Populist Songs

VDH has a discussion of Oliver Anthony, the artist Douglas introduced us to just before he became a sensation.

After Anthony rails against high taxes, a worthless dollar, and ossified wages, he suddenly and strangely pivots both to Jeffrey Epstein—as the incarnation of the corrupt rich—and the subsidized morbidly obese as proof of the baleful effects of the entitlement industry on the poor. Variatio in themes and expression, as the ancients remind us, is the key to good prose and poetry, and Anthony’s song is anything but predictable in its targeting of both the masters of the universe and the welfare class.

That set of lines drew most of the wrath, but it makes a lot of sense. If the anger at the system is appropriate, as it certainly is, you should be able to show both that those who run the system are bad, and that those who are affected most by the system are harmed by it. The accusation is not that the poor on welfare are bad people, but that they are being actively harmed by the system that allegedly benefits them.

One libertarian critic, David Henderson, writing for the website Econlib, complained that Anthony doesn’t understand that “some rich people want to reduce the amount of power the government has over us.” Finally, another commentator on the right, Stephen Daisley, writing for The Spectator, penned an article that was subheaded “Roger Scruton would have thought this country hit was worthless.” The Scottish opinion journalist further groaned of the song’s lyrics, “That is dreck. Doggerel. Objectively bad writing. . . . ‘North of Richmond’ is a squall of hoary nostalgia and pedestrian populism.” Daisley apparently assumes that Anthony should have been a polished literary polemicist rather than a talented failure turned wildly successful singer who wrote from the underbelly of America—a vantage point quite different from Daisley’s own perch.

Well, it wasn't for them. It was for everybody else. 

For this particular elite, rural America’s assumed bias, racism, and sexism offer a tempting target for virtue-signaling, airy lectures, and self-righteous stereotyping. Through a near-medieval sort of exemption, elite progressives relieve the burdens of their own racial guilt by transferring the charge of supposedly unearned white “privilege” to those who rarely had any innate advantage at all.

This is the best insight of the piece. The fact is that working man's wages aren't less affected by these disastrous policies if they're white or if they're black. What he's angry about isn't the things that his critics would like him to be angry about. He's angry that the government is actively harming its citizens rather than actually helping them. It's a betrayal of the mutual loyalty that government is supposed to entail. 

Arguing in favor of that mutual loyalty is, for this elite, itself an affront. The idea that the American government should principally help Americans to prosper and live safe, meaningful lives is described in negative terms like "populist," "white supremacist" (though many Americans are not white, and would benefit right alongside those who are) and even "fascist." 

The concept is actually a necessary condition for any legitimate governance. Even in a feudal society, the king depends upon the knights who, in return for their establishment, keep the king in power. The knights depend upon the king, but also upon the people who farm the land. The knights provide protection in both directions, when the system is legitimate: they protect the king and his order, but also the people from bandits and predation. When that works ideally, the system has a kind of legitimacy.

Lately the idea has become fashionable among the elite that universality rather than loyalty is the mark of legitimacy. We should all live under the same rules, not favoring Americans more than Iranians or the People's Republic of China. That shows we aren't prejudiced, they say; and the fact that the Chinese or Iranian governments don't feel the same way (Iran still holds an annual "Death to America" day) just proves that we are the more evolved and better.

If that sounds like madness, it is. It's all bad philosophy. They read Kant, but they didn't grasp that Kant's attention to the universal didn't mean that he wouldn't believe that you owed more to your father than to any random stranger on the street. 

For those who still believe in bonds of honor, there's this song.