Great replacements in American history

An interesting opinion piece in the New York Times raises an interesting point. Radical right Republican propaganda is demagoguing and fear mongering the rise of minorities and the fall of White people in a narrative called the Great Placement. One commentator argues that great replacements have happened before in American history. The NYT writes:

In the broadest sense, what goes by the name “replacement theory” — the idea that American elites are conspiring to replace so-called real Americans with immigrants from poor countries — is merely a description of the American way, enshrined in tradition, codified by law, promoted by successive generations of American leaders from Washington and Lincoln to Kennedy and Reagan.

There have been four, arguably five, great replacements in American history.

The first was the worst and the cruelest: the destruction — through war, slaughter, ill-dealing and wholesale expulsion — of Native Americans by European migrants. The same far-right true believers who now scream about their own purported replacement by the non-indigenous tend to be the most indignant when reminded that at least some of their ancestors were once the replacements themselves.

The fifth is the most contentious but also the most routine and unexceptional: the alleged replacement of the native-born white working class with a foreign-born nonwhite working class. In this telling, Washington policy, from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement to current enforcement failures at the border, are part of a broad conspiracy to give American businesses cheap labor and Democratic politicians ready votes.

This is both nothing new and nothing at all. The United States has, from its earliest days, repeatedly “replaced” its working class with migrants, not as an act of substitution, much less as a sinister conspiracy, but as the natural result of upward mobility, the demands of a growing economy and the benefits of a growing population. The idea that NAFTA simply caused jobs to flee the United States sits at odds with the fact that the labor-force participation rate in the United States grew to its peak in the years immediately after the signing of the agreement.

What all of this says is that the phenomenon of replacement, writ large, is America, and has been from the beginning, sometimes by force, mostly by choice. What the far right calls “replacement” is better described as renewal.  

All this is of a piece with our traditional self-understanding as a country in which a sense of common destiny bound by ideals matters more than common origins bound by blood. It’s also necessary to any form of conservatism that wants to draw a line against blood-and-soil nationalism or white-identity politics. You cannot defend the ideal of “E pluribus unum” by deleting pluribus. To subscribe to “replacement theory” — the sinister, conspiratorial kind now taking hold of parts of the right — is to weaponize America against itself.

I’m writing this in the wake of Saturday’s massacre in Buffalo, whose alleged perpetrator wrote a racist and antisemitic rant about replacement theory. It’s usually a mistake to judge an idea based on the behavior of some deranged believer. It’s also unnecessary. The danger with replacement theory in its current form isn’t that a handful of its followers are crazy but that too many of them are sane.

When it is cast in that light, the current modern day Great Replacement that the radical right is weaponizing and demagoguing does not look so planned or threatening. It is a natural progression. As long as democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law are maintained intact, the process should be fairly civilized. It is when those defenses against oppression and abuse are neutered that the Great Replacement can turn on people and hurt or kill them. In this case, those targeted for oppression and abuse are the non-Whites and out-groups that neo-fascist Republican propaganda and policy targets.

There is no law or authority in America that prevents the rise of a tyranny of the minority. It can happen today with few or no changes in existing law. A sufficient minority of American society has been propagandized into a firm belief that what Republican radical right elites are doing now and want to do is democratic, moral and God’s will. If democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law fall to Republican authoritarian radicalism, America’s minority Anti-great Replacement movement will turn on the majority opposition and crush both opposition and democracy as much as possible.