It’s rare that a single tweet derails an entire political career. We live in an age where our political class is so mind-poisoned that most of them vent out something totally asinine, evil, or profoundly out of touch at least once a day, creating such a maelstrom of garbage that each individual piece remains indistinguishable from the last. And yet, sometimes a public figure’s brain secretes something onto the keyboard that radiates such a perfect combination of profound ignorance, stomach-churning callousness, and arrogant self-satisfaction that it breaks the cringe barrier and creates a shock wave that sends its creator hurtling into a black abyss.

On December 26, 2024, while most normal people were bathing in the afterglow of the holiday season, opening the last of their gifts, Vivek Ramaswamy was furiously pounding at his keyboard. The electoral triumph of Donald Trump was still fresh, and the functionaries of his imperium were beginning to assemble, clamoring with full eyes and clear hearts to leave their indelible mark on the country. Vivek would be a central player: Along with Elon Musk, he would be tasked with leading the fledgling “Department of Government Efficiency.” It was to be, as he put it, the “Dawn of a new Golden Age.”

But debate was already raging across the online Right about how that “Golden Age” would be forged. The most visible fault lines had formed over the federal H-1B program, which allows highly educated foreign workers with special skills—usually in science, technology, engineering, or medicine—to receive visas allowing them to immigrate to the United States for work. The MAGA movement was broadly in agreement that it did not want poor immigrants—the supposedly “low-IQ,” “cat-eating” Haitians and other such rabble—to enter the country. But what about wealthy Indian immigrants who know how to code?

The more openly xenophobic side of the movement, represented by figures like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, felt firmly that even a single job going to a foreigner when it could go to a "Heritage American" was one job too many. While the fundamental critique coming from this side was rooted more in a racist hostility towards non-white immigrants than any sort of broader discussion about the terms of work, they did hit on something real. The H-1B system does incentivize companies to hire skilled workers from foreign countries to the detriment of American workers, and it also exploits the immigrant workers themselves. Unlike American citizens, H-1B visa immigrant workers have legal residency that is tied to their work for a specific company. If they complain about their working conditions, they risk being fired and, therefore, deported. As a result, many H-1B employers—including major tech firms—have been able to get away with paying those workers less than their American counterparts. For this reason, Senator Bernie Sanders has likened H-1B visa recipients to “indentured servants,” a source of cheap, easily exploitable labor.

But Vivek, a billionaire who hailed from the venture capital world—and who’d profited endlessly from the work of engineers and scientists tethered to their jobs—fell firmly on the other side of the debate. Taking to social media, he unveiled his manifesto:

This was, for all intents and purposes, the final statement Vivek Ramaswamy would make as a national public figure. It didn’t just elicit a response from the Left but from the Right as well. 

If you look at the comments that emerged from the ensuing H-1B discourse—the ones that aren’t simply full of anti-Indian racism, which is a lot of them—you’ll see that it enabled some on the Right to momentarily reach some Sandersesque conclusions of their own. “They want us to be working 80+ hours a week and have zero time for our families. These technocratic billionaires use Americans as slave labor to make them more money,” wrote conservative author Evan Kilgore. “Tech bros framed their H-1B argument as ‘we need the best and brightest’ but what they really want is cheap labor,” said fascist Republican political operative Jack Posobiec. 

Before this tweet, Vivek was on the inside track to considerable power. If he had stayed within the Trump administration, he would now be busy rending apart the sinews of the federal bureaucracy with the richest man in the world. Some considered him a possible heir apparent for the presidential nomination in 2028. But after his “mediocrity” post, Musk would ensure that Vivek was swiftly catapulted out of the federal government altogether, with Politico reporting that his “ill-received holiday rant… hastened his demise.” He has since returned to Ohio to launch a campaign for governor, where he is campaigning to launch a DOGE of his own and has received Trump’s endorsement in the GOP primary.

It’s very easy to see why Ramaswamy’s rant was so thoroughly panned by everyone who read it. It is one of the most profoundly offputting pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. On the surface, it drips with the sweaty insecurity of someone who has turned being a social outcast into a marker of their superiority. It displays a comforting belief that many nerdy outcasts come to adopt—that the reason they never got invited to parties was that the world simply couldn’t understand their genius. 

Vivek fundamentally misunderstands the pop culture figures he wants to lionize. Urkel wasn’t an outcast because he was smart. He was an outcast because he constantly did and said weird things, and his klutziness and total lack of social awareness annoyed everybody around him. Other characters didn’t resent him because he used his intellect to master time travel and build robots but because he used it to come up with schemes to stalk and harass his next-door crush, Laura Winslow, including breaking into her home and tricking her into a fake marriage with him so she’ll give him a kiss.

But while a lot of mockery came from Vivek’s invocation of ’90s sitcoms as the root of American indolence, his invocation of the film Whiplash as a preferable alternative hints at the deeper evil within his worldview. The film is about a young drummer at a prestigious music academy who is severely abused, both verbally and physically, by a sociopathic band teacher who justifies his behavior as a motivational tool to “push people beyond what is expected of them.” Whiplash is one of the best films ever made about how toxic the single-minded drive to succeed at all costs can be. In the end, the protagonist achieves his dream, becoming a world-class drummer and earning his professor’s approval. But it requires him to become obsessive to the point that it costs him virtually everything else in his life. He breaks up with his girlfriend to focus solely on drumming, becomes distant from his family, and—as a consequence of his hypercompetitive environment—becomes as vicious and antisocial towards his bandmates as his professor.

It’s hard to interpret Whiplash as anything other than a cautionary tale. But Vivek takes it as an aspirational model for the entire country. And he’s not the only one who seems to view it that way. YouTube and TikTok are littered with videos from channels with names like “Spartan Motivation” that edit bits of the film, including the professor’s rants and the student bleeding on his drum kits, into montages that are meant to “#motivate” the viewer to achieve excellence. Whiplash is a canonical film of sorts in “grindset” content, which has proliferated dramatically with the rise of influencers like Andrew Tate. In GQ Magazine, Ruchira Sharma describes the “grindset” as a strange mutation of earlier online expressions of masculine neuroses. Whereas earlier “manosphere” content glorified becoming a dominant, charismatic “alpha male” or, in the case of “incel” content, descended into nihilism about not being one, “grindset culture” venerates the “sigma male.” As Sharma describes:

Sigma males are self-sufficient loners; they attract extremely good-looking women but aren't interested in them, and, in keeping with society’s growing fixation with productivity, they’re capitalist hustlers. Devotees encourage other users to live a stricter lifestyle and adopt self-care practices like going to the gym and drinking water more often. This, they argue, will make them more attractive and alpha-like, which will equate to more money.

In other words, no hanging out at the mall, no sleepovers, and no “chillin.”

The “grindset” mentality is the internet-ification of an ideology that dates back to the Victorian era. English author Samuel Smiles’s 1859 book Self Help (which spawned an entire genre of self-improvement texts) contains similar laments about how “individual idleness, selfishness, and vice” were engines of “national decay.” As such, Smiles argued for minimal government intervention to help the poor because “whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves.” He expressed a Calvinist view of work, writing that “Heaven helps those who help themselves... Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.” 

Illustration by Nick Sirotich

It was an early form of the "Protestant Work Ethic" that sociologist Max Weber would later critique, saying that within this worldview, “Waste of time is… the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.” All of one’s waking hours, in this view, should be spent on work and productivity; anything else is laziness and sin. 

The standard eight-hour work days, weekends, and overtime pay that modern Americans have come to expect were not always ingrained. Before the early 20th century, working hours used to be much longer, with 12-hour shifts in grueling factory jobs and on construction sites considered normal. It was only through organized struggle by unionized workers over more than a century that reasonable hours were introduced into American law. 

Bosses often retaliated against workers’ demands with violence, but they also responded with moralizing and derision. In 1835, when a Boston carpenter’s union launched one of the first campaigns to reduce the working week to a paltry 60 hours, a group of merchants and shipowners published a statement in the Boston Courier warning that even a moment of leisure would corrupt the souls of their workforce. “To be idle several of the most useful hours of the morning and evening will surely lead to intemperance and ruin,” it read. Modernize the language a little, and you could hear the same thing from Vivek Ramaswamy. 

The Right’s response to Vivek’s tweet was the final straw that ended his tenure in the nascent Trump administration. But this is a little perplexing, since Vivek’s screed toward American workers is hardly distinct from the sort of condescension that Republicans direct at American workers all the time, nor is his solution of endless grinding distinct from their policy agenda.

You don’t have to look far to find right-wing content venerating the “grindset” mentality of endless work as a marker of virtue. One defender of Vivek’s rant was multi-level marketing executive Patrick Bet-David, whose hugely influential Valuetainment podcast boasts more than 6.6 million subscribers and has hosted President Donald Trump as a guest. “As an immigrant from Iran,” Bet-David said, “I didn’t mind working 80 hours a week. I didn’t mind the competition. All I wanted was a shot. This used to be the American Way.” 

The man currently charting Republican policy, Elon Musk, is a firm believer in extreme work hours. Since as far back as 2010, he has insisted on “100-hour” workweeks as a standard for any entrepreneur to be successful. After taking over Twitter, he demanded that anyone who wanted to stay employed there commit to working “hardcore” 84-hour weeks, which naturally led about 75 percent of them to resign. And since taking over as the doge of DOGE, he’s upped the ante to the ludicrous claim that he and his young employees work 120 hours a week. (This seems, frankly, impossible since Musk also tweets dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day, along with playing PC games like Elden Ring and Diablo 4.) One of Musk and Ramaswamy’s first initiatives in an effort to slash the federal workforce was to eliminate remote work with the hope that many federal workers would simply quit. But Musk was also motivated by a belief that working from home is “morally wrong.” Meanwhile, despite his own companies receiving billions each year in federal contracts, he posts memes referring to people who receive federal assistance as members of the “parasite class.”

Musk’s 17-hour days and demands are extreme even by the standards of American tech executives, but his ideology is not. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who have both recently become courtiers of the Trump White House, have long decried the idea that workers should expect a “work-life balance” and suggested that their companies’ failures to compete with newer tech startups are the result of their workers not being willing to grind hard enough. 

At the political level, the Republican Party has been ruthlessly imposing the grindset as a new normal and chipping away at the expectations Americans have come to hold about their rights as workers. Trump said at a rally during his 2024 campaign that he “hated” giving workers overtime pay and often “wouldn’t pay” it. The Project 2025 policy manifesto his administration is currently implementing calls for an explicit end to the 40-hour workweek, replacing it with a 160-hour work month, which reduces the amount of overtime pay workers will receive. Project 2025 proposes many new avenues to help employers avoid it as well. The year before, when the Biden Labor Department introduced a new rule that allowed 4 million more workers to collect overtime payment, the GOP filed legislation to block the rule from going into effect.

Republicans have also begun to make arguments that Americans need to work later in life. During the presidential primary, Nikki Haley championed the idea of raising the retirement age from 67 to an unspecified higher age, an idea that some executives—like BlackRock’s Larry Fink—have co-signed. During the pandemic “labor shortage,” Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson called for tax incentives to coax retirees back into the work force. And while Trump was smart enough to insist on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t “cut one cent” from Social Security, the Republican Study Committee, which includes a majority of the House GOP, has recommended raising the retirement age in 2025. Republican-aligned media has been sanding the ground for this reality, making the moral case for why seniors who want to retire are a bunch of lazy bums. Ben Shapiro called the idea of retirement “stupid” altogether, saying that “Everybody that I know who has retired, is dead within five years. And if you talk to people who are elderly, they lose their purpose in life by losing their job.” (For the record, studies on retirement have found that, if you control for the health of people retiring, the difference in life expectancy between those who retire early vs. later is essentially negligible.) 

While these fortunately remain only wishes for the time being, we’ve seen what Republicans have been able to accomplish with absolute control over state governments. Union members have long enjoyed more standard, predictable hours and more paid time off—and so Republican states have worked to steadily demolish unions. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has led red states in efforts to demolish public sector unions, introducing onerous new requirements that automatically decertify them if they don’t have enough dues-paying members. Other states have begun to copy him. At private companies, state Republican parties have opposed union drives and critical strikes. When the United Auto Workers launched a campaign to organize across the South—a place that has been notoriously inhospitable to unions—last year, six governors accused the union of “threaten[ing] our jobs and the values we live by.” Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee have all enacted legislation requiring corporations not to recognize the results of union elections decided by card check, whereby a majority of employees at a workplace sign cards in favor of unionizing.

And when cities and towns have tried to pass ordinances to protect their workers from abuse, red states have blocked them using “preemption” laws. Over the past decade, more than a dozen red states have introduced laws that prevent cities from passing “predictive scheduling” laws, which require employers to give their employees a notice period before requiring them to come in to work. Without these protections, service workers' schedules are totally at the mercy of their bosses, who can call them in for shifts with almost no notice. Dozens of mostly red states have preempted other city level improvements to workers’ rights, including their abilities to raise wages, place requirements on gig work, and mandate paid leave. They’ve even fought requirements as simple as mandatory water breaks for employees, even as heat deaths have become more common among outdoor workers due to the increased temperature caused by climate change. Both Florida and Texas have passed laws banning municipalities from requiring that workers be given mandatory water breaks and time in the shade.

Kids are probably doing less “chillin’” and “hanging out at the mall” in states that have rolled back child labor laws over the past two years. In fact, putting kids to work has been such a priority that they bring it up even when nobody is asking. During the 2023 debt ceiling negotiations, when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was asked about a proposal to increase the age that people needed to work in order to collect food stamps from 50 to 54, he strangely brought the topic to children: “We might have a child that has no job, no dependents, but sitting on the couch. We’re going to encourage that person to get a job and have to go to work, which gives them worth and value.”

Right-wing groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity have been successfully introducing and passing laws to let children work at younger ages, for longer hours, and in more dangerous environments. At the same time, the number of child labor violations has gone through the roof, reaching the highest level in decades. Some of the stories have been horrifying, like a 16-year-old in Wisconsin who was killed working in a sawmill or a 17-year-old slaughterhouse employee in Michigan whose hand was hacked off by a meat grinder. In Iowa, where Governor Kim Reynolds signed a law allowing children to work in meatpacking facilities in order to learn that there’s “dignity in work,” dozens of children, some as young as 13 years old, ended up working late night shifts using corrosive chemicals to clean dangerous slaughterhouse instruments. In Louisiana, Republicans eliminated mandatory 20-minute lunch breaks for 16- and 17-year-old workers on shifts longer than five hours. Rep. Roger Wilder, the Smoothie King franchisee who introduced the bill, chafed at the idea that it would “harm children,” saying, “Give me a break, these are young adults.” 

Even the idea of every child having a lunch to eat is controversial. Last year, 13 Republican governors opted out of a federal program to provide their states with money that could provide low-income children with credits for food during summer months when school lunch is unavailable, deriding it as “welfare.” After taking office in January 2025, Donald Trump paused the grants for this program, taking benefits away from an estimated 28 million children. Georgia Republican Rep. Rich McCormick went on TV to defend the decision. “When you’re talking about school lunches, I worked my way through high school. I don’t know about you but I’ve worked since before I was 13 years old,” he said. Needing to take a job in addition to school in order to have food to eat, McCormick said, was “something that makes them have value, thinking about their future instead of thinking about how they’re going to sponge off the government when they don’t need to.”

The reason that Vivek Ramaswamy’s particular strain of classism raised such a reaction seems to be that it was refracted through a prism of racial or nationalistic antagonism. The problem wasn’t that he was insulting workers, but that he was an Indian American man denigrating white American workers in comparison to immigrants from Southeast Asia. The irony was not lost on many commentators on the Left, including Trevor Beaulieu of the Champagne Sharks podcast, who noted that Vivek essentially gave white Americans the same sort of “pull up your pants” speech that white Americans have been giving to Black Americans for decades.

But of course, because this is the Right and their “populism” is limited by the extent to which they can use it to enforce other hierarchies, nothing of value seems to have been learned from this. Within weeks, the people who were railing against the suspect motives of “technocratic billionaires” were back to clapping like seals for Elon Musk as he began to take a chainsaw to the federal government—including agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Labor Department, and OSHA, whose primary purposes are to limit the corporate exploitation of workers and consumers.

That said, I’m loath to assume there’s no limit to how much grinding people are willing to tolerate. Far from being a “mediocrity” culture as Vivek suggests, Americans already work more than people in other similarly wealthy countries. We go on fewer vacations (and often still do work when we go on them), we get less family and sick leave, we take fewer breaks, and we eat more meals at our desks. And yet we also face greater precarity—more expensive healthcare, housing, and higher education and a weaker safety net for when we can’t afford those necessities. And perhaps more importantly, we feel that something is wrong about this. Two-thirds of Americans say they feel burnout from their jobs according to Forbes, which says it’s an all time high.

Republicans have taken their relatively narrow victory in the last election as a mandate to enact all their most outlandish policy fantasies. But when you ask Americans why they voted for Trump, it’s not because they wanted him to get rid of the Department of Education or persecute trans people or take over Greenland or destroy OSHA. The most common reason was inflation. Biden was president, and people were paying too much for too little, so they voted for the only other person on offer.

Working-class Americans have been shifting red in recent years, and the last election continued that trend. But now we’re all getting a big, fat dose of what Republicans do when they have complete control over the levers of government. They’ve been able to obscure their class allegiance for years by playing off racial and cultural resentments and obscuring the definition of “elite” to mean something other than “the rich guy who is in charge of your entire life.” But now, all of those rich guys are aligned firmly behind Donald Trump, falling over each other to pay homage to him. And in return, he is going to give them what they want. He and his party are going to make ordinary people grind more and more and more. 

Hating work and wanting to do less of it is one of the few things that unites nearly everybody—across race, religion, gender, and age. Any politician who ran on a national platform of reducing the length of the workweek would likely be formidable. Amid the post-New Deal consensus, even Republicans like Richard Nixon recognized that pitching a four-day workweek as a dream to strive for was good politics, even if they did it completely cynically. 

It’s even easier to make the case now: technology has dramatically increased our productivity, so why shouldn’t we all get to reap the rewards by working less? Everyone can imagine what they’d do with an extra day of leisure—the books they’d read, the pastries they’d bake, the old friends they’d catch up with, or simply the sleep they’d get. But because both of our political parties are subservient to the whims of that small elite stratum that profits from our toil, even acknowledging the possibility of less work has largely been pushed to the fringes. Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill calling for a four-day workweek. Right now he is on an island, with only a few other Democrats signing on in agreement. But lots of other countries have been steadily reducing their workweeks, either informally through union negotiations or, in the case of Belgium, France, and recently Spain, through the force of law.

Americans are willing to put up with a lot more grinding than Vivek Ramaswamy is willing to give them credit for. But they still have a sense of dignity and self-respect that doesn’t come from work, but comes from being a goddamn human being who wants to have friends, not just colleagues, who wants to have hobbies, not just projects. While the Right’s seemingly unchecked power is terrifying, it’s also clarifying. There will soon be no doubt about who is trying to grind us all into dust.