable college education for the kids, and a nice vacation by the lake or seashore every August.
Dog whistle politics (as opposed to overt racist rhetoric) got its start with George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign. Wallace addressed his speeches to the proverbial hard-working, tax-paying, church-going, law-abiding, gun-toting patriotic citizen:
You people work hard, you save your money, you teach your children to respect the law. Then when someone goes out and burns down half a city and murders someone, pseudo-intellectuals explain it away by saying the killer didn’t get any watermelon to eat when he was ten years old.
As far as I can determine, though, the phrase “work ethic” never crossed George Wallace’s lips during his 1968 campaign. If it happened, it wasn’t reported. If it was reported, it wasn’t archived anywhere I could find it. It would be surprising if Wallace did use the phrase in 1968. It wasn’t a huge vernacular term.
Understandably, perhaps, some readers are ignoring the specificity of my argument. It is not about Weber’s theory or Luther’s or Calvin’s doctrine of calling or predestination. It is about the usage, particularly the vernacular usage of the term, “work ethic” as a synonym and/or substitute for Weber’s “Protestant ethic.” Unless preceded by the modifier “Protestant” or “Puritan,” the work ethic is explicitly not Weber’s theory. Weber was seeking specifically to differentiate between the beliefs and behaviors of Protestants and Catholics.
In his 1971 appeal to the presumably traditional American work ethic, Nixon was seeking to appeal especially to Italian, Polish, Irish, etc. “ethnics” who were exactly the opposite of the people Weber was talking about. As Nixon said, “Keep religion out of it.” Well, if you “keep religion out” of the Protestant ethic, it no longer has anything to do with Weber’s theory. The Protestant ethic and the work ethic are not synonyms.
Nixon was not the first to put the words “work” and “ethic” together in a single phrase without the religious modifier. But before Labor Day, 1971 the usage was sparse. Usage was sparse enough to permit examination of each time the phrase was used in a journal or newspaper.
There is one instance that stands out. In a Nation article published in April, 1968, Roszak took “good liberal” Hans Tuch to task for invoking “the Protestant work ethic to give the hippies a fatherly tongue-lashing…” Note the residual Protestant modifier. Tuch, in turn, had cited (disparagingly) a Time magazine essay from July 30, 1967 in which the author had mused:
What offends, perplexes and yet also beguiles the straight sector is hippie-dom’s total disregard for approbation or disapproval. “Do your own thing,” they say, and never mind what anyone else may think or do. Yet this and many hippie attitudes represent only a slight and rather engaging distortion of the Protestant Ethic that they purport to reject.
In a March 11, 1969 memorandum to President Nixon, Daniel Moynihan lamented the “emotional strain for people who may still share a Southern Protestant outlook about the work ethic.” The context for this remark was survey research showing a very high concurrence among welfare recipients toward the work ethic. Note that three words intervene between Protestant and work ethic. “Keep religion out of it.”
Notice that there are two distinct threads that are being woven into a narrative. One is the disdain for, critique of, or “slight and rather engaging distortion” of the Protestant (work) Ethic. The other is a large number of destitute people who depend on welfare but who subscribe to the (Protestant) work ethic.
Nixon: “We see some members of disadvantaged groups being told to take the welfare road rather than the road of hard work, self-reliance, and self-respect.”
Hard work, work hard. hard-working… What’s ethic got to do with it? Ethics have to do with morality. Ethical people are good, unethical people are bad. For Weber, Protestants worked hard because of their ethics. For the audiences conjured by Wallace and Nixon, was it that people were good because they worked hard? No. The point was that people they felt hostile toward (hippies, Blacks, protesters, intellectuals) deserved to be punished because they were bad people attacking morality.
Nixon: “Recently we have seen that work ethic come under attack.”
A snippet from an essay I am trying to write — don’t know if I’ll drop it here because I lose all the paragraphs:
. . . [snip]
Martin Luther King and Lyndon Baines Johnson and television put American Apartheid back front and center and dealt it the best body blows that federal civil rights legislation could deal.
. . .
What went wrong? Federal labor legislation for establishing labor unions became toothless. Twenty years ago I described the American labor market to my late, more articulate brother John – he came back with: “Martin Luther King got his people on the up escalator just in time for it to start going down for everyone.” We were not even talking about race (I was doing all the talking).
The only way back that I have ever seen [you know what always comes next]:
Normal
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The New York legislature assists the Democratic Party suicide. I would have given anybody a million to one that this could never happen. I’m still not sure I didn’t miss something or that this is not a delayed April Fool’s joke.
. . .
For some reason the embedded link in the picture would only open in a “new private window” for me.
. . .
$2.1 Billion for Undocumented Workers Signals New York’s Progressive Shift
I understand what the conservatives did, but I still do not understand what we did to give them such an easy chip shot. For the duration of the single parent eligibility requirement the AFDC program was directly harming family structure. The worst sin however was the lack of any reasonable program to support working families with childcare. It is one thing to feed the poor, but it is another thing to structure programs to insure they remain poor. Conservatives just fired at us wildly because we had made ourselves a target that they could not miss.
Sammich
I have pretty much given up hope that people can ever understand each other. We each have about a ton of related ideas to every ounce of new idea that can be presented to us at any one time. I’m glad you came back and told us a little more about what you were trying to say the last time you published on this. I think I understand you a little more, but still find my responses deeply shaped by what I thought previously. Nevertheless I hope you keep trying.
I don’t think “work ethic” has anything to do with “morality” in the sense presented above.. or “ethics.” It’s a matter of survival, and yes the behavior necessary for survival is presented as a matter of morality from parents to children, or political leaders of one stripe or another, or community to itself.
But when “work” is no longer so necessary to survival, and is offered on onerous terms, yelling at people about the morality of work will not inspire them, though it is likely to create a “moral” anger, on the part of those working, against those who can’t find work.. or work that could lift them out of poverty, as opposed to just increasing the wealth of those yelling about morality. I think you made that a little clearer today.
The hippie ethic, aside from the natural preference for pleasure, provided some avenue of release from the stress and guilt created by well-meaning parents trying to enforce the morality of work when there was no work to be had… meaningful work, not in the sense of “self fulfillment” but just “useful.”
@Coberly,
Spot on and much thanks.
One exception I have though is that there is a great deal of useful work to be done that one day may even be seen as necessary, but for now is swallowed up in the tragedy of the commons because neither industry nor government wants to pay for it, including all that environmental wasteland cleanup stuff as well as improvement to our education system structure that moves it past establishment indoctrination. What wonders AI teachers aides could have accomplished during this pandemic.
Ron
thanks. i don’t see your exception as an exception to what i was trying to say. “give us useful work, and you won’t have to yell at us about work ethic. we will work with joy in our hearts.”
further note on work ethic. yell at a teen ager to mop the floor when he wants to go out with his friends and he will sulk.
but give a three year old a mop so he can help mommy and he will still be eagerly helping mommy when he is thirteen, and arranging his own time so he can do that and still get out with his friends.
not a good idea to try to “teach” the three year old how to do a better job of mopping.
Mea culpa –
My reactions are always informed by my childhood experience raised by two working parents, an illiterate father and a mom that only finished the 8th grade. Dad did highway maintenance and mom cared for a couple kids in our home as well as sometimes being a school crossing guard after leaving evening shift retail work. She also canned and froze stuff from the garden and game and fish.
I observed first hand growing up the attitude that educated elites had towards hard working poor people. That experience fueled my rejection of mainstream education and my appetite as a multidiscipline autodidact. My favorite teachers were Desmond Morris and Frederick Perls, but I also learned a lot from Outline of History by HG Wells. In recent years I discovered that much of what I came to believe as true could be attributed to JM Keynes, a recent favorite of mine.
ron
no culpa.
you had great parents.
Coberly,
Thanks. My parents seemed great to me. But it is my fault that I see the work ethic as something tangible, real, and useful, while I see morality as the great hoax. Who holds to their moral code if profit, sex, or their own life is at stake? So, in a back handed way, then I can agree with Sandy. The work ethic is immoral, because the work ethic is objective and independent of changing situations :<)
It might be useful to understand the rhetorical purpose of successful political campaigns. To get votes, the politician does not attempt to change hearts and minds, but rather identify with the majority of hearts and minds. People will not follow a leader wherever that leader goes, but people will accept a leader that jumps to the front of their line pretending that they were always there to begin with. Becoming a leader is about following from the front of the line and taking the credit for the direction in which that line moves.
Ron
I think your experience of the way people use the words is very similar to mine, but sometimes it is important to try not to get hung up in the words. Sometimes people have had different experiences and mean different things, and sometimes they are just trying to point out what they think might be a deeper meaning.
i agree with you about “leaders”…at least up to a point. Roosevelt led people to a place they had no idea existed. So, I think, did the Founders and Framers. So, probably, did Napoleon.
So, actually, did Jesus. But most people don’t know it yet. And a lot of backsliding going on.
Morality is some idea that some things are “wrong”. It doesn’t always stop us from doing what we “want” to do. But sometimes it helps us think long enough to realize there might be consequences that will make what we want to do have been a bad idea. And of course there are people who run around hyping this morality thing to cause neurosis if not obedience.. to them. Which is exactly what Jesus was trying to tell them. “Don’t get neurotic about it. And don’t beat yourself up, or others, over it.
“work ethic” at least partakes of some of the same characteristics, and abuses. But I think you and I know it’s just a state of mind that reminds us that work makes eat. and shelter from the storm. we don’t need to think about it as an “ethic” it just IS. when it becomes a whip or an excuse to hate people who can’t find a job… then it’s just another leaven of the Pharisees.
meanwhile i gotta get to work.
Coberly,
Yes sir. Likewise, my work ethic is beckoning me.
Coberly,
Sorry, but I had one more thought while sitting on the throne.
Empathy has generally been a more effective guide to behavior than morality. Moreover, the idea of morality is better associated via empathy, which happens early in childhood, than religious or other social consequences. One must believe in an omniscient God throughout life to fear breaking a moral code throughout life. If one gets away with something once then they will try again. After a while both God and morality fail. OTOH, if morality is grounded in empathy, then it will endure. However, the golden rule must be internalized, not just recited to hold true.
Empathy in its natural state is learned quite early, but changes in child rearing have reduced its incidence of reinforcement in early childhood development. Empathy was first learned by children until recent history during nursing by their moms. Babies start getting teeth long before weaning. So, when baby hurts their mom during nursing, then the nipple is withdrawn. Food trains dogs, cats, and small children more effectively than scolding or any other punishment. As children begin to play with other children, then they learn that hurting their playmates is disruptive to play. Withholding play is second only to withholding food as a reinforcing stimulus.
Morality requires learning language first. It is an abstraction of reality, not reality in itself. Words are weaker than deeds or direct physical stimulus. Words are never more than a scaffolding around the truth. Learning morality is like an academic atheist discussing religion and the work ethic. Morality is generally not drawn from actual experience. Morality is merely an abstraction made of paper.
Empathy is real, at least if it is really empathy learned from experience rather than just something professed as a social conformity.
Ron
I agree with you. I hope you don’t think I have been arguing for morality, or for religion. I have been trying to argue that Jesus preached against those things. The people who have called themselves Christian have alternated between “morality” (words. threats of punishment. and punishment itself) and empathy (love your neighbor as yourself) . that’s becuause they are people. and it’s hard to be empathetic when you think someone is going to hurt you.