The politics of "Rich Men North of Richmond"

 Let's do something different this morning.  During the week of another Trump indictment, there is a more interesting demonstration of our polarized cultural moment, this time again related to country music.  A few weeks ago, I wrote a post, somewhat more nuanced than you are likely to find elsewhere, on Jason Aldean, the history of violence in music, and how polarization now interacts with violent attitudes.  (It's only bad when your side does it.)  Now, the internet is in a state of internet-ness over another song.  Oliver Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond."  This one is more interesting for many reasons.  First, it is better music.  When I commented on Jason Aldean, I wrote about the history of Appalachian murder ballads, how that carried forward, and any examination by the hypothetical and entirely non-existent reader of this blog would recognize that I am a sincere fan of "real" country music, with all of the snobbery implied by the phrase, along with the self-awareness implied by the snark-quotes.  I have never found anything of value in Jason Aldean, nor what we commonly call "bro-country."  Oliver Anthony, however, is playing in a tradition recognizable in a lineage from Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb, passed through modern troubadours, and singing a song that should evoke the Merle Travis classic, "16 Tons," but with an anger that honestly isn't even that far from Woody Guthrie.  In 2023, though, he is a white man from Appalachia, and a couple of the ideas lean right, even if they are not actually violations of most mainstream American values.  The left is simply so accustomed to the entertainment industry veering so hard left that when someone does otherwise, it is as though you have eaten nothing but sugary junk food for years, and then someone feeds you some fruit that isn't quite ripe yet.  Some people like that.  Maybe you don't, but your sense of taste will have been so warped by your diet that you cannot assess it.

Let's dig into the lyrics, and the politics surrounding the song.  As music, this is good.  You may not like the style of singing, but I love it, and his style of guitar is efficient but effective, although not by any means virtuosic.  As for the song, Oliver Anthony has a perspective.  You are entitled to disagree with it, and to critique it, but by the same token, he is entitled to his perspective, to speak it, and to sing it.  Behold, the glory of the first amendment.  As I listen (and read, since I find it easier to analyze when I read), I find a range of ideas, some of which strike me as more, and some less insightful than others, but before I get into it, two points.  First, I want there to be a range of ideas in the world.  I do not want uniformity.  I want people discussing and debating in good faith.  Second, you need to read and listen to those who disagree with you.  Can you explain why?  As you will see, there are points on which I disagree with Mr. Anthony, and I shall explain why.  But as a song, unlike what Jason Aldean did, this is a good song.

First, here is his performance, embedded.  Appreciate with an open mind, even if you do not generally listen to Appalachian-style country.

There it is.  Now, let's go through the lyrics, line by line.  I will give commentary on each passage as I see fit, and then provide commentary on how our politically and culturally polarized nation is reacting to what strikes me as a kind of updated "16 Tons" with a few modern taboos for the far left.

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day,

Overtime hours for bullshit pay;

So I can sit out here and waste my life away.

Drag back home and drown my troubles away.

I introduced my analysis by referencing Merle Travis, but of course, the song is darker.  The first line at least sounds to me like an implicit reference, but perhaps that's me.  The turn towards a description of a wasted life of substance abuse should make the listener think of some important issues of the day.  If you hear that and get angry at Mr. Oliver-- singing from the perspective of a hard-working man trying to support himself, despairing and turning to substances-- then you are the asshole.  Yes, I am saying that many of those excoriating Mr. Anthony are the assholes.  Anyone working hard to support himself, and turning to substances needs respect for working, and support for substance abuse, not abuse from the left.  This guy?  This guy is your new enemy because you think he leans right?  The fact of that reaction tells you something about what is wrong with polarization.

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.

Personally, I find this lament less interesting than the first stanza.  The world has gotten worse, it has gotten worse for people like me and for people like you (is that everyone?-- we'll get to that), there is a desire for it to be merely a nightmare.  Mr. Anthony is a resident of a relatively poor, Appalachian town, hence the lament.  But "poor" relative to what?  This is a critical question, and my reaction to the line is based on that baseline assessment.  Shortly, we will get to a reference to "miners," but we can ask the empirical question.  Who has a higher standard of living: someone living in the rural South today, or an Appalachian coal miner in, say, 1900?  I do not know Mr. Anthony's biography, and one hesitates to say anything about his life without specific information (or rather, I hesitate, even though most of my fellow professors would excoriate him for his white privilege, despite that regardless of color, they have more privilege than he does-- professors are shit people), but the lives of Appalachian residents, and coal miners in particular, were not generally the subject of bucolic romanticization.  Please consult the songs of Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, and others, perhaps a Southern novelist like William Faulkner.

Generally speaking, I have been convinced by Steven Pinker's perspective that one needs to take the long view of history.  In the long view, poverty rates have gone down, life expectancy has gone up, and by all such measures, what the world is getting to is, well, better.  If I had a choice of being born in rural Virginia circa the birth of Mr. Anthony, or 1900, I'd choose the former.

From a broader philosophical perspective, the song takes a very different tack from what even most modern conservatives assert, and quite different from my own.

Life is hard.  The world is cold, and people suck.  These things are not in your control.  What is?  What can you do?  You have agency.  Consider what modern conservatives are telling residents of the cities that are being torn apart by leftist policies, like San Francisco.

Leave.

If you stay, then what happens to you is on you.  Listen to the chorus of conservatives telling crime victims and anyone suffering under the disaster of leftist governance in such places, and this is what you will hear.  If you stay, then what happens to you is on you.

Yet you never hear the corollary from conservatives.  You never hear the Sam Kinison shout of "move to the jobs."

Why is one douche-y and the other not?  Which one?

That depends on your party, ideology, and place in our socio-cultural battle front.

Yet what can you do?  This is the real question.  My point was that one has agency.  You can do something, even if that something is move.  Is that a cold answer?  The world is cold.  Perhaps that's the conservative answer, but if that is an answer unsatisfying to Oliver Anthony, and unsatisfying to you, then are you making common cause with him?  Hmmm...

Return to his question, though.  What has the world come to?  Is it better or worse?  By what standard?  By what baseline?  And to whom?  This brings me to that line, about people like me, and people like you.  To whom is Mr. Anthony singing?  The song doesn't say.  It is easy for anyone seeking to take offense to assume, "not me," but is there anything in the specific lyric to assume that?  Honestly, the only direct line about it would be what's coming up, which would leave out those of Native American descent, in which case, I doubt it implies a lack of sympathy.  Other than that, there is the core attack on the titular "Rich Men North of Richmond," but you can either assume you are included or not, as you choose.  Those who are hyper-conscious of race will assume racial content because they always assume racial content, but where is it in the text?  That'll just be because he's a right-leaning white guy from Appalachia.  He didn't say anything about race.  Don't read that into the song when it isn't there.

As a general interpretation of the passage, then, I will leave you with this.  Lucius Seneca will tell you never to complain, not even to yourself.  As he and his fellows would remind you, you do not control the world, but instead, your reaction to it.  Over what do you have control in a world that, in the long view (see Pinker), has gotten better?

Interestingly, for those who have paid attention to the matter, Anthony put up a video in which he made statements somewhat closer to that view than the bleak content of the song.  Instead of just lamenting the suckiness of the world, he asks the viewer, what can you do to make the world better?  He can sing a song that touches on the darker emotions without necessarily being fatalistic.  Interesting.  Moving on.

Livin' in the new world,

With an old soul;

I'll pause here, mid-refrain.  I have never been fond of the "old soul" cliche, but at least Anthony does something poetic with it.  If one listens in bad faith, one might read the new world/old world split as specifically a reference to those of European descent, but that would be bad faith.  I have seen the phrase, "old soul," applied across races.  Don't look for fights.  If you do, you are listening in bad faith, and you are an asshole.

These rich men North of Richmond,

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control;

Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do,

And they don't think you know, but I know that you do.

Let's now pause for a moment-- and I will return to this-- and reflect on the fact that the left is upset about a song that demonizes rich men.

One can read the phrase as either DC or New York.  The song asserts that there are rich men-- specifically northern rich men-- who want "total control."  There is a lot here.  Writing about authoritarianism has a long history in music.  Woody Guthrie wrote "this machine kills fascists" on his guitar, but unlike antifa, he didn't actually engage in violence.  Considering that, Anthony actually draws lineage back to Guthrie.  Is there anyone seeking "total control?"  Do we have a true, totalitarian movement in this country?

I am as hard on Donald Trump as anyone, and I have no patience for the far left.  Donald Trump really does want power, as does the far left.  Trump is no ideologue.  He's just a narcissist.  But, he idolizes dictators like Kim Jong Un, who murders anyone who even thinks about criticism.  The far left wants to make everyone sit through re-education struggle sessions for thought crime under the guise of DEI.  Yes, there are people who want total control.

Most don't.  Unfortunately, we cannot ignore the outlying voices because the outlying voices drive the dialog.

But here's the thing.  Anthony didn't say which voices.  If you want to listen, you can read any voice you want into the song.  The fact that he said "north" means that you can infer his politics, but until Trump fled to his Mar-a-Lago fortress, Trump was north of Richmond!  That said, you might infer that Anthony didn't mean Trump.  Does that mean you can't listen that way?  No.  You can listen however you want.  That's your choice.  The song is written openly, which allows you that freedom, and if you listen in a hostile mindset, that was your choice.

Yet does anyone care what Anthony thinks?  Only because he wrote a song that went viral.  Otherwise, no one would care what he thinks.  No one cares what I think, and compare.  He's a guy from rural Virginia, who just happened to write a good song.  Which... means he has some real talent.

Me?  I'm supposedly one of those hated elites.  A college professor.  Ph.D.  Piled higher and deeper.  I've written books.  The whole deal.  And no one cares what I think.  Not a one, least of all Case Western Reserve University unless they can find a way to weaponize it against me.

Here's a lesson.  A good one about who really matters, and it is not me.

I like that.  Write a good song, and you matter, but otherwise, no.  No one cares what you think.

But there's nothing wrong with that.  No one should care what you or I think, because no one is entitled to that.  There is also a great deal of freedom in no one caring what you think, because you can think what you want.  In other words, Oliver Anthony is quite wrong.

No one cares what you think, or rather, very few people care, except in rare circumstances.  The titular villains are few and far between.  Mostly, people are just waiting for their turn to talk.

There is one more point which we must address, which is the populism.  Anthony's line at the end of this passage is the claim to knowledge.

What does he know, which he is told he does not know?  The claim is non-specific, but I can virtually guarantee that he believes falsehoods.  And not just falsehoods, but lies under the guise of anti-elitism.  There is a benefit to Mr. Anthony's rejection of my kind.  He won't fall for postmodernist nonsense coming out of academia, academia being a cesspit of absurdity unworthy of consideration in the 2020s.  When my kind tells him that up is down because there's no such thing as truth, as critical theorists are wont to do, he won't fall for it.

Then again, while I will not specifically accuse him of believing a specific conspiracy theory, does he understand the principles of macroeconomics, which are counterintuitive?  They fuck with my head, and I study the math.  Pay attention to this point.  We shall return to it shortly.

But the thing about math is that you can prove it, unlike the postmodernist nonsense that leftist academics spew, frequently with a disdain for math, or the concept of proof.

What does Mr. Anthony know, or claim to know?  I don't know.

Again, though, by leaving it as non-specific, if you want to listen without judging him, you can listen without accusing him.

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end,

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond.

Anthony writes about inflation, which is real.  There are old blues songs about prices going up.  It is difficult to conjure an objection.

Taxes.  Do you object to The Beatles' "Taxman," from Revolver?  Democrats, and the left generally, seem to have made a strange shift on taxes.  Once upon a time, they viewed taxes as a necessary evil.  Both.  Necessary to pay for important programs, but still evil in that they took money away from you.  The left was capable of understanding the moral tradeoff.  The shade of grey.  Something happened, though, and now the left sees taxation as an intrinsic good, as though the act of taking money from people is not morally fraught, but a good in and of itself.  The more staunchly the right opposes taxation, the more the left defends taxation as intrinsically good and right rather than a necessary evil.  Hence, the left now goes into a strange, defensive crouch any time they hear a negative statement about taxes.  They advocate the government taking money, not because they want to do something with the money, but because you shouldn't have it.  The confiscation is now the point.

That wasn't how they used to think of taxation.

Do they skip track 1 on Revolver?  The kids probably don't even know the album.  Or what an "album" is.

When you look at your withholdings, you might react negatively.  Of course, I remember the good, old days of tax refunds, instead of amount due.

Motherfuckers.

Empirically, the less money you make, the less you pay in taxes, to the point that the lowest brackets pay payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare), but no income taxes, and that isn't all that much in percentage terms.  The marginal value of each dollar, at the lower end of the income distribution, is higher because of diminishing marginal returns, but that first line does overstate taxation.  The US has one of the lowest tax rates in the developed world, and combine that with progressive tax rates (by the technical definition) and Oliver really is overstating it, even if it isn't fun to see withholdings.

More, remember what I said earlier about Pinker and rising standards of living?  Would that have happened without someone solving the collective action problem?  We can debate in good faith, but I tend to think that having schools, roads, hospitals, and such has allowed economic development.  Taxed "to no end?"  Boy, would he be surprised to learn what taxes were like in the glory days coming out of WWII!  If it's low taxes you want, welcome to paradise, my friend.  Or you could try moving to some country without the state capacity to collect taxes.  I like it here, though.  Also, now is better than then by Pinker's data.

The proper tax rate is a debatable point, but the long-term trends, particularly on the lower end of the income distribution, have been downward.

Do tax rates have anything to do with inflation?  Well, funny you should ask.  Remember I said something a moment ago about the counterintuitive nature of macroeconomics?  Cutting taxes is inflationary.  This is the kind of thing that you might not think.  After all, you might think that if prices are going up, the government should just cut your taxes to help you pay those higher prices, right?  Mr. Anthony's connection, or at least implied connection even suggests it.

Here's the problem.  If you increase the supply of money in circulation, sellers charge higher prices, which means higher inflation.  Counterintuitive?  Perhaps, but the math checks out, and that's why pencil-pushing eggheads like me exist.  Actually, I hate pencils.  It's the sound they make.  A good fountain pen on Rhodia paper?  Ooooh, that's the stuff, baby!  But regardless, you take my point.  There's a big difference between counterintuitive math that has been tested by time and replicated, and postmodernist bunk.  If you write it all off because your "common sense" tells you better, you will make some critical errors.  Like telling the government to cut taxes as a way to deal with inflation.

I wish politicians would look out for miners,

And not just minors on an island somewhere;

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat;

And the obese milkin' welfare.

This is where we get to the real ideological controversies.

Why has the coal mining industry declined?  There are two issues.  There are the economics of mining, and there is regulation.  Economically, the easy stuff to mine was mined long ago, so it is more costly to mine what we have yet to mine, coal is less valuable on the fossil fuel market, and there are other fossil fuels, like crude and natural gas.  I would add that technology has reduced the need for "miners."  Then, regulation has affected the economics, and the question one might ask is, if you took away regulation, how many jobs would return to coal country, and at what educational requirement?

I know enough to tell you that this is the tension, but I don't actually know enough to give you an answer.  And since I have no "team," and I never just deferred to a team anyway, I'm not just going to give you my nonexistent team's team-approved answer.

It is, actually, OK to say "I don't know."

The "minors on islands" line was bad writing.  Sorry, Oliver, bad writing.  Regardless, the notion that a return to laissez faire economics in fossil fuel would create a jobs rush is questionable, remembering too how horrific those long-ago jobs were.  Any jobs that did return would likely be a) fewer, and b) higher skilled jobs.  How much of an economic benefit would that be to Appalachia?  "I don't know."

It is interesting to see the line, though, that he wants politicians to help.  One of Reagan's famous one-liners was that the scariest line in the English language was, "we're from the government, and we're here to help."  Is that what you want?  Someone from the government to show up and say, I'm here to help?

Dear lefties:  You are demonizing a man who is taking a position directly contrary to Saint Ronald Reagan.  In other words, he's not really a conservative, and you are having a moment of negative partisanship freakout.  Get a clue, and a grip, and a history book.  Aren't y'all always claiming that you want to teach real/true history?

The real controversy, though, comes next.  Homeless people, starving on the streets, contrasted with the image not just of people milking welfare, but obese people abusing welfare.

And there it is.  That is how Oliver Anthony made the left lose their shit.  Yet think about what he said.

a)  Are there homeless people, on the streets, without enough to eat?  Yes.

b)  Are there people taking public money?  Who are, by the technical definition, "obese?"  Yes.

You can have one of several reactions to that set of true statements.  

1)  You can get angry at the fact that both are true.

2)  You can get angry at the fact that someone said it.

3)  You can look deeper and ask why.

I think Door Number 2 is the most unproductive door, but that's the door through which the left has walked.  Instead, I'll take Door Number 3, with an option on walking through Door Number 1 later if I deem it appropriate.

Why are people on public money obese?  Biology doesn't care who pays for your food.  It cares about what you eat, and how sedentary your lifestyle is.

Consider what you eat.  No joke this time.  I beat that joke into the ground, but you really should consider what you eat.  Many recipients of SNAP benefits eat unhealthily.  Why?  Your answer will tell me a lot about your party/ideology because a significant underlying factor in that division is the extent to which you see matters as determined by external forces or your own choices.

So, either you live in a food desert, or you just have bad habits which are being subsidized by tax payers.

A food desert is a strange term, but a measurable phenomenon.  Many of the poorest neighborhoods, where the highest concentrations of people are on SNAP benefits, do not have full service grocery stores, but do have small stores with large concentrations of junk food.  To the left, people on SNAP benefits are disproportionately overweight, not because of any choices they have made-- ideologically opposed as they are to the notion of individual responsibility-- but because they live in food deserts.  Are there any problems with this, empirically?  Two.  First, it doesn't explain soda consumption, which is a very important cause/predictor of obesity.  Cut out the soda, and you do a lot of good for yourself, health-wise and money-wise.  Second, it would suggest that the problem would exist only in those neighborhoods that could be classified as food deserts.  Control for that, and you should explain obesity away.

I might also note that if you want grocery stores and other such retailers to open in these areas, start prosecuting crime instead of preaching that it's OK to steal, and you really need to stop saying that the most excusable theft is the theft of food (which is hardly all that is being stolen anyway).  You're not exactly giving the companies that own these stores an incentive to set up shop in such areas.

To the right, the phenomenon I just mentioned, despite the fact that I can show it empirically, cannot even be discussed.  Well, you can talk about the crime, but not the geographic proximity to better stores or the cost differential between junk food and healthier food, both of which are... [gasp]... structural.

Structural factors are real.  They exist.  Did I just lose all of the credibility I might have built with any right-leaning reader that might exist?

Too bad.  Measurable shit is real.

Sometimes each side has a basic, core, empirical point and you should notice.  And yes, it is OK to observe that there is an unhealthy circumstance called, "obesity."  One of the more dangerous and destructive movements within critical theory has been the claim that doctors are just making up all this stuff about diabetes and heart disease and all of the other things that we can show, empirically, follow from being overweight, and yes, there is such a thing as overweight, and stop drinking soda.

And noting that, can one feel any anger, not necessarily at the concept of welfare, but at the juxtaposition of the starving person on the street, and the obese person on SNAP, who almost certainly drinks soda?

Let me put it this way.  On the scale from totally reasonable to absolute batshit, 0 to 10, where would you rate the following proposal: restrict SNAP to disallow soda, take those savings, put them towards homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

Is that a 10 on the batshit-o-meter?  9?  I mean, the left has really lost it about Anthony's lyric here, so it's gotta be bonkers, right?

Even if you are among the people who opposes the regularly proposed restrictions on the use of SNAP benefits, there are policy beliefs about which reasonable people can disagree, and there are policy beliefs that we simply set aside as looney-tunes.  Injecting bleach during a pandemic, for example.

Do you disagree, and also categorize the SNAP reallocation proposal as bonkers?  Really?

Anthony's lyric isn't so much an opposition to welfare, as the juxtaposition of welfare abuse and unaddressed starvation and homelessness.  To criticize Anthony honestly, one must address not only the obesity/welfare issue, but the juxtaposition.

Furthermore, as a point of contrast, consider JJ Grey's "Country Ghetto," which is actually a kind of R&B/blues song (by one of my favorite artists around), but includes the lyric, "starve to death before you live by a government handout."  Grey sings derisively about even the concept of welfare.  That is not what Mr. Anthony is doing, so much as observing the contrast between a man starving, and the obese person taking welfare.  At no point does Anthony reject the idea of welfare.  Merely that juxtaposition.  So consider the next line.

Well, god, if you're 5 foot 3 and you're 300 pounds,

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds;

This is a very specific policy proposal, and while you can disagree with Mr. Anthony, as many leftists do, his position is centrist, if expressed angrily in the form of a reference to a morbidly obese person eating something that no one of that BMI has any business eating.  If you are 5'3" and 300 lbs., you are going to die.  You need to exercise, you need to stop eating junk food, and you need to do it now.

For your own good, and for those who love you, stop.  Please.

And if you do not understand why someone objects to buying junk food for such a person, you need to leave the leftist echo chamber.

Tenure means the leftist echo chamber must keep signing my paychecks, though.

In tenure veritas.

Anyway, remember the Lindsey, Pluckrose & Boghossian "Grievance Studies" hoax?  One of the more distressing (among many distressing) hoax papers within that set was a paper proposing a fat body building competition.  Yes, you read that right.  Fat bodybuilding, as a competitive sport.  Not competitive eating, like Joey Chestnut.  I mean, the goal is to pack on as much fat as possible.  Postmodernists in "fat studies" are so crazy that they buy this.  These people (academics) are insane.

But Oliver Anthony's position, which is mainstream, is the problem?

The lyric generates controversy for "fat-shaming," but that is not actually what Anthony is doing.  He is objecting to the notion that he should have to pay for the junk food of someone who is morbidly obese, and do so in the context of homeless people starving on the street.  The left simply wants to treat the entire topic of obesity as verboten.  Yet again, a proposal to restrict the use of SNAP, while it might bother you, should be something you can debate rather than trying to shout it down as though it ranks as a 9 or 10 on the batshit-o-meter.

We may not have a simple solution to hunger or obesity.  However, the left's aversion to any mention of obesity has meant that the valid juxtaposition that Anthony raises, in which he treats homelessness and starvation as real problems (the left sometimes pretends to care about these things), goes ignored.

Did obesity have any correlation with COVID mortality?

Ooooh, we're not supposed to talk about that, are we.

If you didn't like Anthony's song, you're really not going to like the answer to that one, but that's the problem.  The left has gotten so averse to any mention of obesity that it blinds itself to real answers and real problems about which they pretend to care, like homelessness, starvation (and COVID).

Healthy diet, regular exercise.  Social science rarely replicates, but the benefits of a healthy diet and exercise?  Hell yes, that replicates.

Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground,

'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down.

Are we supposed to get angry at Oliver Anthony for talking about suicide?  Aren't we supposed to be concerned with this?  There is, of course, a gender imbalance in suicide.  What we make of that is strangely political.  One can read Anthony's lyrics, if done closely, as a comment on treatment of men, and we can then ask about the prominence of misandry.

Does misandry exist anywhere?  Yes.  Is misandry what I might characterize, mathematically, as a net effect in America in 2023?  Um... probably not.  In leftist circles, you will find misandry, but leftism only really predominates in places like academia and the entertainment industry.  Throughout most of the corporate and business world, the top jobs are held by men.  Do I buy this at the societal level, even having interacted with some obvious misandrists?

No.  I can tell the difference between the people with whom I have interacted and what happens society-wide.  If you pay too much attention to tv, or movies, or shit like that, and certain kinds of political dialog, I can see why some men get the misandrist vibe, but empirically, the data just don't support it.

The rhetoric is there, though.  Does the rhetoric have an effect?  I return to the lessons of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and others.  You don't control those who say vile shit.  You control your reaction.  People say stupid, vile, misandrist shit in American popular culture, entertainment, politics, and if you want to say something about the "zeitgeist," or whatever, have fun with that, but if you let that affect you, that's on you.  That's not kicking you down.

However, are we supposed to talk about increasing suicide rates or not?  Anthony does it, and people get angry, I guess because he didn't do it with the proper leftist obeisances.  The left claims to care a lot about this, though, and then they get angry at a guy who clearly cares more than they do, maybe because he notes the gender disparity without talking about what shit men are, 'cuz yeah, that'll help.

Marcus Aurelius might help, but leftist shit-talking won't.

So what would be "kicking you down?"

Here's the interesting thing.  You can read the line as a nonspecific, populist sentiment for the downtrodden.  I went out of my way to read a kind of "red pill" message into the lyrics-- one to which I am not especially sympathetic-- because why not?  I'm picking this song apart, but one needn't.  After all, the villains of the song are rich men north of Richmond, so would it even make sense, logically, to make this passage about misandry versus red-pilling?

I don't think so.  I just did that because it's Saturday, and I'm havin' fun.  I think that this would be picking an unnecessary fight.  I think a better reading of the song is a generic comment on how the titular villains-- unspecified as they are-- kick down the little guy person, and suicides are the result.  Read (or heard) more broadly, this is precisely the kind of generically populist message that left-wing populists would like.

Not left-wing elitists, but left-wing populists.

It depends, again, on who the titular villains are, and who the downtrodden are, but if you choose to read the lyrics in a way that puts you in ideological opposition, that was your choice.  If you listen to at least some on the left, you can hear them talk about "deaths of despair," fentanyl, you can hear them attack "the billionaire class," and such.

Really, how is that any different from what Oliver Anthony is singing?  Why is this right-wing?

Oh, right.  The obesity thing.

So to put this together, I ask the following.  Where does "Rich Men North Of Richmond" fit on the left-right spectrum?

My answer is that it does not fit cleanly anywhere.  This is not a conservative song.  Consider the core attack on rich men, the demand for action-- from politicians, no less!-- not just to help miners, but to address homelessness and starvation.

There is one core point that makes the song anathema to the modern left, which is the fact that Anthony actually talks about obesity.  He does not even reject the idea of welfare (remembering JJ Grey's "Country Ghetto").  Instead, he rejects the idea of welfare paying for junk food, while homeless people starve.  It is that juxtaposition, as policy, that Anthony rejects, and it is the fact that Anthony talks about it that makes the left treat him as the totality of evil.

Remember when Michelle Obama was all about health food and getting the kids to eat their vegetables and stop it with the junk food, or have you memory-holed that?

You know the left would demand her death by slow torture if she tried that now, right?

Observe, then, what has happened to our polarized dialog.  A white guy from Appalachia writes a song in which he vilifies the rich, sings about the difficulties of the working class in the modern economy, substance abuse, homelessness, starvation, anomy, anti-elitism, and the left basically wants to string him up because while he didn't say that welfare should be eliminated, he didn't want it paying for junk food while people starved on the streets because obesity is a problem.

Obesity.  This is all about obesity.  Everything else is bullshit.  So here's what happened.

The left has tried to shut down all discussion of obesity.  The right, then, hears a song in which a guy talks about it, despite the fact that he's also demanding the government help solve homelessness and starvation.

Which of Reagan's commandments is that violating?

Anyway, because the right is so pissed off at left-wing censoriousness, and so enamored of their own bullshit populism while they rally around Donald Trump, they latch onto the song.  The left takes the other side.

Behold.  Culture war.

Yes, I am saying that this whole, damned thing is over obesity.  Take away those couple of words on obesity, and we aren't having this.  The left wants no acknowledgement that obesity exists (see: Lindsey, Pluckrose & Boghossian), and the right is so fed up, so to speak, with that censoriousness that they'll overlook Oliver Anthony's violations of right-wing dogma just because he's sticking it to the left on that one point.

This is stupid.

But maybe the fight will give everyone some exercise, and that'll be healthy.