J.E. Dyer
The Optimistic Conservative, Aug. 15, 2023
“It’s not even about whether there are jobs. It’s not about chinning up and learning to code.”
I imagine readers all know who Oliver Anthony is. A Virginia factory worker, farmer, and bluegrass singer whose song “Rich Men North of Richmond” has gone pandemic in the infosphere because it resonates so strongly with so many people.
I’ll just start out by saying that it resonates because it is the lived experience of millions of working-class people, not just in America but around the world.
The lived experience.
Selah.
So the huge reaction to it isn’t about an abstract theory of things being wrong. It’s about how well the song expresses what is, in fact, wrong. People with full-time jobs, or working multiple jobs, in good faith because they believe in providing for your own family and yourself, are increasingly unable to afford the basic elements of life: food, shelter, energy, transportation.
And that’s by design. The policies of the “rich men north of Richmond” – the suburbs and exurbs of Washington, D.C. – are the design. It couldn’t be clearer that insane jolts of overspending by the federal government are undermining the value of the U.S. currency, and yet the federal government keeps going for more. It couldn’t be clearer that policies that artificially reduce the availability of the most efficient forms of energy drive all energy prices, and hence the prices of everything else, relentlessly upward. Yet those policies continue.
Meanwhile, the working class, the middle class – their faith, their psyches, their sense of worth, their marriages, their children: all are under cultural attack 24/365. If they’re not being defined as vicious bigot-predators, they’re being consigned to a category of pathetic, inescapable victimhood. One way or another, they’re hosed.
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