14 Aug The Rich Men North of Richmond
Donald Trump has…well…“issues.” We know it. You know it. We know that you know it. We don’t need to dwell on it. We found his presidency uncomfortable, and we would, undoubtedly, find a potential second term even more so.
That said, there is no way to deny that the man has captured not just the imagination of tens of millions of Americans but also the zeitgeist of the present era. And despite the fact that this “era” is well into its second decade, almost no one else among our potential political leaders seems to have grasped what Trump has. Almost no one else in politics understands the spirit of the moment.
We imagine that at least a few of you know who Oliver Anthony is. For those of you who don’t, he’s just “a farmer living off the grid” in Farmville Virginia who is suddenly the hottest thing in country music,” as the Richmond Times- Dispatch notes:
An acoustic performance of the Farmville singer’s blue-collar anthem was posted by user radiowv on YouTube on Aug. 11 and has already amassed over 8.5 million views as of this writing.
Billboard wrote, “The Virginia resident is resonating with music listeners, thanks to his song raging against greed and injustice.” The lyrics explore “the pain, frustration and angst of the working class into lines that rage against greedy rich men,” Billboard wrote.
“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day/Overtime hours for bulls*** pay… It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to/For people like me and people like you/Wish I could just wake up and it not be true, But it is, oh, it is…These rich men north of Richmond/Lord knows they all just wanna have total control.”
“’Rich Men From North Richmond’ has also surged to No. 1 on the iTunes Country chart, outpacing the former chart leader, Jason Aldean’s controversial track ‘Try That in a Small Town,’” Billboard wrote.
In the aftermath of Anthony’s meteoric rise late last week, several arguments about him and to whom he “belongs” broke out on social media. Right-wing populists embraced him most fervently, but socialists/Leftists/Marxists also claimed him, insisting that his message is their message and that his lyrics inarguably articulate the “class struggle.”
As it turns out, both are right.
Oliver Anthony’s lyrics and spirit do, indeed, speak of and to the class struggle, as the Leftists insist. The catch, however, is that his class struggle – like almost all Americans’ class struggle – is one of social class, not economic class. Anthony’s anthem – Just like Jason Aldean and his “Try That in a Small Town” before it – is the plaintive cry not of the workers in opposition to the bourgeoisie but of the Country Class in opposition to the Ruling Class. And in that sense, Anthony and Aldean and countless others were all foreseen more than 13 years ago by our friend, the late, great Angelo Codevilla:
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter….
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
We figure that it’s pretty clear what all of this has to do with Donald Trump, but just to make sure, we’ll let Codevilla continue:
[W]hile most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.
Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.
For whatever reason and by whatever voodoo, the billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star managed to become the representative for the disenfranchised majority of Americans whom Codevilla identified more than five years before Trump even announced his candidacy. And despite all of his problems and failures and…uhhhh…“foibles” Trump remains their representative today.
Yesterday, Oliver Anthony performed live at a farmers’ market in North Carolina – and the place was crazy – 25 acres of people crammed together to watch some guy they’d LITERALLY never heard of three days earlier sing his ruling class “protest” songs. And while Anthony himself claims to be a political “centrist,” we don’t doubt for a second that the Venn Diagram of those who showed up at the farmers’ market and Trump voters looks a lot like a single circle, maybe with the edges blurred a little bit.
We know that many of you loathe Donald Trump. And heaven knows we have our own thoughts about him, his politics, and his behavior. But that’s almost entirely beside the point. The otherwise disenfranchised Country Class still views him as their only voice, their only hope to disrupt the Ruling Class and its ongoing destruction of the nation.
For our part, we, like Yoda, would argue that “there is another.” One other candidate speaks bluntly about the clash between the Ruling Class and the rest of us – ironically, the second-richest man in the Republican primary contest, our friendquaitance Vivek Ramaswamy. And while the mainstream media remains puzzled by his rapid rise in the polls, it seems as obvious to us: Vivek sees – probably even more clearly than Trump – what Codevilla saw more than a dozen years ago and what Oliver Anthony feels today. And although he doesn’t say so explicitly, what his candidacy offers is representation for the disenfranchised, without all of the aforementioned “foibles” of Trump.
Whether Vivek can succeed in making his case remains to be seen, as does whether Trump can overcome himself to win the GOP nomination and the presidency again. Whatever happens, though, the spirit of upheaval among the Country Class is likely only in its infancy – despite being more than a decade old.
