Gingergate

You knew this was coming

Earlier this month, a video was posted of folk musician Oliver Anthony singing a song titled “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The song lamented the state of America today, referencing real issues like inflation, high taxes, welfare fraud, and even Epstein Island. It was an instant hit, both with regular conservatives and conservative influencers. The song, and three of Anthony’s other singles, soared to the top of the charts. It was declared a populist anthem. Soon after, Anthony held a concert which thousands attended. If you somehow haven’t listened to the song yet, I recommend you do so below.

Wherever there is great enthusiasm there is also great hatred. The song really pissed off a lot of people, especially on Twitter. Many rightwingers claimed Anthony was a plant by conservative media, that he was likely a hicklib, that his song was terrible, and all manners of personal attacks. Liberals, too, quickly went on the offensive. Anthony was doxxed and subjected to “the eye of Sauron.” Journalists claimed he was a fraud, an antisemite, a leader of the resurgence of fascism among numerous other meaningless accusations that are used with increasing regularity today. Finally, the big name conservative influencers who promoted Anthony initially pushed back, condemning critics on the “online right” as useless and maladjusted, unable to take a win. Once again, everyone is at each other’s throats.

For starters, I think Anthony is a real person. He seems to be an actual musician who really did experience the hardships he was describing. I don’t think he’s a hicklib or anything like that. In fact, in all his interviews he seems like a nice and genuine guy, the kind of musician who should be making popular music in America. Whether or not his song had help in going viral from the increasingly efficient conservative media complex is mostly irrelevant at this point, it clearly does resonate with millions of people. Apparently Anthony recently gave an interview to Fox where he claimed “Diversity is our strength,” but absent anything else I think that probably just means he’s a normie. Those platitudes have been everywhere for decades. It’s what people think they’re supposed to say when they make it to the main stage.

My issue isn’t with the singer, but rather the song and the response to it. Personal music tastes aside, I cannot think of a worse message for conservatives to rally around than “My life sucks. The world has passed me by.” It’s understandable why this song resonates with so many people. These are not problems that he’s just making up. Everything really is getting worse. However, the song is just a lament. We don’t need any more laments.

I just don’t see the point of relishing in how bad things are today. In fact, dwelling on this situation, without anything more, lulls people into inaction. You see a similar phenomenon with burgeoning conspiracy culture on the Right. Even when the conspiracies are true, it doesn’t spur people to greater action. Instead, it turns into a joke. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is a meme, not something that any elected official, even in the deepest Red state, is substantively engaging with.

The issue, I think, is that acknowledging perceived powerlessness creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: The world is dominated by shadowy forces beyond your control. When things go wrong, you know why they went wrong. It’s out of your hands. When things go right, who knows? Maybe that’s just another part of conspiracy. Best to wait and see. It’s a culture of suspicion and skepticism that paralyzes people, and although many of these conspiracies do have some truth to them, others are based on evidence that is pretty thin. It’s easy to concoct a conspiracy around almost anything these days, and therefore always easy to just check out while feeling satisfied that you carry with you some secret knowledge or forbidden truth.

I’ve seen lots of people online saying that the song puts into words what many people can’t talk about, which I don’t believe at all. I hear people complain about the specific issues the song mentions all the time. Normal people do not have trouble talking about them. More likely, I think, much of the song’s appeal rests in being able to come together and support something very popular that is controlled, for once, by friendlies. That’s all well and good, but the content of the song really does matter. Here, I think the content is going to act as a depressant rather than an accelerant.

For decades conservatives failed to craft a positive vision, at least on a mass scale, for what America should be. Liberals have their grand march into the future, inverting all of society. Although this comes at a great human cost (even to themselves), it makes people feel powerful to pursue a grand goal. This is especially true if you can actually achieve those goals, which liberals do regularly. In a time when regular people feel more powerless than ever, this feeling is addictive. That’s why fanatical liberals keep going even as their lives keep getting worse, even as they literally begin to fall apart.

The closest conservatives have come to this kind of positive message recently was Donald Trump’s 2016 Make America Great Again campaign. That really resonated with people. Trump, a total political outsider hated by virtually every mainstream figure, was elected President on this vision. And it was a vision, it wasn’t just lamenting how shitty our country is now. He created a space where anything seemed possible. He solved the decades-long North Korea crisis through personal diplomacy. Then, suddenly, it seemed like the US might purchase Greenland and create a new state for the first time in decades. The MAGA movement was a dynamic force that captured the hopes and dreams of tens of millions of people.

A friend mentioned that Trump could play “Rich Men North of Richmond” at one of his upcoming rallies. It might happen, the song certainly is popular, but I think it would be very out of place at one of those events. Trump rallies are celebrations. They’re fun. Trump is a fantastic showman. People dance to the music. I really can’t see that happening, at least organically, to a folk song that decries how much your job sucks and your life feels meaningless.

I recently saw a clip that compiled reaction videos to the song. Although the reaction video phenomenon is something that’s worth examining in its own right, my biggest takeaway from this particular clip was a feeling of disgust. The people in the video, seated in their gamerchairs, had flamboyant responses. They were tearing up, or at least pretending to. When the song mentioned inflation, they exclaimed “Woah.” It seemed fake and pathetic.

This artificiality fits a song that doesn’t point people forward. In the absence of this direction, we’re seeing a return to the same old failed rhetoric as people go through the motions of what they think a popular movement should look like. Jason Howerton, an entrepreneur and influencer who was one of the earliest promoters of the song, and appears to be working with Anthony directly, tweeted:

The feeling in the country right now isn't right or left.

It's not Democrat or Republican.

It's not white or black.

The rich men north of Richmond are terrified of the day when we figure that out.

I don’t know anything about Howerton, he is probably a nice guy too, but this is just not accurate. The country is genuinely very polarized, and not over trivial issues. This month, a Georgia schoolboard voted along party-lines on the termination of a teacher who read books about genderfluidity to her 10-year-old students. The vote was 4-3, all the Democrats thought her behavior was OK. Liberals almost uniformly supported jailing Kyle Rittenhouse for life over self-defense caught on camera.  If the takeaway from the song was supposed to be that “really it’s just regular people against the elites,” this is a bad message because it’s not true.

It’s convenient to say these things, you avoid alienating some people for now, but at a certain point you have to acknowledge that your interests genuinely are different than those of leftists. They want to kill you and take your property. It’s not just DC politicians who are making them think this. Anthony reportedly plans to do an interview with “Midwest Marx” a communist advocacy account. The interview hasn’t happened yet, I have no idea if it’s even real, but if what’s said is some variant of “obviously we disagree on many things, but we can work together on others against the elites,” (a common response to the song) then we are going backwards.

As more people become active in politics, you see the reintroduction of old discredited ideas. That you can work with leftists in good faith on any project is one of these ideas. Leftists will, sometimes violently, oppose any effective conservative policies. Many conservatives, not wanting to provoke this overboard response, instead turn to “things we can all agree on” as a way to implement facially neutral policies for nominally conservative reasons. You can go out for in public, advocate for a position, and maybe even win. It’s a good feeling.

The problem is, Libs only allow you to do this if you’re helping them. That is why you see gun influencers with huge audiences advocate for allowing felons and drug users to own guns in the middle of a nationwide crime wave. It makes no sense from a practical perspective, but these are some of the only “respectable” opinions conservatives are allowed to have while remaining uncontroversial. The narrative of “Regular people vs the elites” is another one of these messages that can be easily hijacked to pursue leftist aims.

There’s no real hiding the fact that pretty bad people are in charge of the US right now. Likewise, there is an entire class of highly-educated and highly-paid morons who are only in their positions because of their demographic characteristics or fashionable political views. Despite this, is still not worth adopting class struggle rhetoric. These narratives are wholly owned by the Left. When people go to learn more about them, they will be learning from leftists. When they act on them, they will be acting in concert with leftists. It’s not a ship that rightwingers can steer, and even isolated good ideas are accompanied by unpleasant hangers-on.

This was the case in the infamous 1934 Bonus March, when thousands of American veterans descended on Washington, DC to demand the early payment of future bonuses granted for service in WWI. This was a somewhat unreasonable demand, but understandable in light of the ongoing Great Depression. However, large numbers of non-veterans accompanied the march. Many of these were shady characters with ties to the then very active Communist Party USA. There were numerous cases of violence, theft, and extortion that sprung up alongside the growing Bonus Army encampments.

US Army General Douglas MacArthur became convinced that the entire effort was a communist plot. This was the same sort of mass disorder disguised as protest that preceded the Russian Revolution. When police moved to lawfully close the camps after several months of trouble, violent opposition began. Most veterans wanted nothing to do with this and peacefully dispersed. However a large contingent of Bonus Marchers, incited by the communists, remained and began to attack police with clubs and bricks. Two were shot in self-defense before troops led by MacArthur and two other future WW2 heroes, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, arrived on the scene to clear out the rioters. Most veterans involved in the march would have never supported any kind of communist takeover or criminal behavior, and yet thousands found themselves acting as inadvertent human shields for people who wanted to destroy America.

Everyone has to remember that no one is going to feel sorry for us if we lose. You cannot build a healthy identity just around being someone who has already lost and is put upon. Taking national cultural cues from mournful Appalachian folk protest songs might not be the best idea, especially when the situation in the US is likely to only get much worse in the short-term.

This brings us to the last aspect of the controversy, the conservative response to the pushback. Many big and successful figures, who I will collectively refer to as the “influencer right,” began a massive condemnation of the “online right” for its criticism of “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The online right, these influencers claimed, was full of spergs who resented their own side and were afraid of winning.

Although the online right is such a big and diverse group that it’s tough to pin down a singular message from them, and some of the criticisms of the song I saw were very unfair, their instincts were fundamentally correct. People need to know that they have a future. The message that life sucks and you have lost is something that must be rejected. It certainly shouldn’t be celebrated.

There are a few things at play here. First is the generation gap. The influencer right is dominated by Gen Xers and the online right tends to be Millennials and Zoomers. The situation facing younger people today in pretty much every regard is very grim, and definitely not for reasons that are entirely their fault. They can’t afford to embrace this kind of lament as the new narrative of American life.

Older people often feel some catharsis from “telling it like it is” I think younger people know their whole lives are ahead of them. They have a lot of opportunities that they need to act on. This temporary catharsis brings them no real satisfaction. They don’t want to be told that all the world is doom and gloom, that’s not how it looks to them (to their credit). This is a view that conservatives of all ages should adopt.

Young people are also more in touch with certain aspects of America’s decline. For instance, recently there was the infamous viral TikTok of featuring a soft-spoken and beautiful single mom in a trailer park making dinner for her children. For a day or two, she was praised as the heart of conservative America. The online right almost immediately recognized the video was an ad for the woman’s OnlyFans. It’s not enough to commiserate being old souls in a new world. The image of the old world has been hijacked and compromised. Conservatives have to be their own new world.

Finally, everyone knows by this point that there is a very efficient media machine that can make things go viral in conservative spaces. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it’s great to have, but when conservative influencers declare something off limits from criticism, people are right to be hostile. No one knows what kind of behind the scenes deals or friendships are propping up the topic of the week in conservative spaces. Again, I don’t think Anthony is an elaborate astroturf scheme or anything like that. He seems like a nice guy and his song is organically popular at this point, but once anything enters into mainstream discourse it is naturally going to be subjected to a lot of scrutiny.

No one should be trying to pull rank on Twitter. This phenomenon almost always means that there’s something funny going on. You saw it a lot in the circular “Urban vs. Rural” debates. No, people do not have to pipe down and defer to you just because you live on a farm or have lots of subscribers. The influencer right has been on the wrong side of many issues over the last few years. It’s possible they’re still on the wrong side of them and have just stopped discussing those issues due to pushback from the same anonymous spergs they’re condemning now.

If you want to see what happens when people offer unlimited deference to the wisdom of successful conservative influencers and crowds, look no further than the disastrous campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The extremely well-funded DeSantis campaign (which was at times backed by some of the same influencers involved in this argument) checks all the right boxes on paper and adopted many seemingly very popular positions, yet is far less than the sum of its parts.

That said, I do get the frustration of the influencer right. They contributed to something that seems to them like an unambiguous win for the broader conservative movement, then all of a sudden people online (who aren’t able to reach that big of an audience) start laying into them. Some of the attacks were pretty nasty and personal. It wasn’t always easy to understand what the criticism actually was (or if there was criticism at all). I know that this is probably going to fall on deaf ears, and I’ve certainly contributed to this problem in the past, but there really aren’t that many of us and the situation is bad—should make an effort to not go for the jugular all the time. Substantive criticism is always going to be more productive.

The bright spot of this debate is the real-world response to Anthony. Conservative media has a well-tuned system, and a receptive audience, that is willing and able to pluck someone from total obscurity and catapult him to the center of popular culture. This is very powerful. I just hope that that enormous energy is pointed towards growth and the future. Anthony likely has a very long and successful career ahead of him, so that is certainly not outside the realm of possibility for his music.

Henry Ford once stated “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” People claim the online right is unable to take a win. I think whether rallying millions of conservatives around this particular message is a win or not remains to be seen. The online right is valuable because it’s irreverent and can say things that aren’t very nice, go against conventional wisdom, or even piss people off. Sometimes the perception of success blinds people to farther-reaching implications of an event. Being rightwing today has to mean that you’re healthy, you have a future, and the truth is on your side. If that’s not what you’re pushing people towards, whatever movement you are trying to build is going nowhere fast. No more laments, no more eulogies. We’re not dead yet. There’s still a lot more to do.