[ad_1]
Anthony’s lyrics surely speak to millions of struggling Americans: “I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / overtime hours for bulls— pay,” he sings. But you know who else will love this song? The “rich men north of Richmond,” that’s who.
With Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia hailing this song as “the anthem of the forgotten Americans,” wealthy elites north and south of Richmond will be just fine with that. The song seems to lambaste these elites for inequality and working-class suffering, but it actually channels much of the blame in a very different direction. That’s a key reason Republicans like it so much.
Anthony sings that working overtime for “bull— pay” led him to “waste my life” and “drown my troubles away.” He has said this is a reference to his work in a North Carolina factory; struggling with soul-crushing work for stagnant wages and self-medicating in response is a real situation for many Americans.
In skewering the “rich men north of Richmond,” Anthony seems to be talking about some combination of soulless financiers and global capitalists and their handmaidens in D.C.:
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
‘Cause your dollar ain’t s— and it’s taxed to no end
‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down
Naturally, no one should expect serious policy analysis from a song. Nonetheless, its message is that the overworked and underpaid should blame their plight largely on high taxes, welfare cheats and cultural elites monitoring their thoughts for any departure from woke orthodoxy.
Business lobbyists and right-wing politicians have told versions of this distorted story for decades. It seeks to turn people against taxing the rich, social spending and government regulations designed to protect the public and mitigate inequality.
But good federal policy could actually do something about the very thing Anthony personally experienced: underpaid overtime work. In 2016, the Obama administration raised the income threshold for federally required time-and-a-half overtime pay from around $23,000 to over $47,000. That could have helped millions of people like Anthony, but business groups balked and it was ultimately blocked in court. Here, “rich men” indeed conspired to keep overtime pay down.
But many Republican senators also opposed the move, echoing the the pro-business line that it would spark layoffs. President Donald Trump raised it, but only by a meager margin that business groups found acceptable. President Biden is expected to propose raising it much higher this fall. Industry will likely oppose this again.
If and when this happens, will Republican politicians extolling Anthony’s song side with the “rich men” and argue again that mandating higher overtime pay will hurt underpaid workers like Anthony?
Anthony also divides the poor into the deserving (truly hungry) and undeserving (obese welfare scammers), partly blaming government assistance programs for why he gets “taxed to no end.” But as Noah Smith details, such programs are a lifeline for the genuinely hungry, and whatever scamming does occur represents an almost nonexistent piece of Anthony’s tax burden, which could be made fairer by more progressive taxation anyway.
There is a long history of economic elites joining with conservative politicians to divide the “takers” from the “makers” — capitalist job creators and virtuous breadwinners who work with their hands. The goal: sap the latter’s support for taxation and social spending.
This song, of course, is about how people like Anthony feel about liberal modernity. He is “livin’ in the new world” with “an old soul,” the lyrics say, with young men killing themselves because society keeps “kickin’ them down.”
The struggling factory worker beset from below by welfare parasites and from above by pointy-headed elite scolds telling him his manhood is an affront — who is self-medicating amid stagnant wages and social decay, surrounded by deaths of despair among aging working-class White Americans — that’s textbook right-wing populism.
Both parties, to be clear, are complicit to varying degrees in creating today’s economic inequalities. But the reality is that right now, social spending from Biden’s policies are disproportionately creating lots of new factory work in counties with lower wages, many … south of Richmond. If Republicans regain power, they will repeal most of those policies. In the interim, they will likely oppose a hike in overtime pay, just as the “rich men” want.
So when Republicans hail Anthony’s effort, that’s surely in part because it diverts anger in a politically opportune direction, toward their preferred scapegoats. And that will make the “rich men” chortle in their paneled boardrooms.
Anthony describes himself as “pretty dead center” politically. So let’s hope he uses his sudden fame to ask his new friends on the right some hard questions about why they so often serve the interests of the rich men north of Richmond.
[ad_2]
Source link