Oliver Anthony Tells Us A Lot About Our Deranged Politics

We live in genuinely intriguing times, and the frequency at which things that even a few years ago would never be seen now "go viral" and sweep the country in a matter of days in near the top of the list of what's fascinating.  This summer's most intriguing "viral" moment came from Oliver Anthony, a young country singer from the mountains of central Virginia, who posted a populist anthem online that he recorded in the holler near his hometown.  It's very obvious based on his flabbergasted response that Anthony was caught off guard that his song was heard by more than the few dozen people who followed him on social media, but notoriety nonetheless came his way after millions of people sampled his video.  

It seemed as though a star was born as right-wing media latched onto the message of Anthony's song and tried to capture it, and him, in a bottle.  To his ever-lasting credit, Anthony burst their bubble, refusing to embrace the political ideologues who attempted to co-opt him and shaming Republican Presidential candidates who claimed his message as their own.  Perhaps he simply wasn't ready for the national spotlight, but I'll take him at his word that he's politically centrist.  Either way, the core message of Oliver Anthony's hit song speaks volumes of how detached our politics have become from reality, and how easily one-time allies can turn on each other once electoral coalitions change.

The core argument of Oliver Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond" is that there's only one bogeyman preventing ignored rural communities from thriving and that's the federal government.  In the past, populist anthems sometimes hinted that government was a passive participant in the declining standard of living for their families and their communities, but Anthony's song isolated the federal government as a mustache-twisting evil empire bent on Middle America's destruction.  And of course, everybody associated with the MAGA movement ate it up.  After all, it's been an article of faith in downscale rural America for nearly a generation now that their glory days could be restored if only government stepped out of the way.

My primary question to Oliver Anthony and those who love his song is this:  if the "rich men north of Richmond" aren't stepping up to pay for your insulin, then who will?  This is just one high-profile example of the fundamental disconnect between government-dependent rural communities who nonetheless hate the government and want to see it crushed.  The closest we've come to a reality check came in 2018, when John McCain's downwardly projected thumb was the only thing that prevented Trump from taking away health insurance protections for Americans with preexisting conditions.  Given that that describes pretty much every adult over 30 in West Virginia, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin used the health care debate as the centerpiece of his 2018 campaign, managing an extremely unlikely reelection win in Trump's best state.  With Obamacare's fate seemingly secure at this point, the same voters who narrowly decided in favor of not forfeiting their own lifesaving health care coverage reverted back to detesting everything about the government.

Of course it's more than just health care.  Rural areas require considerable publicly funded infrastructure to be livable and will require much more infrastructural improvement to have a snowball's chance in hell of being economically competitive in a more digitized world.  And yet they're aggressively siding with politicians voting against infrastructure improvements.

To be fair, Oliver Anthony's backyard probably has more salient grounds for their grievance against the federal government than most rural regions, even if it's artificial.  Tightening federal regulations on coal production is without question hurting their economy badly, and undoubtedly plenty of people in places like Farmville, Virginia, would argue that their miner employers were better positioned to pay for their insulin and to facilitate infrastructure improvements before the federal regulations put them out of business with no replacement industry waiting on deck.  Of course that's an incomplete assessment given that the fracking boom of the late 2000s would have priced coal out of the energy marketplace even without tighter federal regulations on coal, but you'd have a hard time making that case convincingly to residents of coal mining regions left for dead.  

Furthermore, decades of irreversible environmental damage was done to the Appalachian landscape by a coal industry insufficiently regulated.  If not for the "rich men north of Richmond" ultimately imposing some limits, the region may no longer be livable even if the mines were still open.  Google Pitcher, Oklahoma, if you're looking for a good example.

So it's fair to say that shifting electoral coalitions have made for the strangest of political bedfellows, the end stage of which is epitomized by Oliver Anthony's tone-deaf lyrics.  But the response to Anthony's populist polemic has been just as telling, with the insufferable cacophony of educated elites browbeating him for being on the wrong side of the culture war.  One take that really jumped out at was from columnist Tyler Cowen of Bloomberg News.  Having followed the shifting political rhetoric since the Trump realignment, Cowen's thesis sounded familiar to me.

Says Cowen:  "Anthony lives in the distant rural town of Farmville, whose population is below 8,000 and which has a per capita income of roughly $13,000. No one should force him to leave, but if he truly wants a higher real wage I have some words of wisdom from John Mellencamp: A job in a small town “provides little opportunity.” Or, as Ray Charles put it, more imperatively: “Hit the Road, Jack.” Or, economics aside, may I ask for something a bit more positive and agentic? How about Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome”?"

Oh so just leave?  And go to where the jobs are?  Gee, why didn't they think of that!?!  So all Farmville residents have to do is abandon their families and flee for the big city?  Finding a buyer for their run-down homes in a depressed local economy and then, once in the city, dump the entire value of their old homes for a one-year lease on a shoebox apartment?  Tyler Cowen just solved rural poverty, folks!

I grew up in the Midwest during the 1980s amidst a backdrop of the farm crisis along with a manufacturing economy in widespread retraction in every sector from meatpacking to steel to auto production.  In the face of this despair, the smug consensus from the college boys was that we needed to quit whining and just leave if our communities were struggling.  Needless to say there wasn't much love for those Reagan-era college boys in the communities they were shrugging off.  But two generations later and a funny thing happened with those college boys....they changed partisan affiliation.

While I'm sure Tyler Cowen meant no ill toward Oliver Anthony's neighbors, you can nonetheless be sure that the tone-deaf assessment on their plight has been noticed...and internalized.  It sure was by me when my political identity was forming and Reagan-era flacks on the right didn't seem to care about my family, friends, and neighbors.  Fast forward to 2023 and, ever since the Trump realignment, I've noticed that it's those on the center-left who are routinely parroting Cowen's words of wisdom to the Trump-voting country bumpkins, and are ultimately hardening their disdain for them in the process.

The common denominator here is that the ideology has become tangibly flexible, secondary to the partisan tribalism.  Rural voters who championed the likes of FDR and Bobby Kennedy for recognizing the federal government's vital role in improving their quality of life now decry the "rich men north of Richmond" as their singular source of oppression, despite it being less rooted in reality than ever before.  Likewise, simplistic bromides about "moving to where the jobs are" can be counted upon from those living in communities of affluence interchangeably between the parties, as it's much easier to tell people you don't like to just go away rather than expend any intellectual energy to come up with long-term solutions.

And that's a snapshot of American politics in the 2020s, detached from all measure of common sense and conventional political gravity in every possible way.  The electoral horse race is still kind of fun, but when the political environment is this schizophrenic, it's nowhere near as fun as it used to be when people's voting habits still made some semblance of sense.