Corporate America spent thirty years hollowing out wages, then paid Jason Riley to blame the hollowed-out worker for not wanting the hollowed-out job. The Wall Street Journal opinion columnist’s June 3 piece, “American Idle: The Work Ethic Goes Out of Style,” is a blame-the-victim operation run on behalf of the donor class, deploying six distinct propaganda techniques across its 800 words—because the screws were standardized in the archives we worked in, and they haven’t changed. The piece walks the reader through a rigged diagnostic from opening anecdote to threat-inflation closer; what follows is the walk-through as it was built.
Maybe you’ve seen the old video clip on social media. It’s the one in which comedian Chris Rock explains how to tell good from bad neighborhoods based simply on who isn’t working in the middle of the day… “If you’re in any neighborhood in America at 12:15 in the afternoon on a Wednesday and you see women with sweatpants on, coming out the gym, pushing babies, riding bikes,” Mr. Rock explains, “chances are, you’re in a nice neighborhood. There’s probably a Whole Foods nearby.” But if “you see men in sweatpants smoking cigarettes, hanging with their boys, lifting weights in the yard, riding children’s bicycles as their actual transportation, then you are in danger.”
Mr. Rock’s funny and insightful bit came to mind as I read last month’s jobs report, which showed that the share of American men in the labor force has dipped to record lows. According to the Department of Labor, 1 in 3 men were neither working nor looking for a job in April. Among males 20 and older, the 66% labor-force participation rate is down from 73% in 2006. Mr. Rock was highlighting the correlation between unemployment and crime, but public safety isn’t the only concern raised by a large population of idle young males.
The opening is the four-audience trick executed in a single paragraph—the WSJ editorial page’s signature move. The wealthy reader gets reassurance that nice neighborhoods are safe (Whole Foods is nearby), the populist base gets grievance ratification (the men on children’s bicycles are a threat), the technocrat gets the BLS statistic, and the political class gets the frame: the problem is not collapsing wages but lazy men. All four audiences are addressed before the reader hits the nut graf. Then the piece layers on the hasty generalization (Bad-Faith Catalog: hasty_generalization), treating a comedian’s observational bit as a peer-reviewed labor-market diagnostic. This is the long con operators used to run in cable: put the fear of the Other in the room first, then supply the policy. The policy is the point. The fear is the lubricant.
The premature absence of millions of able-bodied men from our workforce, combined with the continuing retirement of the Baby Boomers and significant reductions in immigration, bodes ill for the country. A life without gainful employment has become a viable alternative for an increasing number of American males. Covid job disruptions didn’t help, but the problem of men in their prime working years (25 to 54) exiting the job market long predates the pandemic.
Here the frame-engineered relabeling kicks in at full speed. “Able-bodied men”—the term is designed to conjure the image of the shirker, the guy who could work but won’t. “Viable alternative”—as if dropping out of a labor market that has spent four decades shedding stable, well-compensated employment for men without college degrees is a lifestyle choice, like switching to oat milk. The relabeling is the whole operation: structural unemployment becomes “idleness,” and idleness becomes a moral failing. The reader is never asked to consider what the jobs these men are supposedly spurning actually pay, or whether they exist at all in the communities where the idleness is concentrated.
The Bandura mechanism is moral justification: the suffering of the jobless is reframed as a threat to the country, so the cruelty that follows—cutting benefits, tightening eligibility, stigmatizing the poor—becomes a defense of the nation. This is the austerity-thrift archetype (WSJ §4.2) running on all cylinders. The column ignores the physical wreckage of the work it pretends is available: the backs blown out in warehouses, the knee replacements at forty, the four herniated discs the company doctor called “pre-existing.” To call the withdrawal from that labor market “unwillingness” is to blame the passenger for the crash while the driver is still on the phone.
In his book, “Men Without Work,” demographer Nicholas Eberstadt reported that the work rate for men 20 and older fell by more than 13 percentage points between 1965 and 2015. During that half-century, he added, “the fraction of men without jobs of any sort in the broad twenty-to-sixty-four group went from 10 percent of the total to almost 22 percent.” And “the percentage of wholly jobless prime-age men shot from 6 percent to nearly 16 percent.”
The long-term rise in male joblessness doesn’t stem from an inability to find employment. It results instead from an unwillingness to search for work. And while labor-force participation rates vary by race and ethnicity, factors other than hiring discrimination seem to be playing a larger role in the disparities. “The legacy of prejudice might seem to explain why prime-age male work rates and workforce participation rates are lower for blacks than whites today. But they cannot explain why work rates and LFPRs for white men today are decidedly lower than they were for black men in 1965,” Mr. Eberstadt wrote. “Nor can they explain why labor participation rates of married black men twenty-five-to-fifty-four are higher than for never-married white men in the same age group.”
This is the “study shows” ledger—WSJ Appendix A.5—with Eberstadt as the credentialed citation. The piece treats Eberstadt’s data as if it settles the question, and the reader is not told that the claim that joblessness represents “unwillingness” rather than “inability” is methodologically contested. The racial comparison is a statistical shell game dressed as a moral hierarchy. Citing married Black men’s participation rates against never-married white men’s sidesteps the structural reality that marriage itself is a strong labor-attachment variable, independent of race. The defensible claim is that marriage correlates with employment; the controversial claim, which the piece advances without owning it, is that the racial employment gap is a problem of culture, not structure. The operation is a motte-and-bailey, and the bailey is that discrimination is a spent artifact because some married Black men are working while some unmarried white men are not.
Some blame technological advancements and deindustrialization for the increase in male idleness, but those barriers are hardly insurmountable. Like married men who are trying to support their families, foreign-born males who come to the U.S. in search of work also tend to have higher work rates, notwithstanding globalization and other macroeconomic trends. Neither married men nor immigrants are stealing these jobs. Rather, they are seizing employment opportunities that others spurn.
The more likely culprit is a social safety net full of generous government benefits that allow men who won’t work to subsist. Welfare and disability programs at the state and federal level are well-funded by the political left, are easily gamed by design, and have become a significant source of income for men with no job and no interest in finding one. Because these men often have no problem mooching off the women who take them in, they’re able to live on welfare payments sent to others in the same household.
The frame-engineered relabeling reaches its peak here. “Generous government benefits”—the term is a donor-class euphemism for the meager, temporary, heavily conditioned assistance the actual poor receive. The welfare system Riley describes—easily gamed, a significant source of income—is a fantasy. The real welfare state in America is the mortgage-interest deduction, the carried-interest loophole, the stepped-up basis at death, and the preferential tax treatment of capital gains. Those benefits cost the Treasury roughly $30 billion annually in mortgage-interest deductions alone, with another $40-plus billion from stepped-up basis and a few billion more from the carried-interest loophole. Those are the benefits that allow the donor class to subsist without work. But Riley’s piece does not mention them.
The “mooching off the women” line is a purity violation frame designed to activate disgust at the moral turpitude of the idle. The technique is dehumanization-by-euphemism: the men are not struggling; they are mooching. The women are not partners; they are hosts. This is the “don’t say poor people, say moochers” memo we wrote in the cable years. The term “generous” is the key—it primes the reader to think of unearned abundance, not subsistence-level payments. The actual effect of cutting benefits—increased homelessness, hunger, and death—is erased by the framing. The whole passage is a permission structure for cruelty: the reader is being told that cutting these men off is not only economically sound but morally righteous.
Democrats in Washington often look to Europe as a social-welfare model for the U.S. A recent Journal editorial on Britain’s workforce woes ought to give them pause. According to a new report from former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn, nearly a million Brits under 25 aren’t employed, in school or in job training. “Nearly half of Britain’s idle youth now claim to have a work-limiting disability,” the Journal noted. And around “seven in 10 youth who claimed a disability benefit are still on it a decade later.” Europe’s large safety net isn’t a model for America. It’s a cautionary tale.
The closing is the threat-inflation closer—WSJ Appendix A.13. The piece ends with the specter of a million idle British youth, presented as a warning but in fact an artifact of the same austerity policies Riley’s own coalition endorses. The Milburn report was commissioned by a Labour government, but its findings are the result of a decade and a half of Tory welfare cuts, not a large safety net. Riley’s version of Britain is the inverted image of the real Britain, where disability claims have risen because the jobs have been gutted and the safety net has been shredded, not because it is too generous. The technique is the deficit double standard applied to an entire country: the WSJ page’s deficit hawkery is mobilized against welfare spending, while the tax cuts that created the deficits are never mentioned. The column doesn’t need accuracy here; it needs a scare. The cautionary tale is a mirror: the real caution is that the donor class’s policies produce the idleness they then blame on the idle.
So here is what “American Idle” actually does, taken together. Riley is not describing a crisis of work ethic. He is describing the crisis his own coalition manufactured and then blaming the victims for the result. The labor market that has shed millions of stable jobs for men without college degrees was built by the donor class—by the tax policies, the trade agreements, the deregulation, and the union-busting that the Wall Street Journal editorial page has advocated for decades. The piece is a laundering operation: it takes the structural violence of wage suppression and job destruction and converts it into a moral panic about idleness, so that the reader who benefits from the wage suppression can feel righteous about the suffering it causes. The real idle men in this story are the ones who live off dividends, not wages. The real moochers are the ones who collect the carried-interest tax break and the stepped-up basis. The real “generous government benefits” are the ones that flow to the donor class, not the ones that keep a single mother’s children fed. This is theft dressed up as sociology, and it lands because the audience is told it’s a moral lecture when it’s actually a receipt for the extraction they just paid for. The mark is the reader who believes the problem is the guy on the children’s bicycle, not the guy who owns the factory that closed.
— Phukher Tarlson