Music has always been the soul of the American working class, a way to express pain, sorrow, joy, and the struggles of daily life in a way that can capture peoples' minds far better than any conversation or newspaper article. They don't always hit, but sometimes a song comes along that can really capture the collective pain of a specific moment.
This is what's happened with the new hit song "Rich Men North of Richmond" by previously unknown musician Oliver Anthony. It shot to the top of chart after chart, and with no effort at all, surpassing the country fakes who sing about loving cops in small towns then go back to their mansions every night.
Both the Left and Right are left shaking their heads in confusion. What the Left can't seem to understand is why the song hit home for millions of forgotten men and women all over the country, who understand it because it's about our lives, about a ruling class that has made us dependent on it and then left us to wither in the sun like an old weed, a ruling class that has shuttered the factories we worked in and increased prices to the point where we're all in debt and can no longer even afford decent food to eat that isn't full of chemicals.
It's hard to get folks on the Left to recognize this anger, pain, and trauma; too often, the response is to dismiss it as racism or bigotry, and indeed, there has been no shortage of commentary condemning Anthony for his "dog whistle"—especially his criticism of food stamps.
Of course, they pay no attention to Mr. Anthony's very direct response to their criticism, which he posted on Instagram. "The lyrics contrast that some are left without any, and others are only left with the option of living on junk food," he wrote. "Meanwhile our farming industry has been corporatized and sold out. Food is entirely too expensive, especially in a nation with abundant farmland. In politics, it's all about keeping people who are dependent, dependent."
When it comes to cancel culture and looking down on people in the flyover states as backward and ignorant, the truth often matters very little. The Left apparently knows what art means far better than the artist who made it, and that rings a little too close to how the elites look at us more generally.
But it's not just the Left that's misunderstanding Oliver Anthony's song. The Right has been all too eager to act like he is one of them, using the song's lyrics as the opening question for the Republican primary presidential debate. Republican politicians have celebrated the song as though they aren't the exact target of its ire.
To them, Anthony had a separate message: "It was funny seeing my song at that presidential debate, because I wrote that song about those people, you know, so for them to have to sit there and listen to that, that cracks me up," Anthony said in a YouTubevideo last week. The song "has nothing to do with Joe Biden," Anthony said. "The one thing that has bothered me is seeing people wrap politics up in this. I'm disappointed to see it. Like, it's aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me like I'm one of them."
What Oliver Anthony's success reveals is how alienated working-class people are from both parties, both political ideologies in this country, and how united they are in their opposition to the contempt of elites on both sides. "Rich Men North of Richmond is about corporate owned DC politicians on both sides," Anthony wrote on Instagram.
In another set of comments, Anthony angered another set of ideologues when he described blue collar workers as "the melting pot of the world" and said that diversity is "what makes us strong." For this, he was called a fake by some of the same conservatives who had previously championed him.
Let's be real: Oliver Anthony is a musician. And music is a powerful thing. It doesn't matter if he's "fake" or "canceled." What matters is that his song resonates with regular people—the kind of people who don't define themselves based on politics, the kind of people who struggle day to day, trying to make ends meet, just like everybody else.
This kind of people is the vast majority of the country, and frankly, we are sick of being told to hate our coworkers, our neighbors, and even our families based on which news channel they watch. We're beginning to understand that it was never about the Democrats or Republicans but about the elites and the rest of us.
Of course, these elites and politicos will try to use it as the millionth wedge to drive between us, to keep fighting each other on their behalf. But for this working class guy from the flyover states, it seems like that era's over. A new era's coming: an era where people are wise to that kind of thing. An era where we see we have a whole lot more in common with the people working right next to us than we do with the rich men north of Richmond.
What we do with that? Well, that's up to us.
Noah Khrachvik is a co-director and theorist for the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
