An important understanding of right-wing populism was developed by Berlet and Lyons (2016). Their analysis, specifically grounded in the US experience, suggests that the everyday followers of right-wing populism identify as ‘producerist’: they see themselves as doing ‘real’, ‘productive’ work, in the ‘real world’. Typically, they are either small business owners or people employed in some kind of productive work. They have a mistrust of perceived ‘elites’, which include politicians, big business, professionals, intellectuals, academics, corporate leaders, Jews, mainstream media and government employees. These elites are seen as out of touch with the ‘real world’ inhabited by the producerists. They are therefore regarded as parasites, drawing wealth and power from the people, and their very existence is a reason why the right-wing producerists believe they are not doing as well as they should. This leads to a mistrust of expertise, of political leadership, of mainstream media and of conventional authority (Canovan, 1999; Taggart, 2000; Betz, 2013; Jansen, 2013; Wodak et al, 2015). Producerists can readily see all that is corrupt and unjust about liberal democratic institutions, and they have good reason to be critical of those in authority, who they see as having sold out the producerists for their own interests. This mistrust of elites has a strong appeal, with faint echoes both of socialist revolution and of anarchism, sometimes fuelled by anti-Semitism, and is readily adopted by new converts to populist causes. It has effectively contributed to politicians, bureaucrats, experts and academic researchers losing some of the authority they traditionally enjoyed, largely unquestioned, in public discourse.

The producerists also identify another group of threatening ‘parasites’, namely the welfare cheats, immigrants, people of colour, the unemployed, refugees, addicts, and others seen as sponging off the system and threatening the livelihood and well-being of the ‘real people’ (Wodak, 2015; Winberg, 2017; Vigil and Vigil, 2019). This is the group Marxists have understood as the lumpenproletariat, the group at the ‘bottom’ of society with no revolutionary potential (Khanna, 2013). It is the group that is readily vilified through racist narratives, hence the appeal to many populists of white supremacy or Islamophobia.