Some Thoughts on Oliver Anthony

Oliver Anthony playing live (source)

It’s been barely two weeks since singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony burst onto America’s national scene, and already we’re fighting over his legacy. Watching the political left (broadly defined) embrace him, then drop him when they listened to his lyrics, was both amusing and terrifying. He’s since been embraced by professional right-wing bomb-throwers like Jesse Watters and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who see Anthony, like countless country singers before him, as a conservative emblem.

Yesterday, August 25^th, Anthony released a YouTube video specifically rejecting his song’s partisan embrace. “It’s aggravating seeing certain musicians and politicians act like we’re buddies,” Anthony says, from that perch that’s become the White YouTuber political pulpit: behind the steering wheel of a parked vehicle. Anthony disparages both the conservative embrace of his song, and the progressive backlash. He sees himself as essentially centrist, and his song as a moderate anthem.

I strive to avoid partisan allegiances, because they frequently result in people starting with their preferred answer and seeking out the question. Nevertheless, American polarization has made “caring about others” and “protecting the weak” political litmus tests, so apparently I’m broadly leftist. I’m certainly leftist enough to balk at Oliver Anthony’s characterization of “the obese milkin’ welfare,” a stereotype Ronald Reagan simply invented to attack America’s most defenseless.

However, I also appreciate Anthony’s attempt to disaffiliate himself from conservatism’s ugliest proponents. American conservatives have repeatedly attempted to appropriate protest songs like “Fortunate Son,” “Born in the USA,” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and turn them into right-wing battle cries. This lack of critical listening has forced numerous artists like Tom Petty and the Dropkick Murphys to aggressively distance themselves from certain politically-minded fans.

What, then, to make of Oliver Anthony? He excoriates conservatives in Verse One, then resurrects Reaganite stereotypes from 1976 in Verse Two. His song names and shames those he believes are harming America, rich and poor alike, but without suggesting a community response, or indeed any stabilizing moral core. There’s no response, in Anthony’s world, except standing on a dock, shouting his grievances in a “high lonesome” accent.

Journalist and pastor Justin Cox finds a possible solution on Anthony’s YouTube page. Anthony has a curated playlist entitled “Videos that make your noggin get bigger.” The list includes Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Billy Graham, and an awful lot of Jordan B. Peterson. Rogan and Peterson both disavow being conservative themselves, but their mostly White, mostly male audiences are frequently dominated by outspoken conservatives, making both men right-wing icons.

Rather than strictly conservative, both Rogan and Peterson are primarily individualists. Both want their audiences to think deeply, feel widely, and have profound experiences, but they want their audiences to go through this as individuals. Peterson frequently disparages collective action, and pooh-poohs any application of his own principles to concerns of class, race, and other collective identity. They see humanity as atomized individuals, not groups with shared interests.

Similarly, historian Kevin M. Kruse identifies Billy Graham as a primary proponent of a politically libertarian, aggressively pro-capitalist Christianity that originated in the 1940s, and achieved political ascendancy by the 1970s. Of the thinkers to receive multiple citations in Anthony’s playlist, only Andrew Huberman isn’t tied to an individualistic ideology—and even that is only because he prefers an exceptionally credulous attitude toward science.

Briefly, Oliver Anthony represents an individualistic worldview. To him, all circumstances arise from bad choices, and though that doesn’t necessarily make others bad people, it also kind of does. Whether it’s politicians choosing to behave corruptly, or “obese” people choosing cheap, starchy foods on EBT, everything is a matter of individual action. No matter how many individuals make he same bad choice, it never adds up to a damaged system.

This manifestation of radical individualism corresponds with something I’ve avoided saying until now: race. Specifically, Whiteness. Black Americans have a history of communitarianism, and collective response to injustice, which White Americans lost somewhere around the time Ronald Reagan functionally legalized union busting. Radical individualism is an essentially White phenomenon, as many of us discovered in the BLM protests of 2020, for which White Americans arrived supremely underprepared.

I’d argue, therefore, that Anthony’s lament is neither progressive nor conservative. Rather, it’s the cri de couer of atomized White loneliness, the awareness that, without communities or unions or church ties, we’re truly alone against a massively brutal world. Within my and Anthony’s lifetimes, White Americans have become so lonely that we can’t imagine not being isolated. So, despite my qualms, Oliver Anthony is the voice of his generation.