You don’t need a college degree to understand what’s happening in our country.
Oliver Anthony, the songwriter behind the viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond,” didn’t even finish high school. But his song is the most intelligent political commentary of the year.
That’s because there are two parts to it, though most critics and many admirers have only picked up on one.
The song isn’t simply a class-war complaint. The trouble with the rich men north of Richmond isn’t that they’re rich; it’s that “they all just wanna have total control / Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do.”
Anthony, real name Christopher Anthony Lunsford, is a throwback to the folk libertarianism that gave us the American Revolution.
There’s a social and spiritual level to the song beyond its obvious economics.
Maybe that’s easy to miss because Anthony’s biography sounds like something Hollywood would dream up for a working-class troubadour.
He lives in a trailer in Farmville, Virginia.
He cracked his skull working in a North Carolina paper mill, spent six months unemployed, plunged into depression and tried to drown his suffering in alcohol.
And he can really sing: “Rich Men North of Richmond” has poignant lyrics, but its appeal lies as much in the simple catchiness of its sound, and Anthony’s voice puts auto-tuned pop stars to shame.
It would make a great movie, but Anthony’s life shouldn’t be reduced to a caricature, and neither should the message of his song.
Look at the first verse: “Overtime hours for bulls— pay” is the line that catches everyone’s attention.
If low pay is the problem, the obvious solution is more money, so some economic conservatives say Anthony (or the song’s version of him) should just pack up and move wherever jobs pay more, while progressives would simply mandate higher wages or provide generous welfare benefits.
Those answers don’t address what Anthony actually sings about, which isn’t just money but “sellin’ my soul … So I can sit out here and waste my life away / Drag back home and drown my troubles away.”
The song’s economic agenda is in fact notably Reaganite, as Anthony directs his ire at inflation (“dollar ain’t s–“), taxes (“it’s taxed to no end”) and welfare as a substitute for work (“if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”).
That’s not just a rejection of progressive nostrums; it’s a powerful rejoinder to complacent conservatives who think that moving to Florida is a substitute for sound monetary policy and an anti-tax agenda designed to appeal to people like Anthony, not just rich men north of Richmond.
Moving from one end of the country to the other doesn’t help anyone escape inflation, and writing off workers angry about their taxes and how they’re spent is a surefire way for Republicans to lose the House, the Senate and the Electoral College, regardless of how prosperous things might seem in certain red states.
Anthony’s song is a warning to the populist right as well, however.
The rich men north of Richmond have created conditions in which wealth accrues to the financial sector, the highly educated and the politically connected.
In the context of Virginia, “north of Richmond” is a synonym for the suburbs of Washington, D.C., which wield enormous political power and economic sway over the state.
This is the “total control” Anthony sings about.
The problem with the people north of Richmond isn’t only their progressive politics or their self-dealing as insiders in a system they control; it’s also that control itself — the sense that the destiny of men like Oliver Anthony is decided faraway, where they have no voice.
Americans felt that way during the revolution: They had no representation in a Parliament an ocean away, where decisions about taxes, trade and the entire economic life of the colonists — to say nothing of their religious and political lives — were made by strangers.
If the counties (and states) north of Richmond were red instead of blue and treated the working men south of Richmond with magnanimity rather than neglect or contempt, there would still be a problem because what those men need isn’t patronage; it’s control over their own lives and a say in their fate of their own communities.
No wage will ever be high enough if the men who earn it aren’t free.
“Rich Men North of Richmond,” like populism itself, is about control, not wages.
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Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
A college degree these days is more of a life impediment of taught social entitlement and dependency of hand outs and hand me downs, than a hand up in real life experience competition. Working for wages that do not match your talents and ambitions are not indication of social injustice,,,,,just an indication that you have not yet discovered the true path and purpose for which your Creator made you to be, live and reflect his image of a Creator. More money via cry baby social strikes and demonstrations of redistributing finite wealth only deprives you of the ability to realize the real purpose for which you were CREATED, which is to create more wealth that can be shared with, not stolen from others. People of creation bring an abundance of things to the American table that can be shared with others, not show up at the table with nothing but an appetite and take from others what God has blessed them in talent and personal property. Governments of fallible men make poor deities who can only offer false expectations, who never deliver true hope for the future. Their proffered heavens on earth always turn out to be hell.
MANY OF THE American parents of children are beginning to wake-up to their responsibilities as parents, the song , ” RICH MAN NORTH OF RICHMAND, ” brought home to many that they also had a duty as citizens of America to vote the democrat, SOCIALIST, / communist party out of office . This party was destructive of what America was all about, freedom of choice and freedom of being able to raise your children without indoctrination centers help, interference between public education and parents. Government control isn’t the answer.
Edmund Burke once said, ” Because half a dozen Grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with Their importunate chinik while thousands of great cattle reposes beneath the SHADOW OF THE… BRITISH oa,k…” chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the most noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
THE American Voters, by their votes, won’t be silent any longer.
MANY OF THE American parents of children are beginning to wake-up to their responsibilities as parents, the song , ” RICH MAN NORTH OF RICHMAND, ” brought home to many that they also had a duty as citizens of America to vote the democrat, SOCIALIST, / communist party out of office . This party was destructive of what America was all about, freedom of choice and freedom of being able to raise your children without indoctrination centers help, interference between public education and parents. Government control isn’t the answer.
Edmund Burke once said, ” Because half a dozen Grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with Their importunate Chimik while thousands of great cattle reposes beneath the SHADOW OF THE… BRITISH oa,k…” chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the most noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
THE American Voters, by their votes, won’t be silent any longer.
” The herd of cattle is silenced by the cricket…”Edmond Burke
Democrat politicians are the political equivalent of the Bovine dung beadle. Step into any pile of political poop and you will find them not only residing within, but feeding off the excrement dropped by the herd. Most herd animals are too dumb not to eat where they defecate. Democrats and their media just dine off the stuff.
” Mexican steel company Grupo Simec announced the definitive closure of two Republic Steel plants in the United States and the dismissal of 500 of its more than 2,000 workers at its subsidiary company. Production will be moved to its state-of-the-art steel mill in Tlaxcala, Mexico.” source unknown.
” When an opponent declares, I Will not come over to your side,” I Calmly say, your child belongs to us already- What are you,? You will pass on. Your descendants however, now stand In the new camp. IN A Short Time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
ADOLF HITLER.
‘ PUBLIC EDUCATIONAL INDOCTERNATION INSTITUTIONS.’
Give me a decade to sow the roots of communism, and you won’t be able to UPROOT those seeds i have sown..
Author unknown.
” Kill them with Kindness, Mudder them with a Kiss…” Author Unknown.
CORRECTION OF THE WORD, (Murder) SORRY.
sotheseedsofliberty2 on 9:06 am August 31, 2023 at 9:06 am
” Kill them with Kindness, ( Muder) them with a Kiss…” Author Unknown.