Last week, the popular country music singing MAGA fascist Jason Aldean released a video for his song Try That In A Small Town—a white supremacist call for violent retribution against flag-burners, protesters against police murder and “criminals.” The video has gotten 15 million views on YouTube, and hit #1 on the U.S. iTunes chart. 

The song and video have caused a shitstorm of controversy—it was pulled from the Country Music TV, and hordes of fascists jumped to Aldean's defense. But while many good people are criticizing Aldean's racism and violent threats, they are ignoring the actual danger of what this song—and the movement it is rallying—concentrates.

In A Declaration, A Call To Get Organized Now For A Real Revolution, we—the revcoms, revolutionary communists—wrote::

These days there is a lot of talk about another civil war, especially from fascists, in government and the broader society, who think they could just carry out a one-sided slaughter of those they hate, including Black people and other people of color, “illegal immigrants,” “uppity women” and those who don’t conform to “traditional” sexual and gender relations and “norms.” This situation needs to be radically changed, to where there are masses of people prepared to defeat these fascists and to do so as part of getting rid of this whole system, which has bred these fascists, along with all the other horrors it continually perpetrates.

“Good Ol’ Boys Raised Right” and Lynchings

Watch the video:

This is an anthem for the aggressive and violent assertion of white American manhood. It's a call to arms—to the millions of Christian fascist MAGA thugs who are organizing now to violently enforce their program of theocratic, white supremacist, woman hating, anti-LGBTQ, America first terror. A few nights ago, at a packed concert in Cincinnati, in his intro to this song, Aldean said, “I love my country, I love my family and I'll do ANYTHING to protect that, I can tell you that right now.” 

If anyone wants to pretend this doesn't mean violence and terror, you are deluding yourselves. And this isn't far off. All this could come to a head with the looming presidential election in November 2024, if not before.  An election which these fascists have already said will be illegitimate unless they win.

If you didn't get the message clearly enough, the video is shot in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, TN¹—which was the site of a famous Southern lynching. In 1927, an 18-year-old Black youth, Henry Choate, was accused of attacking a 16-year-old white girl. Even though she said she wasn't sure Henry Choate was her attacker, a white mob refused to let this go to trial. Three hundred fifty white men attacked the jail and bludgeoned Henry Choate with a sledgehammer. But that wasn't enough. They tied his dead body to a car, and dragged him by the neck to the County Courthouse where they lynched him from the second floor. Even after his body was taken down, that lynching rope hung at the courthouse for weeks—as a message and warning to all Black people.

These lynchers were the “good ol’ boys, raised up right” that Aldean praises in his song—the sterling citizens and sheriffs, donning the white hoods and robes of the KKK, gathering regularly in a festive carnival-like atmosphere, to witness the savage torture of Black people, taking photographs and mailing them as postcards after church on Sunday.

Trying To Oppose Aldean On The Basis Of The “Real” America Is a Disarming Deadly Fantasy

There has been some protest and opposition—from within country music and more broadly—although not nearly enough, with prominent artists like Dolly Parton staying mum. But even the progressive response within the country music world reveals a problem of its own. While these criticisms have included important exposure of the whole history of lynchings and Aldean’s calls for violence, far too many are either trying to cloak themselves in the banner of the “real America” or seriously underplaying the danger.

The singer Sheryl Crow, for instance, tweeted, “I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence. There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence....”

On the contrary, there's nothing more American than racist violence, whether in small towns, big cities or done on the people of the world by “the troops” Sheryl Crow brags about playing for. And what Aldean is celebrating is the real America—with its bloody thread from its founding in slavery and genocide, through to Jim Crow lynching, to today with genocidal police murder and mass incarceration. 

No decent person should be wanting to claim any part of this! This whole system of capitalism-imperialism—which cannot end this white supremacy and terror, but only violently reinforce it in new forms—needs to be overthrown through an actual revolution. A revolution which can put an end to racial oppression as a key part of the emancipation of humanity, here and all over the world. 

Because of the sharpening divides throughout all of society, the splits among the rulers themselves and the way this whole society is being ripped apart—which this Aldean song is a concentrated illustration of—this revolution has become more possible. 

But only if all those who want to see a better world wake up, and recognize that things are hurtling to a showdown... that something positive could be wrenched out of this if we get organized for revolution.

There Is No Going Back to “Normal...” and No One Should Want To

Even among those who do point more to ingrained white supremacy, there’s a failure so far to recognize and call this out for what it is—not just one more racist country song in a long line of racist country songs (bad as that is), but a summons to battle. 

The fascists feel an existential threat to their “way of life”—and are on the march toward civil war. This is NOT one more example, however outrageous, of some timeless white supremacy in America. This takes place in a very specific context.

As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian wrote in Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating:

“... people need to be jolted awake, to reality—to the reality of this system of capitalism-imperialism, the reality of where things are heading right now, with terrible consequences if things continue on this course—and the reality of the possibility, and the urgent need, to wrench something positive out of this, through a real revolution.”

There is no going back to normal—which was a nightmare anyway. All of you who care about the future—who want to put an end to the centuries of white supremacist terror and violence, who hate the small-minded xenophobic ignorance of “America love it or leave it,” the patriarchal yahoos of “we take care of our own,” instead of wanting to take care of the diverse humanity... you need to hear Aldean's drumbeat for the alarm bell that it is, and raise your sights—be part of fighting now for a whole better way to live, the fundamentally different system that is urgently necessary and possible.