Why the Left Should Have Loved Rich Men North of Richmond
And why they really really didn't
I’ve been listening to Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond again and I just love it. There’s a thing about good music: even if you don’t share the artist’s worldview when they are skilled enough (or inspired enough in the creative process) you can feel what they are feeling.
That’s how I get with Rich Men North of Richmond — it covers me with chills. I forget all my Keynesianism and my fears about where Populism might lead and I want to grab a torch and take back America from those rich elites. And I’m not even American! It’s powerful stuff.
It’s not just the music that creates this spell. The aesthetics of the video amplify the musical signal. There’s the resonator guitar harking back to the roots of blues in the solid soil of trampled-down slaves of the antebellum American South. It’s not an electric guitar or a sexy well-finished Taylor or Gibson but something more ruggid. It feels symbolic of a grassroots movement — the amplification is built into the guitar itself rather than relying on the help of external technological aids. It’s organic.
Then there’s the setting: a man in a clearing in the woods with a couple of dogs around him. The contrast with the halls of power in Washington is stark. This puts us in mind of the small nippy America of the War of Independence era. It’s not the neon cosmopolitanism of the 21st-century big city. This is rural America unchanged and forever true.
Then there’s the man himself. He’s certainly not a picture of the sexy rock & roll star — never destined to be pinned on the walls of tween girls’ rooms. How perfect that he has this woodcutter’s beard; it evokes the rugged man — the Henry David Thoreau vibe of a man unseduced by the decadence of modern life and speaking about deeper truths out in nature.
Of course, it’s all a mirage. This is shot on a nice camera with amazing sound and watched on YouTube by millions of people across the world. To use the language of the “Godfather of Postmodernism” Jean Baudrillard this is a hyperreal simulacrum of a certain America. But it’s a powerful one.
It’s also worthy of a lot of historical and philosophical contemplation. Because this is a song that the Left should love. But they hate it and maybe that’s not just to do with the humdrum workings of politics (i.e. mimesis) but also about a transformation of the Left and the Right in recent times. Oliver Anthony’s song is an anachronism.
Why the Left Should Love Rich Men North of Richmond
There exists a point of view from which Oliver Anthony’s railing on by the Left appears bizarre. If you were an alien who had just come to this planet you might think these would be natural allies.
Of course, any acquaintance with the subcultures themselves would quickly disabuse you of this notion. The linguistic markers of Anthony’s subculture are all over the song. Hence you, non-alien that you are, are likely to feel the opposite and wonder on what planet the Left might have liked this song.
From a historical, theoretical point of view, there are a few reasons Anthony’s song could hypothetically have been a hit for leftists. Firstly there’s the radical undertone. The common refrain of radicals both Left and Right is hatred of the “Elite”.
Of course, the set “Elite” has very different contents depending on your pole. In fact, those on the leftist end of the spectrum are inhabitants of this category for their would-be comrades on the Populist end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, historically speaking, there is a shared sense that the halls of power are utterly corrupt and in need of massive reform if not just total eradication. The Populists react strongly in this vein to Trump's promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington while the leftists speak of the need for revolution because “The System” is corrupt beyond repair.
The most powerful historical connection is between the Left and the working class. This is almost the defining feature of left-wing political history. That goes for the centrist liberal left like the American Democrat party and their working-class heroes like Bruce Springsteen and it’s even truer for the radical leftists from Socialists and Communists to Anarchists. In the case of Marx, the working class was sacred — he revered and idolised them as the bringers of the coming transformation of the world.
So when you hear Oliver Anthony talking about “selling my soul working all day/ Overtime hours for bullshit pay”, and of the poor being exploited by the rich, it seems like there’s a clear match here.
And yet, the reaction to Rich Men North of Richmond among liberals and leftists was almost universal disdain. Some have attributed this to a major shift that has taken place in the Left in the past decade with the baton being passed from the so-called “Old Left” to the “New Left”.
Why the Left Hated Rich Men North of Richmond
In his commentary on the reaction to Rich Men North of Richmond in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote that Liberals, while attentive to racial injustice, have “a blind spot about class” and are too quick to:
“wag their fingers and scold [Oliver Anthony] for insensitivity. [...] Have Democrats retreated so far from their workingman roots?”
The connection between Democrats and the rest of the Left with the workingman has become a historical curiosity. Some are calling this “The Great Awokening” and you’ll see these graphs showing the rise in social justice search terms in media outlets between 2010 and 2019.
What these graphs show is the rise of the New Left. The Old Left are the ones who have a working-class fetish — the Marxists, Socialists and Anarchists whose social critiques took the form of economics and politics. The Old Left had its last plume of life with Occupy Wall Street and with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party.
The New Left are more focused on culture. Their attention is on systemic racism, sexism, bigotry and the Patriarchy. The focus has moved away from the working class as being the downtrodden in need of protection and has become about the oppressed minorities and women.
This meme is in the same vein. Whereas in 2011 there was Occupy Wall Street where radicals of all stripes were united against economic inequality and the Elite, a decade later, the politics of the Left has shifted to the cultural domain to focus on Identity Politics and is now popularly known as the Woke. Occupy Wall Street fractured into the radical right and the radical left who are now largely pitted against each other rather than against the System. This meme, appropriately, portrays this as a conspiracy by the Elite.
This New Left don’t see anything resembling a common cause with Oliver Anthony. This isn’t a working-class hero singing about the evils of Capitalism. At the more harmless end they see his writing as “artless” “doggerel” that is essentially a “blunt-force hissy fit”. But at the more severe end, they see in Rich Men North of Richmond a white man “punching down” on the obese people on welfare — bashing the poor; they see the “nastiest impulses” of America; his songs feel “parochial to the point of bigotry”. Anthony hits all the trigger points of the New Left. He's an angry white man — a walking effigy of everything the Patriarchy-hating Woke despise.
The Chthonic Populists and Pure Woke
From these snippets of commentary on Rich Men North of Richmond, you’ll notice another key difference between the New Left of the Woke and the New Right of the Populists: tone.
It’s not surprising to me that Occupy Wall Street would have been a unifying point for these groups. Looking at history it’s worth remembering that there was a similar cycle of radical discontent in the wake of the First World War. Mussolini was originally a socialist politician before becoming disillusioned with the socialist ways. The origins of the German Fascists lay in a Socialist workers’ party before a certain charismatic Austrian came along. Though the Fascists and Socialists were the most bitter of enemies, there was also a stock of similarities they had in common that neither shared with their moderate wings.
The same goes for the 21st-century’s Populist Right and Woke Left. Where both are partial to the needs of the poor people who are not being served by the insatiability of the apathetic System, they are coming at the problem from two different angles. And that is where the difference in tone comes from.
The Woke are more refined. On the frontlines of the Woke movement, there are a lot of PhDs and college degrees. There’s a familiarity (or at least a posture of familiarity) with a tradition of Critical Theory and with the history of imperialism, colonialism, racism and bigotry. There’s an attitude of compassion and solidarity for all people across the world — immigrants, developing nations, minorities and outsiders.
Despite what the right-wing gurusphere would have you believe, the Woke are much closer in spirit to the values of the Enlightenment of freedom and equality than anybody else on the political spectrum. Like Foucault, they want to consummate the Enlightenment vision rather than destroy it. They may spurn the hypocrisy, blindness and other foibles of the Enlightenment thinkers but their dream is one of tolerance, equality and justice. Of course, you don’t see this on the frontlines of the Culture Wars for the same reasons that the guillotine never went dry in the years of the French Revolution — purity is a hungry god.
In contrast, there's an uncouthness to the populists — they're crass; they're salt of the Earth. And akin to that Earth they are like maggots and shit and BO and all the ugliness of matter that polite society deliberately overlooks. Like their leftist counterparts, they also believe the system is fucked and should be more equitable. Their spirit however is less the beautiful idealism of the utopian than the ugly desperation of a starving man fighting for scraps to feed his family. Their ressentiment is much more concrete.
This is the proletariat discontent that Marx thought would bring about Communism but that Lenin discovered was more of a “trade-union consciousness”. That is to say, they aren’t idealists looking for an ideal world; the System can live on so long as they get a fairer slice of the pie. Trump in this sense is the trade union boss bargaining with the Elites on their behalf.
This difference in manners, goals and natures — one deep in the Earth where the sweat and bones of their ancestors lay and the other high in the idealistic awe of the firmament — inevitably come into conflict. Both are equally cut off from the ways the world works — one is beneath it and the other above and it is this disconnection that makes these groups into radicals.
But this mirror image — this light and shadow of Populist and Woke — is rife with conflict. To the Populists, the multiculturalism of the Woke is suicidally naïve. To the Woke the parochial Nationalism of the Populists is disgusting.
What to do about the Oliver Anthonys?
A question remains: what is the leftist attitude towards the Oliver Anthonys of the world? What are we to do about a problem like the poor white underbelly of America? And I haven’t come across an answer. If any of you know any good videos or articles wrestling with this problem from a leftist perspective please share it down in the comments.
The predominant framing however is a fear of Fascism. For leftists, the System has ceased to be the primary focus of outgroup feeling. Since their university-educated peers are now the hive body of the mainstream media there is less room to direct hatred at the media. And while the halls of power continue to evade them except for scraps of policy to guarantee their vote, the true animosity of the leftists is directed towards their looming fear of Fascism. When the Left isn’t fighting among themselves (which to be fair is the default mode) they are railing against the dangers of Fascism’s rebirth. All their energy is directed against the MAGAs.
With that tension between fighting for their cause and fighting against the shadow of Fascism, leftists are all out of bandwidth. The different worlds inhabited by subcultures must also be factored in. The Populists are more of a rural/exurban phenomenon of America’s red ocean while the Woke are more of an urban phenomenon. What you end up with is a meeting between these subcultures on the abstract virtual frontline of social media and a lack of contact with the wound of the Other — with the lived experience that drives their ressentiment.
In answer to the question then, I don’t think leftists give it much thought. I don’t think they are too cognisant of the problems of the poor white underbelly. They just want to protect immigrants and minorities from them. And I’m sure there is also a belief in the back of the head that if leftist economic policy could prevail then these backwater poor will get what they need if not what they want. Again I’m willing to be corrected on this but it seems to me that the leftists don’t interact with the problems of the Populists only with what’s problematic about them. Needless to say, the inverse is also true but then the Populists aren’t known for their compassionate cosmopolitanism but for their parochialism.
In conclusion, there was never any real hope for Oliver Anthony with the New Left. And the Old Left is far too weak and quiet these days to offer any real support. And so Oliver Anthony instead of reminding us of the days of Occupy Wall Street when the radical left and right shared common cause, instead became more grist for the mill of the Culture Wars.