In (Partial) Defense of Oliver Anthony and David Brooks

I f there’s a question that cuts straight to the foundational disagreement between “establishment” conservatives and the “New Right,” it’s one about blame. Whose fault is it, exactly, that many individuals and communities in middle America find themselves in states of dissatisfaction, decay, and discombobulation? For the “establishment” crowd, the decay is self-produced. The resentment that led many to support Donald Trump is a product of local manufacture; white, working-class communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, rather than making the adjustments necessary to thrive in the 21st century, decided to sit down, throw their hands up, and reminisce of a time when they were privileged. In this story, Appalachians had everything they needed to thrive alongside coastal cities; the determining factor was their own lack of effort.

But there’s a competing tale, one in which middle America was left behind by elites who exported Midwest factory jobs to China, preached destructive social norms to which they did not adhere themselves, and shrugged off legitimate concerns about rising income inequality and stagnant wages. In this story, white working-class despair was an import from decision-makers in New York City and Washington, D.C.

I was struck by a recent column from David Brooks (who is often associated with the “establishment” camp) arguing for the validity of a version of that competing tale:

Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country. . . . We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?

Not so fast, say our own Dominic Pino and Charlie Cooke. Argues Dominic:

[People] define success as having a stable job and providing for their family. And you can do that by attending a state school, or attending a technical college, or doing any number of different jobs out there that will allow you to work your way up and make six-figure income and do really well for yourself and really well for your family while also being a part of your church community or a local club or organization. And the fact that you didn’t go to law school or that you didn’t get a clerkship on the Supreme Court just really never crosses your mind at all.

And Charlie:

I didn’t like the David Brooks column either. The first thing is that I didn’t believe him. I thought it was a condescending humble brag listing all of the great things that he has. The second is that he treats the Trump-supporting people who made these decisions of which he disapproves as if they’re automatons, as if they’re below him. Well, of course they would make these decisions because we up here are so educated and have put them in this difficult circumstance. No, no. The choice to nominate Donald Trump twice and perhaps a third time lies with Republicans. They can’t be tricked into it. They have agency and they must exercise it.

Who is right? Are Trump voters helpless automatons who have been forced by nefarious elites to turn to a populism of victimhood, or are they rational individuals, deeply imbued with agency, who have made their own bed and are now complaining about the consequences? The answer, I think, is somewhere in between.

When evaluating the situations of individuals and communities, the starting premise must be that human beings have agency and, to a significant extent, are able to shape their own destiny. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies, for example, are undoubtedly a product of personal decisions. But what about the babies born as a result of such pregnancies? Can we really claim that they are not, in a profound sense, victims of their situation?

In the economic realm, we must similarly begin from the premise of personal agency. Americans, especially in today’s tight labor market, are free and able to pursue jobs that pay them a living wage. But sometimes that requires making a tough decision to pick up and abandon the place you have long called home, in which you have long felt deeply rooted. And once you arrive, you might find that your hourly inflation-adjusted wage is not that much more than what middle-class Americans were making 30 years ago. Conservatives, of all people, should not belittle the difficulty of that choice nor treat such a reality as an acceptable economic goal.

The truth, then, is that struggling working-class whites are neither total victims nor solely accountable for their condition. That they are, in a real sense, able to pursue a better life does not mean that elites have not handed them a raw deal.

It is this raw deal that Oliver Anthony sings of in “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which rose meteorically to national popularity in the past few days:

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. . . .

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

‘Cause your dollar ain’t s*** and it’s taxed to no end

‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond

Anthony clearly views himself as a victim of external forces, which he sees as primarily responsible for the suffering he describes. National Review’s Mark Wright takes issue: “We, as citizens, as men, still hold it in our power to ignore the corrosive effects of our politics and the popular culture and get on with living the good life.” Mark, of course, touches on something important and real, but so does Anthony, who is not simply grasping at straws. Is there really nothing to his description? At the very least, it should be readily apparent to conservatives that big government (largely, in fact, run by “rich men north of Richmond”) has indeed played a dispositive role in bringing about our inflationary period, the effects of which are obviously most distressing to the people Anthony has in mind. And is it not manifestly obvious that central planners “wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do?” Does this not cause folks like Anthony to think twice before offering an opinion contrary to the preferences of America’s elites? Haven’t we all been complaining about cancel culture for the last half decade?

This is all to say that we need to find a middle ground between treating individuals in stagnant communities as total victims and as the sole determiners of their fate. For people like Anthony, the responsibility to rise up falls first and foremost to themselves. At the same time, our society has put them in an increasingly tough position. We can and must do better.

Before the rise of Donald Trump, conservatives spent decades rightfully emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility and the power of personal agency. We often forgot, though, that external factors play a role — sometimes a sizeable one — in determining where we end up. In the Trump era, conservatives have swung to the other extreme, only focusing on victimhood and eschewing the truth that we have been gifted with free will and are thus deeply capable of improving our own circumstances.

The person who puts it best, I think, is not a conservative at all but a liberal Democrat from Connecticut. Writes Senator Chris Murphy, alongside Richard Weissbourd, in Time this past April:

America’s genius lies not just in our spirit of entrepreneurship and pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism, but also in our decision to make sure that this value on personal responsibility and success is never absolute. To varying degrees over the course of our history, it has been matched by a concern for the community and the collective. We measured success both by how well we were doing and how well the communities and the country we belonged to were doing, and we tended to view our individual and collective well-being as powerfully entwined.

Properly striking the balance that Murphy describes is the challenge of our politics. Mark Wright, Charlie Cooke, and Dominic Pino have emphasized one side of the scale. David Brooks and Oliver Anthony have emphasized the other. But conservatives have been searching for the golden mean since the days of Aristotle. In matters of great public import, it is necessary that we continue to do so.