Work is Warping Politics

Americans rarely touch their government directly. They engage with the American system at work.

The modern world of work is a great black hole warping politics. Few people realize this, because you can’t see a black hole directly with your eyes—they don’t give off light. You only know a black hole’s there because they warp and distort everything around them, reshaping the landscape of reality.

That’s what the modern American regime of work is doing to America’s political life.

Americans spend very little time directly dealing with government. They rarely interact with the police or the courts. Abstractions like economic growth figures, or specific government policies, only touch their daily lives in tangents. The true government for most Americans isn’t the people parading around Congressional hearings, but their manager, their corporate policies, and the bureaucracy at HR. The place they interact with America as a system is at work.

When work is going well, their lives are going well, and therefore America is doing well. When work becomes insecure, frustrating, or abusive, they think the system has failed them, which means America has failed them. Once you realize this, you realize a lot of political anger focused on “national politics”—immigration, DEI, “late-stage capitalism,” “misinformation” and social media, and “the oligarchs,” to name a few—is fundamentally grounded not in national politics, but people’s relationship with work. It’s a problem tearing at America—and just wait until the earthquake of AI.

THE PROBLEM WITH TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WORK

For most people, work has always sort of sucked. Nobody dreams of spending their life banging away at an office email job. No one’s childhood fantasy was toiling in a fulfillment center. No one wants a manager bossing them around and telling them what to do. Unless you’re the rare entrepreneur building a company, creative chasing a dream, or rare sort who truly lives for grinding, work is something you do to support your family and lifestyle because you must.

Even when it’s a toil, however, work can be an experience we feel good about—an honorable necessity and source of pride. It can also be a hell that drains us, exploits us, slights us, and disrespects us. Money is only part of this—of course, if you pay people enough, they put up with an awful lot—but it’s hardly all of it. It’s about how our experience working contributes to dignity, identity, hope for our future, love for our families, sense of duty, and pride.

Work has changed a lot over over the last few decades. We’re now as far away from the mid-century suburbia of Mad Men in grey flannel suits that people think about as “work” as the long-gone world of family farms and little corner stores. These changes have touched not just blue-collar factory jobs, but white-collar office work as well. They affect people’s stability, control, upward mobility, and personal respect.

Corporations still expect loyalty from workers, but now give little loyalty in return. Remember when companies kept loyal employees on through downturns, or when they got old, or became expensive? Remember the popular twentieth-century cliché of retiring after forty years and getting a gold watch? Today’s workers are disposable, asked to pitch in and work weekends to pay dues, when we all know at the first weak quarter they’ll be tossed aside. They’ll come in one day to be fired alongside hundreds during a tone-deaf Zoom call, and then humiliatingly escorted out of the building by security after years of missed birthdays, weekend crunches, and loyal service.

Corporations invest as little as possible in workers, providing more limited career paths and upward mobility. The common advice is to move companies every few years if ever you hope to get promoted or receive a raise. Few companies reward good workers, train them, groom them for promotion, or promote them from within. If you want to move up, you must move on to someplace that absolutely must pay what you’re worth to secure an essential hire. When you think about it, that’s dysfunctional and insane.

Not that job searching is easy. In our modern world, with hiring formulas and HR screens, corporate CEOs resort to sending masked versions of ideal resumes through their own HR process to find they’re screening out perfect candidates because the people and algorithms screening neither understand the resumes nor the jobs. Companies advertise jobs that aren’t available. They fail to respond to applicants. They disrespectfully ghost, refusing to take the few minutes necessary to notify people who interviewed they’re no longer in consideration. The days of giving people an opportunity and a chance have given way to treating them like commodities

Adding to the disrespect, corporations have erected vast HR bureaucracies to micromanage workers with opaque and inconsistent rules, purportedly to help employees, but in reality to protect the company. These bureaucracies don’t just govern work but reach into personal lives and private speech—essentially becoming unaccountable private governments supervising people’s lives without transparency, input, or control. HR bureaucrats no one elected have more power over people’s private lives than any government agency.

Presiding over this system are imperial CEOs and C-suites—not founders or owners who took risks to create enterprises, but corporate politicians who climbed the greasy ladder to big jobs and used them to pay themselves outlandish packages and grant themselves ownership stakes that turn them into billionaires. America’s old divide was between blue and white collar workers. Today’s is between the few who captured the corporate heights, and everybody else. This is further complicated by the increased role of finance over those who actually understand the company’s function, creating common debacles like at Boeing.

Then we cloak it all in the phony, transparent, BS of modern public relations culture, issuing proclamations that sound like they’re crafted by liars trying to gaslight in the spirit of “your call is very important to us.” Of course Americans on both left and right feel disrespected—less like democratic citizens than serfs.

According to those still trapped in economic theory, none of this should be. When conditions become intolerable, people should be able to leave to another job, putting pressure on bad actors to improve. In reality, today’s markets are consolidated, often into a few international behemoths, and people have to work. Industries are small towns in which everyone shuffles between the same companies with the same cultures and rules. There are no longer local governments, community pressure, or unions pushing back (and the twentieth-century union, created for mass-production industrial jobs, is long outdated).

Workers are catching on. Increasingly, they’re unwilling to climb a ladder that no longer exists. Young people in Gen Z no longer want to work on weekends, pitch in for emergencies, or otherwise “pay dues” they know will never be repaid. People complain about “quiet quitting,” and “nobody wants to work,” while Gen Z proudly counsels to “act your wage”—meaning don’t give an ounce more than you get back. None of this is good. Many Americans no longer believe working hard is the path to the good life they were promised. They don’t believe their future will be better than their past. They don’t believe the people at the top will let them rise. They don’t see America as a land of opportunity, but one of trapped workers fated to always produce for someone else. It’s no surprise there’s nostalgia for the mid-twentieth-century world with one parent in an ordinary 9-5 job finding stability and dignity to support a family over decades. They could buy a home and new car. It wasn’t perfect—it still was work—but everyone felt like an integral part of America.

The true interface between Americans and America is at work. A lot of Americans no longer fully feel like a part of America, that nation of scrappy pioneers chasing the American Dream. With AI now coming, things are about to get even worse.

WHY SO MANY AMERICANS ARE ANGRY

I suspect this is why so many people are pissed off at America.

Many of the familiar complaints you hear about America aren’t really about the issue, but symptoms of the reality of twenty-first century work. There’s “late-stage capitalism” and “oligarchs.” There’s the price of eggs, and that people can’t afford a house. There’s the anger at H-1B visas and immigration. There’s the anger at health care companies making profit without providing care. There’s the worry about inflation. There’s the focus on billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. These things are ways to grasp at straws to define a nagging feeling something is wrong about careers, finances, and our future. Perhaps people complain so much about an out-of-touch government that doesn’t listen because they feel trapped by highhanded and dismissive bosses over which they have no control who don’t respect them as social equals deserving opportunity and the American Dream?

I’m fundamentally a capitalist, and have always been. I know the world is too complicated to plan, and too much regulating makes systems clunky and ineffective instead of improving them. I know markets pick up signals and innovate better, producing more. I know the twentieth-century union model is outdated for the modern economy, and at best would have to be redesigned to be effective in the modern world. Most of all, I believe letting people build things, create things, and innovate things unleashes human flourishing.

At the same time, I also know capitalism and markets need rules. We’ve always made rules about how people must play the game. We don’t allow people to cheat each other. We enforce contracts. We don’t let people withhold or steal wages fairly earned. We don’t let people trick consumers by infringing trademarks. We don’t let people dump toxic waste in the lakes we use. We used to let people work 14-hour days in sweatshops, and rightfully put an end to it. We used to let children work in coal mines. If you let them, people will come up with all sorts of short-term strategies to play the game that make the nation worse. Like with any game, you must create solid rules and a level field, and then enforce them for the game to work—or else it all breaks down.

The twenty-first century culture of work, I fear, is creating a tragedy of the commons for democracy. It’s in every fisher’s interest to take as many fish out of the lake as they can get, but if everybody does this the lake runs out of fish and everybody starves. It makes sense for a single firm to treat workers as disposable items on a spreadsheet. When everybody does it, it damages the character of democracy and American Dream. This spends down the legitimacy of America—a nation of hard-working, innovative, striving pioneers seeking opportunity and the chance to build better lives. When the American Dream is degraded, people get mad, and they blame not just the economic system, but America.

Our government and political class doesn’t yet understand this is increasingly what politics is about, or that it’s their job to address it. “Managing the economy” means more than just tinkering with interest rates or manipulating inflation and unemployment figures. Corporate bosses, on the other hand, naturally see little reason not to pursue what they (incorrectly) believe is their best interest. Work, however, is about more than charts, or graphs, or even money, but also the experience of working. Do people feel like they’re treated fairly? When they put in effort, do they get back a good life? Do they feel treated with dignity and respect? Do they feel like free people with opportunity and economic mobility and a fair shot at chasing dreams? Does their labor reward them not just with a sufficient paycheck, but a well-earned sense of pride?

This isn’t a diatribe to abolish capitalism, or restrain markets, or punish the rich. It’s an appeal to notice the black hole warping politics out of shape. Before we can begin to address it, we must invent the language to talk about it—about how so many political problems have roots in the trainwreck that’s the world of twenty-first century work. With an AI revolution brewing, it’s also about to get worse. If the people implementing this revolution aren’t very careful, they risk snaping the last meager threads holding together a system that’s already deeply under pressure. We must start thinking now about how to avoid unnecessary disaster, and create instead another great American century.

Before we can begin to address any of this, however, we first must notice it. Then we can start talking about what we intend to do.

What do you think of the problem of work? Join the discussion in the comments.