Rich Lessons in Rich Men North of Richmond

I don’t much like what the Democratic Party has become. I stick with it because I really don’t like what’s become of the Trumpy Republicans.

The Democrats used to be the party of the working class. Now it’s the party of condescending snobs. Latest case in point (you can find a case in point every week) is the surprise hit of the summer Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony.

In an August 30th piece, liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof laments liberal disdain for Anthony’s song. Kristof writes: “Liberals are properly attentive to racial injustice, but have a blind spot about class, driven in part by unfair stereotypes that members of the white working class are invariably bigots. In fact, you can’t think seriously about inequality in America without contemplating race, but that’s also true of class. And as the Harvard professor Michael Sandel has noted, one of the last acceptable prejudices is disdain for the less educated… It’s partly this condescension that has driven many working-class voters, initially white voters and more recently brown and Black ones as well, into the arms of conservative politicians who would shaft them even more. If we’re going to achieve a more progressive agenda, then we need to win elections — and that means respecting workers rather than scorning them, insulting their faith and casually dismissing them as bigots. If we believe in empathy, let’s show some.”

I like Kristof because he’s one of the few liberal columnists who consistently gets it right on this score. I would quibble with one of his conclusions, though. Disdain for the less educated is only one of many acceptable prejudices on the left. You may also be (in fact, you fall under suspicion if you’re not) bigoted when it comes to Catholics, Evangelicals and men, especially straight men. It’s even acceptable on the left to use a slur directed at conservative suburban women. They’re called “Karens.”

There are a couple of lines in Anthony’s song that especially attract liberal ire. The first is related to taxes and the line goes, “‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end. ‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond.” In liberal land taxes are always good. Liberals are very much into redistribution. They don’t understand that most blue collar folks don’t look at it that way because of the next stanza that liberals find offensive. That one goes, “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat.
And the obese milkin’ welfare. God, if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds.
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”

Admittedly, that’s pretty raw, but it’s probably not racist. As J.D. Vance pointed out in a book liberals loved before Vance ran and won for the U.S. Senate as a Republican, Hillbilly Elegy, working class whites directed their disdain not so much at Black people, who weren’t much present in coal country, but at even poorer whites who they viewed as not working, instead living off welfare.

And that is a fundamental theme that liberal elites just don’t get. The blue collar workers they claim to support want to earn things, not get handouts. And even when it is a handout they’d like to be given the opportunity to believe they earned it.

It’s important to note that Democrats aren’t just losing blue collar white voters. Incredibly, they’re also losing Black men and Hispanics of both sexes without college degrees, the latter at an alarming rate. That’s because, even with so much blatant and more subtle racism spewing out of Trump and his sycophants, the condescension oozing from liberal elites is even more off-putting.

Rich Men North of Richmond has its rough spots, but it’s yet another lesson for Democrats and liberals about how blue collar voters think. You can be sure it’s another lesson that will go unlearned by the elites who run the party.