The song Rich Men North of Richmond became a YouTube phenomenon with tens of millions of views, yet it would be easy for Chinese-speaking audiences outside the United States to miss it entirely. That is not because the song is subtle. It is because its language is coded. On the surface it sounds like another complaint about rich people. Listen closer and it is a compact expression of a much older worldview: the agrarian mind trying to make sense of a modern economy it no longer controls.
One need not be a Trump supporter to see the danger in ignoring the inclinations of nearly half the country. News often seems to produce absurdities out of nowhere. Beneath them are sedimented habits of thought, and those habits are not uniquely American. Something similar is stirring in many places: a kind of impotent rage directed at the complexity of modern life.
The usual mistake is to read the conflict as ideological: capitalism versus socialism, left versus right. That Cold War frame only captures a few decades. The deeper, more durable conflict is between modern society and agrarian society. Capitalism and socialism are overlapping branches of the modern side. Many people who use modern technology and modern vocabulary are only pseudo-modern. Their habits of mind remain close to those of their ancestors.
The agrarian labels are familiar: family-imperial order, a balanced and stable society, economic independence, the all-conquering hero, honor above all. The modern labels are different: individual-city order, a growth society, economic integration, expert elites, money above all. When someone looks at a modern society through agrarian eyes, the result is constant discomfort. Secular modern society keeps patching the contradictions. It does not solve them, because it cannot. Humans are still better adapted, emotionally and cognitively, to agrarian or hunter-gatherer life. Retraining that instinct is extremely difficult.
What secular society leaves unresolved, religion and conservative conspiracy theories are happy to explain. An agrarian mind wants a total explanation. When reality clashes with expectation, it looks for an answer, and religion or conspiracy theory can supply a vague but all-encompassing one. Many people under pressure from modern life find a cognitive safe zone there and swallow it whole, replacing the technical, standardized, detail-heavy science they learned in school. The mainstream secular worldview is too arrogant to take this seriously. It assumes agrarian thinking has been defeated, keeps ignoring the nonmainstream, and then discovers, after counting heads, that the nonmainstream is close to becoming the mainstream.
The lyric about selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours, for bullshit pay is a good place to start. Selling one's soul is classic religious language, often used to belittle merchants. In agrarian thinking, profit-seeking is a bargain with the devil. The opening says that the singer has already sold his soul to fit into this modern world; he works hard and puts in overtime; what does he get? A miserable wage. Inflation is part of the background in the United States, but the deeper feeling is that effort no longer produces a proportionate reward. Modern specialization and technology mean that many people's effort genuinely cannot command a higher wage. From the inside, however, it feels like the same long hours, the same overtime, the same exhaustion, and still the pay is low. This is the agrarian principle of equivalent return: plant in spring, harvest in autumn, work more, get more. But modern society also allows fewer hours to produce more value, or existing resources to produce income without labor at all. The rich men north of Richmond are the obvious example.
Then comes the wish to sit outside, waste a life away, drag oneself home, and drown my troubles away. Going home to the family is another classic agrarian narrative. But American family structure has already gone through a phase of disintegration. Going home may mean living alone or being divorced. The answer is alcohol. That line resonates because many Americans remember the classic nuclear family: four people, a car, a dog. Broken is broken. The only response left is numbness. The song also gestures at America's drinking and drug problems. Life seems to have gone off the rails. This is a stage modern development passes through. As the economy grows, individuals, especially women who were previously disadvantaged, become less dependent on the family. From the male point of view, the old rules have collapsed. In the United States, divorce can mean long-term support payments to the ex-wife until she remarries, which adds to the sense of loss among traditional men. The absolute advantage men held in agrarian society is inevitably weakened in modern society. But it is easier to fall from privilege than to accept equality. Many people cannot interpret the change, so they conclude that the world has been led astray by the left.
The chorus returns to what the world's gotten to for people like me and people like you, and to the wish to wake up and it not be true. Here wake up is not a neutral phrase. In liberal usage, being woke means recognizing institutional unfairness that already exists; in ordinary political shorthand, it can mean political correctness. Under that regime, conservatives feel they cannot speak freely and that whole topics are fenced off. Political correctness also implies a deep state: a force that really controls the country, wages a war over words, corrodes moral order, and produces misery for everyone. This anti-woke language is a kind of password among Trump supporters. They see Trump as a non-politician who speaks plainly, fights the deep state as head of state, and is eventually brought down by professional politicians. It is a classical tragic-hero narrative. People like me and people like you speaks to ordinary people whose lives have not gone well. Yet modern experts and elites are very different from classical heroes. They do not usually have dramatic stories. Their path is elite school plus high salary, far from ordinary life. Modern society evaluates people in complicated and plural ways, so ordinary people cannot see how they reached the top. They assume the class ladder is frozen. Classical heroes, by contrast, rose from the bottom by fighting monsters.
The line livin' in the new world with an old soul leads into the rich men north of Richmond, who just wanna have total control. They want to know what you think and what you do. They do not think you know, but the singer knows you do. Your dollar is worthless and taxed without end because of them. Richmond north is Washington. Geographically, Washington sits north of Richmond. Richmond was also the capital of the Confederacy, and it is a conservative city. The rich men north of Richmond are the alliance of Washington politicians and Wall Street. In deep-state conspiracy thinking, liberal big government wants to control everything, including what ordinary people do and think. It does not want them to understand. Its only goal is total control and a steady flow of tax money to support the powerful. This is, at bottom, an agrarian-imperial narrative. Modern states do have this side, but most tax money goes to the military and health care, and the larger purpose is to maintain economic and financial hegemony. Ordinary Americans do not necessarily buy the grand-strategy story. Taxes taken from their bank accounts are real, so they object.
American history has a long conservative Monroe Doctrine tradition: do not get entangled in other countries' affairs. Trump turned this into America First. From that perspective, bases around the world and wars in distant places are waste. Conservatives also oppose Wall Street-led financial globalization, which they see as moral decay in the service of capital. This is plain agrarian storytelling. The problem with reversing course now is that the cost of living would rise further, and conservatives may not grasp the complex links. It is worth noting that conservatives generally believe in economic liberalism. They do not want government regulation, because they think the economy self-adjusts. When adjustment fails and crisis arrives, they call it a return to value. The logic is self-sealing. If the US government truly believed this, it would not have gone after Huawei and ZTE. Conservatism patches that contradiction with patriotism. It wins either way. Modern thinking tends to see economic integration as the most efficient path and active crisis response as necessary. The results are often unsatisfactory, but that is a different argument.
The verse about politicians looking out for miners rather than minors on an island somewhere turns to social problems and speaks for the working class. Miners represent a pioneering spirit and fit the ideal of reward for hard labor. The opposite image is the island Epstein used for the sexual exploitation of powerful men, including minors. That is also the general imagination conservatives have of Washington's rich: morally corrupt, involved in child abuse. In this case, the imagination was not wrong. Then come homeless people who have nothing to eat and obese people milkin' welfare. The welfare system is failing to put money where it should go. This is an old Republican distrust of Democratic policy. Conservatives prefer primary income distribution to taxing people and funding welfare. That is a common agrarian habit.
The image of someone five foot three and three hundred pounds, whose taxes should not pay for bags of fudge rounds, is another concrete complaint. Why should an obese person pay tax on candy? Obesity is already bad for health. Why add a tax? The underlying idea is personal responsibility: a person is free to choose an unhealthy life, but why should government tax them for it? Modern society answers with risk pooling. Insurance systems, tobacco taxes, and public health measures ask individuals to give up a little for the collective. If everyone who thought they would never need the pool opted out, those who do need it would face disaster without a solution. Conservatives tend to see this as the individual's own burden, not the government's business.
Young men, the song says, are putting themselves six feet in the ground, because all this country does is keep kicking them down. The pressure on young Americans is much greater than it was for the previous generation. Many people still imagine that American children become independent at eighteen. In reality, young people in big cities increasingly depend on parents for tuition or a house. Many graduate with student loans they will be paying for decades. The Occupy Wall Street movement, now half-forgotten, was one expression of liberal youth resistance to the existing system. Conservatives see government as the root of the problem. But the mismatch is also between growth-society expectations and income. Institutions designed for a steady-state society cannot handle new demands. Severe inequality is a necessary result of modern economic development. The system needs fairer rules or redistribution. The conservative solution is simple: do not tax, let everything develop freely. That model works mainly in a small agrarian society. The lyric names the problem briefly and blames the government. Go deeper and it becomes a problem of capitalism itself, which conservatives usually deflect with the language of personal responsibility.
By the end, the song has gathered the confusion and grievances of American conservatism and handed the bill to Washington. It repeats the call to wake up and fight, but the last repetition feels bleak. That is the tragic-hero structure again. The song is probably a beginning, not an ending. With global growth weakening, agrarian thinking will return in many regions. Complaints and scapegoats will multiply.
The likely future is an urban economic era. Advanced productive forces and most of the population will concentrate in prosperous metropolitan areas. Rural areas will drift away and become more conservative. Each side will live separately. The so-called middle-income trap should also be judged at the city scale. Cities with per capita GDP above roughly $20,000 are likely to keep a modern way of life. Those that fall short will have talent and resources absorbed by nearby cities that clear the threshold. They will become functional satellite towns or decline and disappear. In China, out of more than 300 prefecture-level cities, only around 30 have per capita GDP above $20,000. Those cities will probably enjoy developed-country services and technology. The rest have perhaps another decade to develop. If they still cannot reach the threshold, they will have to fend for themselves. In the United States, perhaps a dozen metropolitan areas will continue to prosper. The current prosperity of rural America rests on dollar hegemony. If decline comes, big cities will have more means of self-protection and more room to adjust than small cities. The current talk of nation-state rivalry is also agrarian thinking. The durable conflict is urban versus rural. As long as modern economic development continues, that conflict will be sharper than the conflict between countries.
Today the trouble is north of Richmond. Tomorrow it may be Wall Street. The day after, atheists. Then evil countries. After that, perhaps only aliens are left to take the blame. Conservatives and liberals can always find an opposite. The deeper problem may be the brain that has not evolved much since hunter-gatherer times. Trying to solve future problems by returning to the past is both foolish and wicked. Once a historical trend has formed, the task is to understand and adapt. Right and wrong are never absolute in the middle of change. There are no fixed heroes and villains. When you rage impotently and loudly declare that some opponent or idea is the villain, the villain may be your own past self.
Most of us, after all, are monkeys living in a steel jungle.