DON'T LOOK FOR NUANCE IN A PROTEST SONG.

Oliver Anthony's recent Rich Men North of Richmond well might be another in a series of recent protest songs that catch on with populist conservatives.  Reason's J. D. Tuccille suggests there is a pattern.

It's not often that country music songs grab the attention of largely city-based name-brand media, but Oliver Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond" did exactly that with anti-elite, anti-tax, anti-welfare lyrics—and his undeniable singing talent. Even more remarkable, Anthony's tune bumped the similarly earnest anti-urban "Try That in a Small Town" by Jason Aldean from the top of the charts. If you add in Austin Moody's lefty-taunting chart-climber, "I'm Just Sayin'," you have a cluster of songs grabbing popularity with a shared sense of populist outrage. Call it the return of the country protest song.

The return has been going on for some time.  "Country singer John Rich's recent 'Progress' is likely to be popular as a cover item on the county fair circuit, where Normals repay elite contempt with defiance."  This morning, "Fox and Friends" featured Mr Rich with another new composition, "I'm Offended."

Mr Tuccille correctly understands that there might be two strains of protest song in a polity.

All three songs are explicitly political, in opposition to what the artists see as intrusive, smug, urban elites who want to dictate terms to the unwilling. By any reasonable definition, they're protest songs from a long tradition of similar music. That's especially true if you consider that country music is just folk music for righties (and folk music is country music for lefties). But music critics don't want to put Aldean, Anthony, and Moody in the same tradition as Woody Guthrie because times have changed, name-brand media types overwhelmingly like today's elite establishment, and the protest songs come from a different direction than Guthrie's socialism. But not approving of a protest doesn't mean it's not a protest. Times have moved on, but the gap between rural and urban, populists and elites, remains.

Yes, and currently, unlike, say, during the war against Franco, the right-populists have all the good songs. It's further possible, as Christian Toto suggests, that the song hits home in a way that afflicts the current, comfortable, credentialed cosmopolitans.

Some may be unaware of his overnight stardom. Progressive journalists live in a bubble, protected from right-leaning or contrarian views. Anthony may be all over a conservative’s social media landscape, but liberals may be blissfully unaware of his story.

There’s another angle, though.

Reporters understand Anthony’s work undercuts their narratives. Bidenomics is working! There is no collusion between the Biden administration and Big Tech!

Everything is fine, and our elites have the situation firmly in hand.

That's a possibility, although the song is hitting a nerve in a way the current, comfortable, credentialed cosmopolitans can't stand.  There's a lengthy "Intelligencer" essay in New York by one Eric Levitz, who might be the very model of a credentialed coastal cosmopolitan.  There's a lot in the essay, but he buries the lede near the end.

Whereas left populism posits a binary between the people and the elites, right populism conjures a three-part division of society between “the people,” the elites, and the undeserving others whom the elites coddle at the people’s expense.

That's an argument of long standing, and it's raised by a number of observers. Jeremiah "Infinite Scroll" Johnson calls a partial roll.

There are the condescending attempts to explain class dynamics to the uneducated rural yokels. The Inquirer bizarrely tried to draw a comparison between the song and the Civil War. The AV Club also tries to connect the song and the Civil War, while others call are calling it regressive, offensive and fatphobic. Plenty of these articles speculate that Anthony could be an industry plant by shadowy conservative forces, though most of them have enough shame to note that there’s zero evidence of that.

For such a short song, it has surely generated a lot of such commentary. It puts me in mind of one of those sacred scrolls with one verse from Deuteronomy followed by commentary.  I have flagged enough such essays to be able to fill yet another mini-dissertation with excerpts and reactions.  I'm unlikely to do so.  Rather, I will use another passage from Mr Tuccille to conclude today's message.

Whatever their political beliefs in the past, people who prefer the spread-out life available in small towns and rural areas—the kind of people who tend to be country music fans—tend to the right, politically. Or maybe (Oliver Anthony describes himself as "pretty dead center down the aisle on politics") it's more accurate to say that they find themselves in opposition to institutions, including government, media, academia, and large corporations that they see, with reason, as dominated by urban progressives who sneer at them and their way of life. It doesn't take too many denunciations by political candidates of "deplorables" or a whole lot of big-media contempt-porn about the supposed miseries of life behind the (stories suggest) corn-silk curtain before the message is received.

The political turmoil of recent years "has consolidated progressive norms in almost every institution susceptible to pressure from activists (or activist-employees), and it's pulled the entire American establishment leftward," conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote in 2021 for The New York Times.

Populist country songs attacking elites necessarily sound like they're coming from the right because the elites of today are largely on the left. And the divide between right and left is wide and growing.

Yes, and that three-part division Mr Levitz would wish away has been a long time coming.  A few weeks ago, David Brooks confessed that, yes, the Credentialed Elite were the bad guys.

He precedes that paragraph with a passage on the way in which the privilegentsia got themselves deferred from the draft, and integrated the public schools of the big cities, which might have midwived much of the suburban sprawl and metropolitan segregation. He continues with the understanding that "smart" might be a make-the-cosmopolitans-feel-good euphemism for "properly credentialed." And that deconstructing bourgeois norms was for the common room, not the great room of a well-to-do, intact family.

For making such observations, some of the Very Smart People who were so pleased when he admired the crease of Barack Obama's trousers were all, "Davey, you're not as smart as you think you are."  If the fans of Rich Men and Small Town and I'm Offended perceive themselves as put upon by the Credentialed for the succor of the Undeserving they may have reason to be upset.  It was the school districts of the big cities that were integrated by forced busing; it was the high school graduates who were called up for Vietnam, while the graduate student deferment was the last draft deferment to go; it was the residents of the tract houses who were called out for perpetuating and benefitting by urban segregation; while the comfortable credentialed cosmopolitans redefined dysfunction as authenticity.

I can do my part to highlight the illogic of the policy preferences of the comfortable credentialed cosmopolitans.  Let the troubadors do their part to call attention to the contradictions.  Let Mr Tuccille deliver the benediction.

The fact that these songs are finding large audiences is an indication that they tap into popular sentiment. That matters whether or not anybody else agrees with that sentiment. People act on what matters to them, not on what others think should matter or even on what makes sense.

Enjoy Oliver Anthony, Jason Aldean, Austin Moody, and their peers for their music if you're so inclined. But even if you don't enjoy it, their work represents a new round of country protest songs expressing the sincere concerns of their creators and their listeners.

So mote it be.