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A few weeks ago, Oliver Anthony, an extremely red-haired singer-songwriter from Farmville, Virginia, released a single called “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and no one has really shut up about it since. Conservatives, particularly the kind of conservatives who livestream their podcasts, seized on Anthony—who sings that “your dollar ain’t shit and it’s taxed to no end” and laments about how the world now treats “people like me and people like you”—as the new voice of right-wing populism. A lot of liberals, zeroing in on lyrics about people “milkin’ welfare” to buy “fudge rounds,” saw something similar.
If it’s understandable that people engaged with the conservative strain in Anthony’s lyrics, it was maybe a leap to unilaterally anoint him a MAGA mascot. A lot of people’s politics are a little messy, after all, and lots of people are both mad at the Man and annoyed by their neighbors. (And…