First, a quick story: When I was a brand new, inexperienced Marine platoon commander, I had a young Marine who immediately struck me as bright, competent, and hardworking — and yet this Marine was still just a corporal. At least to my fresh eyes, it seemed like this man should be a sergeant, at least. “Had he been passed over for promotion unfairly?” I asked my crusty platoon sergeant. “Should we take this up with the command?”
The platoon sergeant’s gruff response has stuck with me: “Sir, in my experience, 95 percent of the time, there’s a good reason — even if not always entirely satisfying — that a Marine is one rank and not another. I can look into this, but my advice to that Marine would be to keep doing the good job that he’s doing right now, and his time will come.”
Yesterday, I wrote on the Corner a critique of the message in Oliver Anthony’s viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The response to that short post has been universally negative. Along with dozens and dozens of four-letter-word epithets directed my way, I was told that my view was clearly out of touch, elitist, and condescending. Why was I criticizing the passion of this man who has so rightly noticed “what this world’s gotten to”? Am I blind or indifferent to the struggles, the suicides, the wrecked lives of blue-collar American men? Sohrab Ahmari, writing in the American Conservative, labeled me a “hunky-dory con,” adding that “Hunky-dory conservatism might please the right’s donor class, but it alienates the millions who can’t detect reality in its rosy picture of the world.”
Surely I must be one of those rich men living north of Richmond to be so arrogant and callous.
Well, I’m neither callous nor indifferent to the suffering out there. I’m not attacking Oliver Anthony personally or disparaging his character. Indeed, I called the epidemic of overdoses, suicides, and deaths of despair a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe.” And, as I wrote, I don’t think that the federal government or our national leadership has been an innocent bystander in any of this. Of course the government has wasted avalanches of money, stoked inflation, and made it harder for your dollar to stretch to the end of the month.
But you won’t convince me that the first-, second-, and third-most important factors in the fracturing of our society hasn’t been — us. We the People have been the cause of our decline.
On the economics, Ahmari writes, “real wages for the bottom half of American workers have been stagnant for the better part of two generations.” That’s a debatable assertion at best — see Michael Strain’s book The American Dream Is Not Dead — but as I see it, where the rubber hits the road, that’s not the biggest issue by far.
There are, according to a recent report from the U.S. Chamber, 9.6 million job openings in the U.S. and 5.8 million unemployed workers. Worse, the labor-force participation rate (Americans who have a job or are actively looking for one) has been falling steadily for two decades, roughly the period that Ahmari has identified — from 67 percent in 2001 to 62.6 percent today. If you talk to anyone who hires people or runs a business, the No. 1 comment you receive is, “We can’t find enough good applicants.” But are these jobs well-paying enough? Are there good blue-collar jobs out there through which young men can earn a living, build skills, and support a family? Yes, there are. In fact, there are serious shortages of good workers in the building trades. And I know that the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy will pay you tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses to ship to boot camp on short notice. So yes, as I wrote, “if you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’ you need to find a new job.”
We all know this is true. Even Ohio senator J. D. Vance, now a leading NatCon, knows it’s true. He wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy that “Nobel-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites.”
What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough — I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.
The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly toss aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America [emphasis added].
That cultural rot doesn’t sound very hunky-dory to me, Sohrab.
Again, government hasn’t helped, but no, you won’t convince me that the course of our lives isn’t primarily a function of our own choices. I have been on jobsites and personally witnessed the new guy not come back after lunch. I’ve watched friends with a baby on the way choose unemployment and drugs. I know young men who’ve thrown away their chances. Indeed, that young man was once me — and could still be me — if I had not looked a mentor in the eye and taken his direct advice to stop screwing around, grow up, and get to work.
For the record, I’m not a rich man living north of Richmond. I’m an Okie, living in my hometown. I was raised in a middle-class family. I worked my way through college. I mowed lawns, built fences, and stood the closing shift at a convenience store. After school, I roughnecked in the west Texas oilfields for two years to pay off my student loans. Later, I joined the Marine Corps and served in the infantry. I’ve followed work to four different states and moved my family three times in seven years. My hands are rough and calloused. I know blue-collar work and what it’s like to make ends meet on blue-collar pay.
But you know what? If I had been born a trust-fund baby, if I had been schooled at Phillips Academy and Harvard, if I worked at a desk at Goldman Sachs’s offices in Manhattan and my uncalloused hands had never done a day of manual labor in my live-long life, this timeless advice would still hold true:
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: get a job, get married, raise your kids up right, get involved with your church, read good books, teach your boys to hunt, be present in the lives of your family and friends, help your neighbors.
It’s not condescending to speak the truth.