Opinion: The off-key economics of Oliver Anthony’s ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ – The Globe and Mail

Once upon a time not so long ago, liberals and progressives would have been able to relate to a song like Rich Men North of Richmond. They might have even sung along.

“Well I’ve been selling my soul,” goes the tune’s opening and closing, “Working all day/Overtime hours/For bullshit pay.” The singer, Oliver Anthony, is punching the clock, “so I can sit out here and waste my life away/Drag back home/And drown my troubles away.” The chorus: “It’s a damn shame/What the world’s gotten to/For people like me/And people like you.”

The cause of these woes are the “rich men north of Richmond” – referring to Washington, a two-hour drive north of the Virginia capital.

You half expect the next line to be: “There is Power in a Union!”

Yet this tune, which shot to the top of the Billboard chart last month after being recorded by a total unknown, has been embraced by conservatives, and was even played at the start of the first Republican presidential debate. The right instantly decided the song and singer were “us.” The left just as quickly dismissed both as “them.”

It’s a reminder of the strange polarization of our politics – American more than Canadian, but we’re well on our way – and a tribal insistence that almost everything and everyone stick to one of two partisan poles, while being magnetically repelled by the other.

It also shows how our tribes have congealed along cultural rather than economic lines. Liberals are a lot less interested in class than they used to be.

Mr. Anthony is white, male, Southern, blue-collar and rural. He is liable to open his Bible and read Scripture before concerts. He sings country music. There are American flags at his shows.

So critics left and the right did their intersectional analysis, and jointly branded him as right-wing.

But then Mr. Anthony posted a video to YouTube remarking “it was funny seeing my song” at the GOP debate because “that song is written about those people on that stage.” He adds: “I see the right trying to characterize me as one of their own, and I see the left trying to discredit me, I guess in retaliation.”

He said on Facebook that he lives “in a 27-foot camper with a tarp on the roof that I got off of craigslist for US$750,” parked on land he bought for US$97,500 – “on which I still owe about US$60,000″ – in the small town of Farmville, Va.

He dropped out of high school in 2010, and then worked industrial jobs, the last being on the graveyard shift at a paper mill – “US$14.50 an hour in a living hell.” He left after he fractured his skull and couldn’t work for six months.

Mr. Anthony says he doesn’t want to be a Republican mascot, but he can’t help having grown up in a place immersed in GOP talking points. Rich Men North of Richmond suggests “the obese milking welfare” are one of the reasons working stiffs have it tough. That and being “taxed to no end.”

The truth, of course, is that the U.S. has a lot less “welfare” for those at the bottom than most rich countries, which is one of the reasons American poverty is high and often especially brutal. It helps explain why American life expectancy is so low – in 2021, it fell to seven years less than Canada. Virginia’s life expectancy is lower than China’s – and the rest of the U.S. South is worse.

And Americans are not “taxed to no end.” Taxes are overall low, which is why, even though the U.S. is running monster deficits, it can afford less social spending than other countries. In 2021, total government revenues in the U.S. were worth 32.9 per cent of GDP. The figure for Canada was 42.3 per cent. The European Union average was more than 47 per cent.

Then again, while U.S. taxes can be a light touch at the top, with low rates for capital gains and dividends, and deductions for mortgage interest, the burden can be heavy for those at the bottom.

Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, a situation he has decried for years. And though most low-income Americans pay no federal income tax, many states have an income tax, and it is often not progressive. In Virginia, someone earning US$20,000 pays 5.75 per cent tax – the same rate as someone making 20 times as much.

And people at the low end also face high Social Security and other payroll taxes, with an effective rate of as much as 14.1 per cent for someone making less than US$10,000.

And after all that, blue-collar men and women still have to buy health insurance. Canada funds that out of progressive income taxes. The U.S. does not.

It wasn’t so long ago that the left didn’t think of people such as Oliver Anthony as “them.” Tommy Douglas was a guy for whom quoting Scripture was second nature. After all, he’d studied theology at Brandon College, and his first job after graduation was as the minister at Calvary Baptist Church in Weyburn, Sask.

That rural, conservative, blue-collar world of a couple of generations ago is the place that gave birth to medicare.