Hey guys! Here in the US, the concept of laziness is a mainstay in politics. Conservatives call Progressives “lazy”, claim welfare programs enable “laziness”, claim that the younger generations are too soft/lazy, etc. You also have the occasional Progressive say that rich people/landlords are lazy and live off the backs of working people.
Is laziness prominent like this in your country’s political discourse? Are there widespread concerns about welfare programs enabling “lazy” people? I’m pretty sure working hard is considered a good thing just about everywhere, but I also know that the US is more workaholic then most European countries, calling someone lazy is a very strong insult over here and I think it’s often used unreasonably. I’m interested to hear your guys answers.
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Very uncommon in the general atmosphere but pretty common among a certain crowd that likes to act like American politics are particularly relevant in Iceland. I think it might be in part due to how Kafkaesque Iceland’s welfare system is and how difficult it is to get into even if you genuinely need it so there aren’t many people exploiting it.
There is no political discourse at all, so here is that.
Laziness viewed as a neutral-positive characteristic of a person. Means that person have means to allow himself to be lazy, and he is resousefull and have a hidden potential when he decide to to stop being lazy. Essentially we have a few folk tales and literature about lazy people get successful by being lazy.
Becoming more and more common in political debates as labor conditions and labor market become worse.
A couple oh years ago, we had a government that approved a basic income for people looking for work or not in employment.
This unleashed a pretty violent reaction by conservatives and reactionaries forces and media outlets.
In fact, one of the first act of the newly elected far right government was to delete this income altogether starting 2023.
The debate was all based on the so called laziness and on the fact that the State wont subsidize laziness and create a worker shortage.
Of course, the whole issue, being complex, has nothing to do with laziness but this is an easy and immediate way to instill an idea in people’s minds.
Yes our political parties imitate a lot their US counterparts.
> Conservatives call Progressives “lazy”, claim welfare programs enable “laziness”, claim that the younger generations are too soft/lazy, etc.
No, here they say welfare programs need to be cut because they contain “incentive traps” that “passivize” people. You don’t attack, you express concern.
> You also have the occasional Progressive say that rich people/landlords are lazy and live off the backs of working people.
Here, trade unions are active in rental property business and are exempt from dividend tax. This allows them to make more money and use it to support leftist policies. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Very. A lot of smug people have been saying poor people, and let’s be honest, more often poor brown people, are only here to pop out kids and collect the wlefare checks and refuse to work. Which is empirically untrue, but well, obviously when someone’s racist you can cite all the sources in the world and they won’t believe you.
Our president is also very fond of calling anyone who disagrees with him or who uses welfare lazy motherfuckers (he did use more political words, but that was the sentiment) repeatedly, again and again and again since he’s been president, so there’s that too.
Being called lazy would be considered an insult. Lazy isn’t connected with relaxing over here. It’s not doing what you should do. Relaxing is for after work is done. When you’ve earned it so to speak.
However in the political discourse laziness hasn’t been used all that often recently. There were reforms in the early 2000 on how much money the state will give you when you are unemployed and what you are required to do for it.
The official idea was to ‘support but also to challenge’. Implying that some are just to lazy to work. The reality however showed that most people are not lazy and unemployment often wasn’t their fault, but the result of medical problems, structural changes in the labor market and bureaucracy that made it difficult to get off the benefits once you had to rely on them.
Where it does get used, is against climate activists. Especially if they block streets. Then it’s common they get called lazy and they need to (made to) work, so that they don’t have the time to block the streets.
However it seems that no political party (except the far right) actively uses the laziness argument for anything. It’s to simple to see through to be effective.
UK wide, sure its a thing. Tories are often having a go at so called “benefits scroungers”. At the Welsh level I don’t think that kind of rhetoric would cut through, as we are a far more socialist country than England.
In Poland our conservative ruling party (PiS) is more supportive of social programs esp for families (and did introduce them) than the main opposition liberal-conservative party (PO). I mostly hear that young ppl and leftists are lazy or that social programs enable laziness from the supporters of PO and both the supporters and politicians of the far-right Konfederacja.
It pops up, but it’s not the most prominent. The right wing of today is more busy whining about immigration.
But we did, for example, have a party that called our student grant “cafe money” as an accusation that students just waste it on frivolous things instead of supplementing their normal finances to free up time to study
It was a huge talking point within the social democrat government of 2002-2005, when they did a lot of reforms to the social system and created a huge low wages sector.
And it was huge in 2003 in the context of Florida-Rolf, a German citizen who lived in Florida and got welfare from Germany due to falling ill. The right wing press painted him as being lazy, sitting at the beach under palms draining Germany of money. So the government changed the rules for welfare payments to Germans living abroad.
It’s a hit or miss in Spain. It depends a lot of the region. It’s more common in certain political feuds of the right, like Madrid, that is shifting to a populist neoliberal far right model of politics like the US republicans, but not in others, like Galicia, with a enormous chunk of the population that is not really conservative but they vote to the right because is more moderate. To those people, talk about cutting welfare/pensions would be political suicide. Same in Andalucía, that now governs the right. A lot of people there benefits from social benefits, so calling them lazy, when it’s a necessity for the economical situation, is the equivalent of covering yourself in gasoline in the middle of a wildfire.
And yet, what it is common (and also BS) is to use the laziness argument to ditch other regions, usually north to south. And that’s something certain conservative politicians with a taste for populism are using to try to scratch some more votes. Pathetic, if you ask me.