Oddly, the viral hit ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ isn’t that hard on the rich

After the conservative celebration of Jason Aldean’s single “Try That in a Small Town” helped spark massive sales of the song, the right can barely contain its glee that it has a new favorite: a previously unknown musician from rural Virginia named Oliver Anthony whose performance of his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” has more than 15 million views on YouTube.

“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bull—- pay,” Anthony’s song begins.

Anthony seems reasonably talented — he has a good voice and the song is pretty catchy — but that’s not why conservatives are cheering “Rich Men North of Richmond” the same way they cheered the emphatically mediocre ode to anti-urban resentment and vigilantism of “Try That in a Small Town.” They’re celebrating because Anthony, perhaps unwittingly, has produced an anthem so perfectly attuned to the Republican agenda that it could have been penned at RNC headquarters.

Though the song’s narrator complains about low pay, the villains of the song aren’t those who refuse to pay that narrator more. Nor, for that matter, does the narrator address the larger forces that keep wages down.  The villains are the rich men who, Anthony sings, “just want to have total control/Want to know what you think, want to know what you do,” making it unclear whether he’s talking about government surveillance or tech companies, which Republicans consider their particular enemy.

Therein lies the key to understanding why the GOP — the party of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for corporations — has no problem with anger at “rich men,” so long as it’s the right rich men. A populist appeal that doesn’t demand more power for workers is fine with them. They know that vague displeasure with the rich disconnected from any discussion of where power lies and who benefits from its distribution doesn’t produce change, it just produces disgruntlement. Which can always be redirected at the right’s enemies.

Thus, Anthony has been lauded by Republican politicians and championed by the conservative media universe and promoted by figures including Dan Bongino, Matt Walsh and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. Walsh said Anthony’s song “may become the protest song of this generation,” while the Daily Caller gushed, “Anthony’s music resonates with America’s working class like no other performer before him.” Both assessments may be just a bit exaggerated.

Regardless of whether Anthony means to criticize the government, Google or both, he doesn’t aim his barbs at the ones devoted to keeping wages down: the industrialists who employ large numbers of blue-collar workers, fight unionization tooth and nail, and lobby against increases to the minimum wage and regulations to improve conditions for workers.

If Anthony has a wage problem, then he’d do better to direct his anger at, say, Koch Industries or Tyson Foods, not to mention the Republican politicians who work to make sure the laws are as congenial to those corporations as possible and who are more likely to offer the working class a stern lecture on the value of bootstrap-pulling than any policy ideas that might boost their incomes.

But not only does “Rich Men of Richmond” fail to adequately call out the powerful, but it also targets the powerless. Anthony sings, “Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.” Working-class people have a lot of problems in America today, but the use of taxes for safety net programs is not one of them, and nothing about the narrator’s quality of life would improve if the U.S. began conditioning food stamp eligibility on a low body-mass index.

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That’s being too literal, though. This is an old story, of working-class struggles and resentments being pointed downward. You know who loves nothing more than to see people who are struggling get mad at people who are struggling even more? Those “rich men,” that’s who.

Anthony is a singer, not a political theorist; so maybe we shouldn’t expect his analysis to be that sophisticated. But the conservative politicians and pundits embracing him understand very well the political utility of his message. There’s something else going on, too: Conservatives are so excited about “Rich Men North of Richmond” because they feel marginalized in popular culture.

And they’re at least partly right to feel that way. 

It’s not because they get “canceled,” or because there’s a conspiracy against them. There are well-documented personality differences that map onto political ideology; among the “Big Five” personality traits, liberals usually score higher on “openness to experience,” which includes exploration and creativity, and conservatives typically score higher on conscientiousness, which includes organization and responsibility.

There are always exceptions, of course, and there is still a fair amount of conservative music out there, especially in country, but the arts are, have always been and most likely always will be populated mostly by people who lean left politically. 

As for the conservative music that does exist, most of it is just bad (see here, or here). The same is true for lots of conservative art (and lots of liberal art, for that matter). But if there are many more liberal artists than conservative ones, then math suggests that more good art will be liberal. Thus, liberals don’t feel the same urgency to promote art they agree with politically. Liberal art is all over the place, so they don’t have to get excited about the existence of a particular song or film that reinforces their values. 

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a communication scholar and author of the upcoming book “Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation,” says songs like Aldean’s and Anthony’s catch on not only because conservative elites jump to promote them but also because they activate vital currents of identity, both in who the singers are and in their message.

“Today’s Republican Party is very homogeneous in its whiteness, Christianity, ruralness and cultural conservatism,” Young told me. “This creates a powerful engine for social identity as a tool for engagement and mobilization — one that fits nicely with populist ideologies (good people versus the corrupt elites; or ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’). Write a song about the virtues of small town life versus the chaos of urban life, or the virtues of rural working class laborers and evils of regulation and taxation, and you hit the jackpot.” 

Anthony has certainly hit the jackpot. And he’ll continue to excite his new fans if he keeps writing songs that criticize social spending and taxes and leave most of the capitalist class unscathed. But he should know: If he gets too specific about the people and the political party that ails the working class, his new friends will quickly change the dial.