No, "Rich Men North of Richmond" is not a "right wing" dog whistle to the reactionary losers of society
It is a global "populist" anthem harboring a cry for recognition by those scorned by our progressive neoliberal elites as well as an inchoate cry for more representative democracy
One thing that has really struck me about all the hullaballoo over Oliver Anthony’s viral hit ballad Rich Men North of Richmond is how much of the mainstream media has almost simultaneously called it both a “working class” and a “right wing” anthem.
Whereas the Midwest Marxist Institute, or what’s left of real socialist worker radicalism in America, slobbered over Anthony’s hit tune as “the voice of the disconnected masses” confirming that “the revolutionary sentiment is there in this country”, the self-described political “left” in America collectively trashed and thrashed the song for what The New York Daily News called its “most common right-wing talking points”.
Aside from the one lone jibe about “the obese milkin’ welfare”, Rich Men could hardly be distinguished in tone and content from Ralph Chaplin’s labor organizing ditty Solidarity Forever. British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg praised Anthony’s creation as “the ghost of [late US folk artist] Woody Guthrie whispering in my ear”.
But it remains marvelously ironic, even if it’s not in any manner surprising, that so much of America’s not-so-intelligent intelligentsia has seen fit to seize on Anthony’s canticle, which hit number 1 on Billboard’s top 100 this week, as the first true augury (never mind the fate of Trump) of the ferocious fascist storm front putatively boiling up with its hellish black thunderheads on the electoral horizon.
Given their reaction to Anthony’s music, I doubt that the talking heads at Fox & Friends will seriously have to worry any longer about “Marxists” skulking the halls of academia, infiltrating Hollywood studios, or staging midnight coups from Seattle to Sarasota in corporate HR departments. The so-called “cultural Marxists” about which the PR flaks for “right wing” office holders constantly complain are about as Marxist as the Marx brothers ever were.
Although armchair Marxism has been the go-to brand of au courant academic discourse since the heyday of the “red diaper babies”, it has little to do any longer with Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ theory of historical materialism, the “expropriation” of the value of the worker’s labor, or the recurrent “crises” of capitalism that are supposed to lead to the climactic communist revolution.
In fact, for all the misnamed “cultural Marxists” revolution is utterly out of the question. There can be no revolution, because there are no longer any “revolutionary masses”. There are only various and sundry “oppressed” or “marginalized” personal identities that have virtually nothing to do with one’s contribution to what Marx termed “labor power” or the “relations of production”.
The “marginalized”, whatever that connotes concretely, are certainly not anything resembling what in Marxism has always been called the “universal class,” that is, the “proletariat”, or the urban low-skilled, subsistence-wage hordes of factory or transportation workers who in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made titans of industry like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Heny Ford filthy rich and famous.
Today’s “capitalists” no longer own or manage factories; they code AI algorithms or run hedge funds. They are the key constituents of what the business economist Peter Drucker around the turn of the millennium called the “knowledge class” who fit almost to a T, as I have pointed out, the description Marx and Engels singled out as the “ruling class”.
They are also the well-paid merchants of influence – agency bureaucrats, federal contractors, political consultants, and an incontinent spectrum of lobbyists and special interests – who have turned Washington DC with its mind-blowing wealth, rank corruption, and Luciferian hauteur into the new de facto Roma aeterna, the meretricious capitol of the global neoliberal empire.
They are, in essence, “the rich men north of Richmond”.
At the same time these “rich men” no longer fear any “Communist”-inspired revolt of the working classes, as their forefathers did, because not only do they claim to have all the Marxist rhetoric nailed down (just as the Soviet apparatachiks did in 1989), they have mastered the black art of gaslighting the uneducated working masses into believing they themselves are the “oppressors”.
It’s not unlike the famous parable in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamzov known as “The Grand Inquisitor”. In the parable Jesus returns to earth in Seville and confronts the Grand Inquisitor, who is torturing and burning at the stake thousands of alleged heretics. The Grand Inquisitor arrests and condemns Jesus, largely because of all his talk about “freeing the captives”.
“We are completing your work,” the Inquisitor unctuously lectures Jesus. Jesus’ work was incomplete, according to the Inquisitor, because the Gospel message was never really about freedom. Freedom gets in the way of accomplishing some grand historical purpose, however our leaders define it. Only the elite few who are granted absolute power to control people’s lives in pursuit of this purpose are allowed true freedom.
And that’s really the heart of the matter.
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Marxism as a political movement ultimately collapsed in ruins because it demanded total control by a self-appointed elite not only of the means of production, but of people’s inner lives and consciences. It promised a “worker’s paradise”, yet it ruinously failed to deliver even the material goods beyond a subsistence level because it denied basic human dignity and freedom. Cuba and North Korea are perduring testimony to the fraud of classic Marxism.
What has replaced Marxism as a viable emancipatory mass movement around the world is something vaguely understood as “populism”. Rich Men North of Richmond is decidedly a populist anthem, but the word “populism” unfortunately has too many disparate associations to carry much theoretical freight at the moment.
According to Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser, “populism is one of the main political buzzwords of the 21st century. The term is used to describe left-wing presidents in Latin America, right-wing challenger parties in Europe, and both left-wing and right-wing presidential candidates in the United States.” Recently in the United States and Europe it has come to be virtually synonymous with “right wing” politics, which turns out to be by and large a function of its demonization by the dominant progressive neoliberal elites.
Yet, as Mudde and Kaltwasser emphasize, populism in its global context implies a certain uncompromising vision of democracy. “Populism”, they write, “can help achieve radical democracy by reintroducing conflict into politics and fostering the mobilization of excluded sectors of society with the aim of changing the status quo.”
That does not sound exactly “right wing”.
Historian Michael Kazin characterizes populism as “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.”
This poignant and controversial stanza in Anthony’s song thus comes to mind:
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
The line comparing “miners” with “minors on an island somewhere”, of course, is an oblique reference to the kerfuffle during the West Virginia Democratic primary in 2016 when Hillary Clinton made the clueless comment that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” while her husband former President Bill Clinton was regularly cavorting with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Of course, the irony is totally lost on commentators such as Brad Onishi, for whom any mention now of child sexual exploitation is tantamount to “conspiracy thinking” that automatically sends it audience slithering down the slippery slope into the voracious craw of QAnon.
According to Onishi, “the idea of child trafficking is now a conspiracy haven”, even though the U.S. State Department estimates that there are “an estimated 27.6 million victims [of trafficking] worldwide at any given time”, while the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime declares that “one in every three victims detected is a child.”
Onishi claims that the song introduces us to a dark “world view” cobbled together from sheer resentment and “grievance”, which in turn can be fractioned down to “a list of conspiracies, and threatening ’others.’” That, to be sure, is emblematic of the paranoid discourse of America’s cultural elites, who seem to be projecting their own fragilities and anxieties on to a growing, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial populist upsurge in this country.
If Rich Men is simply the swan song for an angry, alienated, démodé grievance subculture, then its meteoric and mind-boggling popularity tells us there really is something dangerously askew in this country. But perhaps the song’s impact implies the opposite. It is our self-absorbed political class and its jaded commentariat that is the root of the problem.
In his recent free concert in Moyock, North Carolina Anthony opened with a prayer and in a later interview gushed:
I mean I've gotten messages from people in countries that I don't know how to pronounce. This is something that has touched people globally and there's a reason for that.
Rich Men North of Richmond is indeed a populist anthem.
Populism is a burgeoning global phenomenon, and it cannot be pigeonholed into the all-too-familiar right-left binaries. Yes, there are snorts of resentment. Yes, there are unmistakable whiffs or racism. Yes, there are crass displays of political fetishism and idolatry, as crops up more often than not among Donald Trump’s acolytes.
But Mudde and Kaltwasser are spot on in their take on populism as the Cuisinart for a future radical democracy. As many more savvy and sober analysts in recent years have observed, so much of populist “resentment” stems from the constant stereotyping and smackdown of their values and lifestyles, as Hillary Clinton’s cavalier remark about a “basket of deplorables” or Obama’s comment in the 2008 campaign concerning people “who cling to guns or religion”.
The pervasive elite assumption that Anthony’s fans are just a swarm of conspiracy-obsessed bitterenders may be the most egregious sort of prejudice.
In fact, Anthony apparently upset some of his “right wing” followers when in an interview he opined that he only wanted “people to start appreciating each other for human beings and look beyond political differences and ideology, and a lot of things that I see corporate media and education doing, which is making everyone identify each other’s differences and not their similarities”.
And in what sounds little different from the boilerplate of a corporate DEI statement he added: “what makes us strong, is our diversity.”
From Lenin’s Communist “vanguards” to nineteenth century colonial administrators to today’s academic constabulary for policing language it is always the case that certain self-appointed elites are adamantly convinced that they are the only ones who can bring about substantive social change by blaming and shaming, if not intimidating, the refractory masses into the proper “world view”, which of course is the one that most advantages them.
They can only succeed for a season, however, by forcing on public perception a crude caricature of the truly “diverse” populations they claim to represent.
As the great late twentieth century French thinker Michel Foucault wrote, “there are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ‘politicians’ think.”
Populism is one of those ideas, but its implications have only barely begun to be thought. Populism is neither “right” nor “left”. It is not in any way “adjacent” (as the current progressive neoliberal snark terms it) to QAnon, or fascism, or even to Marxism in its orthodox manifestations.
As the living French critic and philosopher Alain de Benoist insists, “populism does not contest democracy, but rather the insufficiently democratic character of representative democracy and the regression of systems founded on representation toward oligarchy.”
That is the palpable “idea,” or “inconvenient truth”, before our current progressive neoliberal elites tremble. It is an idea that our elites cannot control, which is why Anthony, regardless of his personal character flaws or profound human failings, seems so appalling.
And it is Foucault who chimes in here as well: “But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”