Who are the Rich Men?
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord, knows they all just wanna have total control
– Oliver Anthony
Who are the rich men north of Richmond?
Just over two years ago Oliver Anthony, a local musician from Farmville, VA, released a self-produced song that was viewed 5 million times over the course of the next three days (now at 223 million views). It reflected the ache and disenfranchisement of a population in rural America that expressed itself a few months later in the polling booth.
The current administration would do well to put it back on its playlist … on repeat.
After reading the recent Plough article by Maureen Swinger on a roots festival hosted by Oliver in Kentucky, I was drawn to revisit the reality of rural communities which have for decades been struggling over the loss of community and economy- mainly due to globalization, climate change policy and urbanization. Charles Murray wrote about them in his book Coming Apart, which informed my former boss’ 2012 Presidential campaign (Murray actually contrasted struggling Fishtown, PA to Belmont, MA which foreshadowed the showdown between Santorum and Romney in the primary). A few years later, and coming from a left-of-center perspective, Bowling Alone sociologist Robert Putnam observed the same trends of decline of marriage and church attendance, and increase of out-of-wedlock and drug use in his book Our Kids (2015). And of course our current Vice President wrote about his own experience a year later in his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy.
It’s assumed that Anthony was writing about progressive elites at the time. But what if he was writing about me? I was born in Basel, Switzerland and grew up on the campus of an Episcopalian seminary as the son of a theologian. I went to college for engineering and communications, and then to seminary to pursue a masters’ degree, ending up on Capitol Hill as a chief of staff and eventually overseeing a leadership office in the Senate. I’ve been in Northern Virginia ever since, and live among the intellectual Illuminati of the right.
My tribe? I probably resonated best with the subtitle of Rod Drehr’s book Crunchy Cons: “How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers and their diverse tribe of counter-cultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party).” I’ve been tracking Rod ever since, not always seeing eye to eye, but always appreciating his insight from his Benedict Option (I was sympathetic to the Gerson-Whener alternative Wilberforce Option, of course) to his recent Living in Wonder.
For the record, I do consider myself a political Burkean but I don’t own Birkenstocks. My wife Leanne and I fail consistently with our garden plants, do own guns, are (Anglican) evangelicals, buy free-range eggs, and homeschooled our kids. And my production company is working on a scripted film about the three nights that Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir spent alone in the Yosemite Valley, considered the origin story of the national park system.
Wendell Berry, in his home in Kentucky
As I mentioned in our latest substack essay on several “saints” from rural Kentucky, Wendell Berry and the Correll family, because I studied and championed “Cracker Barrel conservatives" in the past, I may not think of myself as the “rich men” that Anthony indicts, but I would be wrong. I don’t fully understand the realities of the population in rural America, and I don’t serve them well if I pretend I do.
This, I fear, is the reality of many Republicans and DC-based conservatives think tank “experts” who point the finger at the left but didn’t really listen to Anthony’s complaints about policies that ignore their realities. I think the unwillingness of the administration to use the food stamp (SNAP) contingency fund during the shutdown is indicative of this tone deafness.
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
But God, if you're five foot three and you're three hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground
'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down
Yes, we need reform, but we can’t pull the rug out of these communities. Henry Olsen, who tracks the populist movement worldwide, shared with a few of us that by definition, populist uprisings aren’t partisan, and they certainly aren’t party loyalists. They are as likely to swing to one direction as the other, and this may be in part what happened in Virginia this past election with the Republican ticket’s resounding drubbing. Henry’s analysis is worth a read.
Other analyses are still coming in, but there is no question that the depressed vote in rural counties last week, and dramatic swing in them, does not portend well for current Republican elites if they don’t listen closely to the lyrics of the left behind communities and address the economic, social and cultural pressures their families and young men are facing.
Perhaps the solution is to take a drive south, and visit Anthony's Rural Revival Project (RRP) which he launched with proceeds from his song. Swinger wrote in Plough that Anthony’s goal is to use Richmond money to benefit the people who populate his songs: “Buying several abandoned farms in Virginia, the team is working to convert them into places where, as Anthony envisions: people can learn to can food, to raise animals – people who have just gotten out of rehab, vets with PTSD, people who are depressed and suicidal, can come and get reconnected with nature… learn how to exist outside of a system that’s been placed on us as a generation.”
I think my tribe might actually be conservative communitarianism. As my dear friend Steve Garber says, it’s more important to choose a neighbor before a neighborhood. This is why Wendell Berry resonates with me and many on both the right and the left. Check out the Plough feature and our Substack installment Rooted in Community, and put Rich Men back on your playlist. And maybe take a trip to Farmville with me.
There's needles in the streets, folks hardly survivin’
Sidewalks next to highways full of cars self-drivin’
The poor keep hurtin' the rich keep thrivin’
Doggonit.
—Oliver Anthony
