In that David Brooks column I posted on earlier, Brooks cited historian Michael Kazin's definition of "producerism" to described the views of the right-wing protest movement we've seen so much of lately--and in order to argue that the movement has nothing to do with race. Here's what Brooks said:
The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.
And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.
Well, I reached out to Kazin, and it sounds like Brooks may not have read his book very carefully, because the idea that "producerism" on the right is completely decoupled from race is not one Kazin agrees with. This is what he said to me in an email:
"In the history of the modern right, producerism (which is the core of populist ideology) has almost always been linked with racism. Wallace and Reagan (and many others) appealed to white wage-earners by attacking pro-busing judges and liberal pols who they charged were taking the people's money and wasting it on lazy minorities. The racial undercurrent never lay far from the surface."
So much for right-wing producerism having nothing to do with race.
-- A. Serwer
