“Rich Men North of Richmond” can't be ignored.

The working class awakening to the failure of movements that were supposed to secure their future will have a generational impact. What that impact will be is in our collective hands.

I heard Oliver Anthony’s song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” last week when my soon-to-be stepson-in-law sent it to me.

You can be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Oliver Anthony or the song in question. Until last week, the singer was completely unknown on the country music scene. But in a week or so since it began making the rounds on social media, his song has rocketed near to the top of Apple Music’s country charts and has garnered millions of listens across other platforms. 

But it has also attracted massive criticism, with its lyrics panned as “polarizing,” “offensive and fatphobic,” and slammed for perpetuating tropes about welfare recipients.

So what should be made of its popularity?

**“I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay / So I can sit out here and waste my life away / Drag back home and drown my troubles away.”**

Fans of the song have found resonance in some of its lyrics.

Growing up in a part of America where 40% of the population is at or below the poverty line, affording a college education was not in the universe of possibility for my son-in-law. To better himself, he enlisted in the United States Army when he was 19 years old. Now, at age 23, instead of coming off a fun and friend-making college experience, he’s finishing his first four-year active duty contract - with service deployments and all that entails, under his belt.

He expressed his feelings about Anthony’s to me in a torrent - a rarity from a young man who uses words with the same care and precision as his hunting rifle. The cost of his hunting permits has radically increased over the last year (he grew up hunting to provide affordable protein for the family, not for sport), while groceries have become more unaffordable. Worries about housing, not being able to afford to have kids. Four years of service to his country - for what? Less opportunity than his parents and grandparents had? What kind of government let it get to this point? 

**“It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to / For people like me and people like you / Wish I could just wake up and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is.”**

My stepson-in-law’s feelings aren’t unique. They’re not confined to one political stripe, and they’re certainly not limited to working class people living in the United States. In the last few years I’ve heard them countless times from people in my own community, and across Canada.

**“'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end / 'Cause of rich men north of Richmond.”**

In Canada, affordability issues - including the prospects for upward financial mobility - are top concerns for all demographic groups. This sentiment is evidenced by rapid increases in the cost of the necessities of life -  housing, borrowing, groceries, and fuel. This trend has occurred while the quality of public services like healthcare has declined. For many, particularly Canadians under 35, a sense of being trapped in a downward spiral has set in.

**“Livin' in the new world / With an old soul / 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”**

And that spiral has left millions, particularly younger people, with disillusionment and trust in the government’s ability to empathize, much less solve these problems. There’s a growing sense that the government’s priorities are misplaced and that politicians are focused on consolidating power to benefit themselves, not the public.

And it's in that sense of malaise and helplessness that big trouble is brewing.

“I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere / 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.”

While some of the criticism of Anthony’s song has mentioned its oblique reference to the private island of American sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, more has been focused on something else. As Rolling Stone Magazine points out, a controversial part of "Rich Men North of Richmond" comes in a verse where Anthony uses the social assistance abuser stereotype as a punching bag.

Anthony deserves the criticism he is receiving for including that trope in the song: welfare stigma has been roundly debunked.

Those who are promoting the overall sentiment of the song have a responsibility to make this point, too. Words can cause irreparable harm, and even those fighting for what they believe to be a noble cause aren’t exempt from that duty of care. And, significantly, when different groups of marginalized people solely blame each other for failures that politicians have the power and responsibility to help rectify, it's politicians who benefit from their enmity. (This is something I pointed out to my son-in-law).

But none of negates the sense of hopelessness that Anthony captures in his song.

Said differently, Anthony's choice to include certain lyrics can be soundly criticized while also acknowledging that the raw anger with which he sings about the rapidly diminishing prospects of the working class is something that many in the political class aren’t taking seriously, but should be.

For example, in Canada, the same federal Liberal government that seems content to dismiss housing affordability concerns with patronizing talking points about an ineffectual spending program have allowed institutionalized misogyny and racism to run rampant in the RCMP, Canadian military, and our justice system. This approach is evidenced when prominent senior men in the governing Liberal party, like newly promoted Minister of Defense Bill Blair, who did sweet fudge all to fix these problems in previous senior roles, fail upwards. At the same time, the upward mobility prospects of millions of racialized and otherwise marginalized Canadians falter.

Those same men use tactics of division to distract from failure. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose to ignored experts' findings about why many different groups of Canadians were vaccine-hesitant and instead chose to villainize those people for political gain and avoid the politically unpalatable but necessary hard work of fixing Canada's broken healthcare system. His government has pushed ineffectual climate change policies that have made transport unaffordable while failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop affordable substitute goods like reliable public transit.

So while these facts do not absolve someone like Anthony of his responsibility as an artist to think carefully about what message he's sending in his work, class-division should not be used to absolve a political class that uses division to distract from incompetence, corruption, and failing policy and ideology.

That approach is taking our country down a dark path. At this rate, those fights will occur, and they risk permanently breaking many of the institutions on which our fragile pluralism sits. 

More than anything else, the extremely polarized reaction to Anthony’s song - even in Canada - makes this point abundantly clear.

Alternatively, we can acknowledge the existence of barriers to equality of opportunity that are rooted in generational systems of classism, racism, and misogyny without perpetuating the tropes that enable them. We can turn enmity from each other and unite against those in political class who would use this type of division to our collective detriment.

In Canada, if the well-to-do in the cabinet room in the building north of Wellington Avenue care about the future of our country, they should be helping that process instead of hindering it.