The problem with ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ | Will Bunch Newsletter

While I was writing this newsletter on Monday night, Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, was indicted. For the fourth time. That’s one more time than The Donald has gotten married! As a columnist, it’s getting hard to find new things to say about an ex- (and possibly future) president’s staggering corruption. Maybe that’s the way that Trump and his minions — 18 of whom were indicted with their leader, in Georgia — want it.

📮 Last week’s question about whether Trump should do prison time drew an interesting array of responses. There wasn’t much debate about the guilt of POTUS 45, and most of you think he probably should be behind bars, but there’s a lot of doubt this would ever happen. Emailer Linda Miller doesn’t think they should lock him up, “BUT he should not be able to ever run for office, and he should pay millions to the government for the wasted money spent on him and his family.” Maybe my favorite email was the anonymous author who told me, “No, but you should.”

This week’s question: The 76ers are having the off-season from [heck], and James Harden wants out at any price. Would you release the moody Harden and blow the team up (maybe even trading superstar Joel Embiid), or force Harden to stay for new coach Nick Nurse and see if Embiid, the rising Tyrese Maxey, and a disgruntled Harden can still win something? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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“I don’t believe we can have an army without music.” — attributed to Gen. Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee need not have worried about dead air. The Civil War that ravaged America from 1861 to 1865 was in many ways the Woodstock of U.S. combat. Historians say that as many as 54,000 musicians marched on the battlefield, either with fife-and-drum corps or in the larger military bands. Soldiers woke up to the sound of a bugle, marched into the war’s famously bloody battles to the rat-a-tat of drums, and were buried to the mournful melody of the newly written “Taps,” which Union soldiers played at funerals instead of traditional rifle volleys, for fear of rousting nearby Confederate troops.

But popular songs were especially important on the home front, rallying everyday citizens and boosting morale despite a war that killed some 600,000 Americans. In the South, the 1859 minstrel tune “Dixie” became an anthem for preserving the Confederate way of life. In the North, lyrics extolling the noble cause of ending slavery justified the extreme bloodshed of the War Between the States.

Union soldiers marched south with “John Brown’s Body,” celebrating the violent, hanged abolitionist, ringing in their ears. They later embraced the revised lyric that Julia Ward Howe published in The Atlantic in 1862 as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It promised the Lord is coming to free those in bondage, but only after stomping out some vengeful grapes of wrath. “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,” Howe wrote. “His truth is marching on.”

Nearly 161 years later, the American house is again divided against itself, laboring to stand. Whether you see the nation’s 21st century conflict as a fight to save democracy or a war against the tyranny of “wokeness,” commentators are increasingly fearful that the United States is devolving into a new kind of civil war. And maybe General Lee was onto something when he said that you can’t have an army without music.

This summer I hear the drumming: Two No. 1 viral hits, both straight out of “Dixie,” both on the right side of the political dial, both brimming with white, working-class grievance, have dominated the American airwaves. First Jason Aldean’s “Try That In a Small Town,” and now the unknown Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” are the new battle hymns for today’s fractured republic.

And whether you line up on the left or right, we are compelled to listen to what these two bards of rural rage are trying to tell us, and the nation writ large. Decades from now, historians analyzing why America fell apart will be analyzing these lyrics much as today’s scholars look to Julia Ward Howe to understand the intensity of the violence unleashed at Gettysburg.

I won’t dwell as much on Nashville veteran Aldean, whose “Try That In a Small Town” shot up to No. 1 on the Billboard chart last month right after online liberals complained about the song’s not-at-all-subtle embrace of violent retribution against political enemies. It’s not just that his tune absorbs every Fox News meme about the sucker punchers and flag burners of urban America; Aldean wants you to know he’s got Grandpa’s gun and that no leftist is going to grab it from him. “Try that in a small town,” he sings. “See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own.”

If that “make it down the road” line seems to invoke the nightriders of yesteryear, Aldean drilled down when he filmed the video for the song in front of Tennessee’s Maury County Courthouse, where a Black teen was notoriously lynched in 1927. Aldean says that’s a coincidence, but then the singer seems to live in denial since standing on a stage in 2017 as a sniper with automatic weapons mowed down 58 Las Vegas concertgoers in the worst mass shooting in American history. Any emotions triggered by that seem to have faded with time. Nor would it likely affect Aldean if you explained to him that homicide is skyrocketing in “small town” America, as well as his native city of Macon, Ga. “Small Town” is ultimately a Newsmax rant, and not nearly as interesting to analyze as what Oliver Anthony is trying to say.

One week ago, Anthony was just a working man on 90 acres outside of Farmville, Va. with three dogs and a guitar. But the simple, strumming video of Anthony performing “Rich Men North of Richmond” in the piney woods soared once it hit Twitter/X, winning glowing endorsements from right-wing luminaries like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, right-wing commentator Matt Walsh, and ex-news anchor Kari Lake. This omicron-level viral spread brought more than 9 million YouTube views in just a few days, and sent “Rich Men North of Richmond” to No. 1 on Apple Music and iTunes.

“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day,” Anthony begins. “Overtime hours for [baloney] pay.” So far, he’s nailed the problems of the working class man and woman in America. So who’s to blame, in the singer’s worldview? The government — these are his rich men north of Richmond. The swamp. He never makes it up I-95 as far as Wall Street, home of the super rich who actually fixed Anthony’s starvation wages. He’s not really thinking about who keeps worker pay so low, but instead he fixates on who’s getting the tax dollars on those puny wages. There were welfare queens in 1979; in 2023, welfare schlubs.

“Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds,” he sings, “Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.” There’s also an allusion to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — fair enough, although the biggest whoops will surely come from the QAnon crowd. There’s a powerful line about so-called deaths of despair — “Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground” — but there’s no condemnation of the oxycontin-soaked Sacklers or Big Pharma. Nope, just the Fudge Rounds Lady. Like most white, working-class brawlers, Anthony has been trained to only punch down.

I know an impudent snob in the effete mainstream media like me isn’t an ideal messenger, but someone should tell Anthony that it’s Republicans (who get their votes from the white working class) who’ve kept the federal minimum wage at a paltry $7.25 since 2009. But the real problem is the focus on government and not billionaires. As the great labor writer Hamilton Nolan said in a searing essay about the song: “‘Do not let the rage of the populace become focused on the capitalists’ is the number one rule of capitalism’s perpetuation of itself.”

But there’s even more going on here. “Rich Men North of Richmond” is the musical embodiment of the late Lee Atwater’s famous riff on racial resentment politics in America, how it evolved from the N-word to the more abstract “states’ rights” to even more abstract-sounding rants about taxes, but it’s implicitly understood, said Atwater, that “it hurts Black people.” Race resides between the lines of Anthony’s No. 1 hit on behalf of people south of Richmond, which was capital of the Confederacy, after all. Atwater would have understood that Anthony doesn’t mention the race of the fudge-rounds eater because he doesn’t have to, just as Ronald Reagan described welfare recipients only as a “strapping young buck.”

Oliver Anthony isn’t going to sing about raising the minimum wage, or fairer overtime rules, or, heaven forbid, the collective power of labor unions, because those things would benefit the entire working class, including the large swaths that are Black and brown. Anthony and the 9 million and counting who are watching on YouTube don’t want that kind of progress, but a restoration of a time when there was a power and prestige that came with simply being white and male. These new battle hymns hailing a civil-war cleansing of the D.C. “deep state” and urban America, with Grandpa’s gun at the ready, are turning Howe’s 1862 exhortation “to die to make men free” on its head. But their truth — no matter how free of actual facts — is marching on.

Question: Is south-central PA’s [Rep.] Scott Perry, who’s apparently poking his nose into the PA-1 Republican primary, one of the unindicted co-conspirators 1-30 [in Monday’s Georgia indictment]? — Via @JoeStepansky on Twitter/X

Answer: Joe, I can’t give you a definitive answer on this yet, as it will likely be some time before all of the many co-conspirators are identified. I do know that Perry — the Trumpiest right-winger in the Pennsylvania delegation — is identified by name in the indictment as the White House contact when it wanted to connect with the Keystone State’s top GOP legislators. To me, this raises a much bigger question: Will there ever be real accountability for the many members of both houses of Congress who aided Team Trump in an attempted coup against our government? Like many folks, I was disappointed Monday night when the Georgia grand jury failed to indict South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham for the pressure he applied on state election officials. Coup plotters like Perry should be planning their legal defense instead of trying to influence Pennsylvania politics.

The two big stories that have dominated this long hot summer — Donald Trump’s indictments and climate-change-amplified natural disasters — have a similar vibe. Both keep happening again and again. A big chunk of the body politic is outraged, but no one has confidence that anything will actually be done. The heartbreaking tragedy of the wildfire in Maui — America’s deadliest in more than a century, with 99 confirmed fatalities and a death toll certain to climb ― is absolutely linked to climate change caused by fossil-fuel pollution. The brutal summer of 2023 had dried out the Hawaiian island’s normally lush vegetation, creating a tinderbox.

And yet there is no sense of urgency from the alleged grown-ups running this country. Our 80-year-old president, Joe Biden, remains stubbornly blasé about declaring a national emergency around climate change. Instead, the task of telling anyone who will listen that our national empire of fossil-fuel hegemony is parading down 5th Avenue with no clothes has fallen upon the wide-eyed and agitated children of America. Even in a place like politically red Montana.

In 1972, when the American pendulum turned briefly toward environmental protection, Montana — a state of big skies and unspeakable beauty — amended its state constitution to affirm “the right to a clean and healthful environment” and to require leaders to ensure that for future generations. But the current generation of adults passed laws that barred communities and regulators from even considering issues like climate change in permitting new fossil fuel facilities. Today, Montana’s big sky is scarred by 5,000 gas wells, 4,000 oil wells, four oil refineries, and six coal mines. So the future generation, aged 22 to 5, aided by lawyers from Our Children’s Trust, took it to court.

On Monday, Montana Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that the kids were all right, that the state’s pro-fossil-fuel, pro-polluter laws violate the state’s constitution. She found Montanans “have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental life-support system.” The ruling will be appealed by red-faced Republicans, but the victory has been hailed in the handful of states — including here in Pennsylvania — that have baked environmental protection into their own constitutions. Will a children’s brigade save Planet Earth while our befuddled emperors are searching for their pants? Stay tuned.

The mid-2010s will be remembered by American historians as a pivotal moment. Unrest over police violence in the Black community was on the rise, and so, not coincidentally, was Donald Trump. In August of 2016, those worlds were colliding in Milwaukee, where the police killing of a man named Sylville Smith had triggered unrest. On Aug. 15, 2016, I hoped in vain that the GOP presidential nominee would cancel a planned campaign stop nearby. I wrote that “going to Milwaukee when community leaders are appealing for calm is absolutely the worst thing that Trump could do. Frankly, I’d hope that any candidate — Hillary Clinton, or anyone else — would not appeal for votes in Milwaukee under this week’s circumstances. But Trump, with his blatant appeals to violence and knack for stirring up tension, has re-written the rules. He really should stay home.” Read the rest of what I had to say on this day seven years ago in, “As Milwaukee burns, America fails to listen.”