Populist Conspiracism
When conspiracism is blended with populism, the result is frequently a worldview called "producerism." Producerist movements consider the "real" patriotic Americans to be hard-working people in the middle- and working-class who create goods and wealth while fighting against "parasites" at the top and bottom of society who pick their pockets. 140
Gary Allen provides an example of producerism in his 1971 None Dare Call it Conspiracy, which included a graphic chart showing the middle-class being squeezed between the ruling elite "insiders" above, pressured by the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Council on Foreign Relations, and the rabble below, pressured by "naive radicals" of the left, such as SDS, the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the Young Socialist Alliance, and Common Cause.141 In 1974 Allen updated the scenario in Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order, articulating the anti-globalist theme of much current conspiracism in the Patriot and armed militia movements.142 Allen's work is championed by the John Birch Society.
Producerism not only promotes scapegoating, but also has a history of assuming that a proper citizen is a White male. Historically, groups scapegoated by right-wing populist movements in the US have been immigrants and people of color, especially Blacks. Attention is diverted from inherent white supremacism by using coded language to reframe racism as a concern about specific issues, such as welfare, immigration, tax, or education policies.143 Non-Christian religions, women, gay men and lesbians, youth, students, reproductive rights activists, and environmentalists also are scapegoated.144 Sometimes producerism targets those persons who organize on behalf of impoverished and marginalized communities, especially progressive social change activists.145
The nativist and Americanist movements emerged as a way to promote a broad Christian nationalism, and a way to enforce implicitly white supremacist northern European cultural standards among increasingly diverse immigrant groups.146 Producerism played a key role in a shift from the main early mode of right-wing populist conspiracism which defended the status quo against a mob of "outsiders," originally framed as a conspiracy of Freemasons or Jews or aliens. Today, right-wing populist conspiracism targets the government and other "insiders." According to Michael Billig:
"With the replacement of the old aristocratic orders in Europe and the increasing participation of the middle classes in political life, there came a change in the themes of the conspiracy mythology. In the United States the change accompanied the threats to the hegemony of the old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant group, posed by waves of new immigrants in the middle of the nineteenth century. The conspiracy theory ceased to defend government against conspirators, but located the conspiracy within government, or more often behind government."147
Two organizations representing the nativist tradition--the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby--played a significant role in promoting producerism and helping it transform into populist anti-government conspiracist themes during the 1960s and 1970s.148
The John Birch Society (JBS) maintains that internationalist "insiders" with a collectivist agenda, (claimed to be behind both communism and Wall Street capitalism), are engaged in a coordinated drive to destroy national sovereignty and individualism. JBS members are primarily elitist, ultraconservative, and reformist. Its conspiracist theories do not center on scapegoating Jews and Jewish institutions, nor do they center on biological racism. In a more subtle form of racism and anti-Semitism, JBS promotes a culturally-defined WASP ethnocentrism as the true expression of America. Echoing historic producerist themes, implicit racism and anti-Semitism are intrinsic to the group's ideology, but they are not articulated as principles of unity. JBS conspiracist narrative traces back to Robison's book alleging a Illuminati Freemason conspiracy. The Society's roots are in business nationalism, economic libertarianism, anti-communism, Eurocentrism, and Christian fundamentalism.149
The Liberty Lobby's conspiracist narrative is that the secret elites are Jews (descended from non-European bloodlines) who manipulate Blacks and other people of color to destroy national unity and popular will, which derives its strength from a racially-separate organic tribalism. The Lobby is primarily populist, fascist, and insurgent. It promotes conspiracist theories that center on scapegoating Jews and Jewish institutions, and on biological racism as the basis for white supremacist xenophobia. However, through the use of coded rhetoric, and appeals to racial separatism that extol Black nationalist groups, the group attempts, with some success, to mask its core racism and anti-Semitism. The Liberty Lobby relies on historic anti-Semitic conspiracist sources that trace back to the Protocols and its many progeny. Its roots are in isolationism, small business resentment of large corporate interests, and eugenicist White racial nationalism.
The JBS and Liberty Lobby both use populist rhetoric, but JBS members distrust the idea of the sovereignty of the people, and stress that the United States is a republic not a democracy, which they dismiss as a "mobocracy." This explains how the JBS can criticize the alleged secret elites, yet retain an elitist point of view; they want to replace the "bad" elites with the "good" elites--presumably their allies. Both groups use conspiracist scapegoating, a common feature of right-wing populism. Starting in the 1970s, other branches of right-wing populist conspiracism began to grow, in the Christian Right, the Christian Identity religion, the Lyndon LaRouche network, and in both secular and religious forms of survivalism.
Populism can come from the bottom up, but it also can be deployed from the top down--used to attack the status quo by outsider business factions seeking to displace entrenched power structures. These outsider factions use populist rhetoric and conspiracist, anti-elite scapegoating to attract constituencies in the middle class and working class. As right-wing populist movements grow, they can lure mainstream politicians to adopt scapegoating, in order to attract voters. Their theories can legitimize acts of discrimination, or even violence. And reformist populist movements can open the door for insurgent right-wing movements such as fascism to recruit from their own movements by arguing that more drastic action is needed.150 Fascism itself is a distinctive form of conspiracist right-wing populism. Fascist groups are not likely to seize state power in the US (or in most countries), but can seriously damage attempts to extend democracy and equality as they encourage scapegoating and conspiracism in adaptive and creative ways while engaging in recruitment and ideological training.15
Because right-wing conspiracism so often rests on an anti-elite critique, it has been known to fool gullible leftists.152 Various Green Party activists have had to struggle against conspiracism, including the anti-Semitic variant, among members and even a handful of leaders.153 Populist conspiracism also has found a home in certain Black nationalist and Arab anti-imperialist groups.154 Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi has actually tried to unite left and right groups that oppose the US government at meetings in Tripoli, Libya.15
We must be careful to draw a distinction between critiques that extend economic and social justice, and those that claim economic privilege for middle-class consumers at the expense of social justice. Anti-regime criticism is rampant in the conspiracist right.156 There is a need to educate and thus inoculate large sectors of the white middle class and working class against the dead end of right-wing populism with its penchant for scapegoating. If we tolerate the paradigm of conspiracist scapegoating by right-wing economic populists simply because it appears to advance a short-term anti-corporate or anti-government agenda, we are creating a dangerous alliance with people whose long-term vision--wittingly or unwittingly--promotes racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic outcomes.157 We will be throwing our long-term allies overboard and helping sink the ship of state, when we should be plotting a new course on a sturdy vessel we all help to rebuild.
This is especially true given the current period of apocalyptic anxiety and millennial energy, which infuses the Christian right, populist right, and far right.
