Trump, Kanye, Elon, and the Ideology of Producerism
The other day I was doom-scrolling through Instagram and came across this fuzzy picture (Kan)Ye had posted of him and Elon Musk laying the ground looking up, as though they are college kids doing some indoor stargazing because they’re on mushrooms and the ceiling looks wild bro! I’ve been there.
The picture reminded me that over the past few weeks I’d in two totally unrelated places—one, a Jamelle Bouie comment in a debate podcast, an the other, an old piece about Henry Ford’s obsessive antisemitism—encountered a word for an ideology that I’d never heard before: producerism. And wow, it seems such a useful word for explaining a handful of seemingly incomprehensible dimensions of our politics.
Goldwag says that:
Producerism offers up a vision of farmers, artisans, merchants, and industrialists-the
people who actually create wealth as victims of both the idle poor beneath them on the economic ladder and the parasitic financiers who cluster at its top.
Bouie says that:
Entangled in these social and economic transformations is a longstanding and potent American ideology that slots some people as “makers” and others as “takers,” to use Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff language to donors during his presidential campaign in 2012. Although traditionally associated with whiteness and masculinity, this producerism holds sway and currency across the electorate.
Berlet and Lyons say that it goes back further, and comes from the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer as the ideal American, but also emerged with antisemitic undercurrents in:
The Jacksonian dichotomy between "productive" entrepreneurs and "parasitic" bankers is almost identical to a basic tenet of modern anti-Semitism: that the abstract, parasitic power of money (embodied in the Jewish banker) threatens the concrete authenticity of productive activity (embodied in non-Jewish workers, farmers, and industrial capitalists).
Trying to lend sense to how it could be that the Latino community could begin to swing toward the anti-immigrant Donald Trump over the past five years, Bouie points out in an op-ed that:
I think that a part of Donald Trump’s appeal, especially for men, was the degree to which he embodied the producerist ideal. His image, at least, was of the commanding provider, who generated wealth and prosperity for himself and others. Put another way, the prevalence of producerist ideology in American society helped frame Trump — previously the star of “The Apprentice” — as a political figure, making him legible to millions of Americans. Hispanic voters were as much a part of that dynamic as any other group.
It is this kind of masculine Silicon Valley vibe that includes within it the sort of “be a disruptor” mentality that says a good person is someone that fucks up society’s current way of doing things—because, of course, when society gets disrupted new markets and thus profits emerge.
But it also makes me think back to all the times (Kan)Ye has compared himself to Steve Jobs and to Pablo Picasso—creators. Ye, not the best rapper in the world but arguably the greatest producer of all time. Ye, the guy who wrote an entire raging album about how the high fashion industry was super racist and wouldn’t let him design clothing because he was Black and “just a rapper”:
My mama was raised in the era when
Clean water was only served to the fairer skin
Doin' clothes, you woulda thought I had help
But they wasn't satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself
I remember when Ye first put the MAGA hat on and said he supported Donald Trump, I remember people being baffled, and I also remember me sort of being like…actually this totally makes sense, but I don’t have a word for why. But it is this: producerism.
As far back as 2003 his goal was to be “the best (dressed) rapper in the game” and when he was producing all of Jay-Z’s best songs of all time he always talked about them cinematically, as though he was scoring a film, and how he ultimately wanted to make movies and that music was just a stepping stone. For Ye this production, creator, artisan dimension of his identity is so salient it may serve to overwhelm all others to the point that the red MAGA hat becomes sacred. And it makes sense, at least to me, for the sort of woke-agnostic American to be totally on board with Trump who is the ultimate performer of producerism—and I would highlight performer.
It is the ideological sense of the moral citizen called producerism that links farmers and billionaires, small business owners and CEOs, first-gen Latino men and white nationalists, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Ye. And it feels like an incisive angle on our current political coalitions.
I think in this lies a serious political question for Democrats. That is, how do we celebrate creators when our primary political villain is the corporate billionaire? How do we raise taxes on the rich while bringing small business owners into the fold. This is easy in terms of policy, but very difficult in terms of mythology—which is where the Democratic party in its current overly technocratic, bureaucratic, and ultimately robotic political style fails time and time again.
In a monarchy it’s fine to just do things and be done. But in a democracy just doing is not enough. You have to promote, celebrate, and explain. Narratives and political myths matter. And so I wonder what the democrats should do about all this subtle story that cuts across class divides?