If there is one thing that I have noticed about the music charts of 2023, especially during the summer, it is the proliferation of populist protest songs about the problems of contemporary society that have risen to the top of the charts through sales and found enough streaming to endure on the charts for a considerable length of time.  We have previously commented here about Jason Aldean’s smash hit “Try That In A Small Town,” and today it is time to talk about unknown Virginia artist Oliver Anthony, and his song “Rich Men North Of Richmond.”  Admittedly, I don’t have much to say about the song itself.  There really isn’t anything about this song to dislike, unless one happens to be one of the corrupt political elites or people taking advantage of government aid when they do not properly deserve the largess they are receiving from taxpayers, and the only really political line has to do with the desirability of protecting miners rather than wasting effort on catering to selfish elites on Epstein Island.

What is perhaps most interesting about the song is the discourse about the song.  Olive Anthony is not a well-known artist (unlike Jason Aldean), and he does not come to his moment in the contemporary culture wars with a personal history that can be attacked as is the case with Aldean.  All that I know about him is that he has written a lot of songs, and that they presumably speak to his experiences as a musical and observant rural Virginian.  In a previous decade, it is likely that this sort of song would have been seen as a Democrat song about the blue collar working class that used to vote and think of themselves as Democrats.  In the contemporary culture war, though, for a white man to have a perspective that does not match the urban progressive one is viewed as automatically being racist or fascist, even if the problems and struggles of people to make a living in rural and small-town America do not fall only on white men but on a diverse group of people of both genders and all kinds of backgrounds ranging from people living on reservations to rural Mexican farmworkers to rural blacks in Southern countries, and more besides that.  To disregard a worthwhile message of societal discontent simply because one doesn’t appreciate the identity of the messenger is immensely superficial and foolish.

Besides from being a pun that practically writes itself, “Rich Men North Of Richmond” is a reflection of the stark geographic, cultural, and political divides that are threatening the well-being of our country and show no sign of abating.  Richmond was, for most of the Civil War, the capital of the Confederacy, and the 100 miles (160 km or so) between the two cities was full of bloody battles that decided the fate of the United States in the middle of the 19^th century.  Richmond also happens to be the capital of Virginia, Anthony’s native state (at least as far as I know), and sits at the southern end of the urban agglomeration that includes Washington DC, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, New York City, and lower New England up to the northern suburbs of Boston.  This area includes a majority of the cultural, political, and economic elites of the nation who ride on Acela trains (the only reliable and profitable high-speed rail in the entire country) and who make the decisions that tend to make life more difficult for common people outside of the nation’s elite.

While I do not consider myself to be a populist, a subject I have discussed at length in other places, I consider populism to be something worth paying attention to.  Populism is the result of a society that has gone awry and where the leaders and elites within a country have ceased to act for the well-being of common people who leaders openly profess and celebrate serving and has instead sought to serve its own corrupt interests and neglect entirely the well-being of those less connected and less fortunate.  That sort of corruption has consequences, and included in that is growing resentment and hostility on the part of those whose interests are being neglected and whose perspectives are being ignored, disregarded, and insulted towards those unwise people who are neglecting the people.  Even if the people are not always wise and are certainly not always right, it is not safe to ignore them or disrespect them.  People deserve to be heard and respected, even if one does not agree with them, and when people feel as if no one cares what they think, we can expect there to be ominous consequences sooner rather than later.