Conservatives Are Defending a Sanitized Version of ‘The Great Replacement’
www.theatlantic.comThis article has an excellent roundup of how conservative pundits have doubled-down on the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory in the wake of the Buffalo shooting. It also explains the various flaws of reasoning in that narrative. I’m really disappointed by this reaction from the conservative media elite – I had expected them to shy away from it for a while, but instead they have decided to own it. That is troubling, to say the least.
I’ll come back later to discuss why I think these pundits are promoting a genocidal conspiracy theory (if anyone has questions). Serwer does a good job of breaking it down. In short, there are several flaws:
- Political identity/ideology is not fixed, especially not across generations.
- Democrats are not openly advocating for ‘replacement’ (Carlsons’ clips show nothing of the sort).
- The problems with this conspiracy theory are not mitigated by replacing “Jews” with “Democrats” – it still has 99% of the genocidal potential, and 99% of the logical fallacies.
Edit: Here’s an Ann Coulter piece that Serwer did not include, but shows the same rhetoric.
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The great replacement is a complicated one. Ben Shapiro defines it as
If that is the great replacement theory, I don’t think its real.
If you define it as,
There is no denying its real. And you’ll find that’s what most “conservatives” define it as.
White people see non white people celebrating this fact and then think its in purpose.
I do think immigration is on purpose. I think politicians use it to get votes. Corporations use it for cheap labor.
Given that the majority of people are not white it makes sense that immigration would drive the percent of white people down. There is no need for a global elite group to be driving it.
Immigration presents many problems for native populations if not limited. So I think its fine to limit immigration. Especially from countries who don’t allow immigration themselves. I think it should be a two way street or a no way street. But that’s off topic.
Why use Shapiro’s definition? If I’m not mistaken, the term is directly taken from a French text by Renaud Camus in 2011 talking about Arabs and Muslims replacing them. Has the overall American version shifted that far? Possible, I don’t talk to people who believe in it, but I doubt it.
Absolutely. There are humanitarian arguments but at the end of the day, they are abused for cheap labor by the profit-driven owning class. Unfortunately, the media and general rhetoric lead millions of people to blame the immigrants thenselves and not the corporations/HR, which drives a wedge in the historically-left labor movement who both rightfully and wrongfully (depending on who exactly is doing the blaming and why) interpret the dispute as racist and exclusionary rather than pro-worker and anti-corporate.
When people say the ruling class use racism to divide the working class, immigration is a perfect case study of how and why.
An interesting take from a practical perspective, because there’s most countries on Earth that I can’t see many Westerners putting their hands up to visit beyond missionaries and volunteers.
Shapiro’s definition has three parts – two of them are being promoted by the pundits Serwer quotes:
Shapiro and the rest are arguing for the first two positions. That’s 99% of the work – they’re promoting an paranoid conspiracy theory. It doesn’t really matter who they place at the core of the conspiracy – it’ll be whomever is convenient for them. Anyway, this appeals to anti-Semites just as much as an openly anti-Semitic narrative would: it’s easy enough to treat “Democrat” as code for “Jew”.
The idea that politicians are promoting immigration to get votes from those future immigrants (as opposed to embodying the policy preference of existing voters and donors) is absurd. It takes 30+ years for a generation of immigrant to develop into a voting block big enough to influence elections. Democrat politicians are short-sighted careerists.
The idea of “white people being replaced” is far from obvious. Immigration is not causing the population of white people to drop. Anyway, the idea of ‘white nations’ is racist. I assume you just used clumsy wording … but I have no sympathy for people promoting those ideas.
No, it doesn’t. You can become a citizen in a only a few years under certain circumstances. two under marriage I know. People tend to vote within their ethnic group. So cities with large numbers of salami immigrants try to encourage more salami immigrantion so that samalis can vote for them. This is how Ilhan Omar got elected. Irish/Italians did this back in the day too.
How?
It’s clear from the numbers the percentage is shrinking. I’m not saying I care just that it IS happening.
Well, we live in a world with finite resources. In some scenario immigration might increase available resources but that is complicated. In general, more people mean less land, food to make more babies.
No it’s not. It’s an objective descriptor. Just like Blue Sky. If you were to say, you only like white nations, that could be “Racist”. Or if you wanted to do some evil to create white only nations that would be evil. But describing England, Sweden, and other traditionally European nations as historically white nations is not racist by itself. And in conversation it’s best to assume the best in people not the worst. People generally mean well.
White is absolutely not an objective term. Hypodescent, differing definitions (e.g. Irish not considered white for hundreds of years, borders on Asia and southern Europe) and an arbitrary cut-offs of white and non-white are some simple examples. Hell, many official national sources call ethnic Jews white, but good luck telling white nationalists that.
Therefore I don’t see how white nations can possibly be an objective descriptor. Furthermore, is USA a ‘white nation’? Is Australia a ‘white nation’? They’re culturally and demographically dominated by British and other European groups by far.
Race is just a weird, arbitrary way to group cultures and nations.
There is no use in having a conversation with you if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of white people.
Imagine what that graph would look like if it went back another hundred years and included native Americans 🤦
Its expected for racial-imbalances across the globe to even out over time now that global travel is so accessible. This could also have something to to with natural selection lol
Proponents of the Great Replacement are well aware of the native American situation and it’s one of the main talking points when they are explaining the Great Replacement.
This sounds pretty racist imo. You are saying White people are somehow weaker, less capable or something?
Could you elaborate on what you mean by natural selection?
Imagine a graph of rabbit population on and island where foxes have just been introduced.
I bet it would look a lot like the white & native american graph. I’m not saying its good or bad, just possibly the product of natural predation.
White supremacists believe that they are the best race and that some evil plot is preventing them from taking over. I don’t have evidence, but I was thinking it would be ironic if it was just natural selection.
Everything is natural selection. Falling on a stairset and dying is natural selection. Getting an abortion is natural selection. Genocide is natural selection. Rape is natural selection.
It’s not a good talking point. It just makes you sound like a racist imo.
Yes, everything is natural selection, and there are good and bad forms of it, some choose to “out-compete them for resources”, and others choose murder.
I think from the white supremacists perspective they see that they are being out competed for resources by non-whites in a civil and legal way, so they’re advocating for murder to help themselves compete.
Well I think conservatives are advocating for less immigration and to stop giving the children of illegal immigrants welfare.
Although I do think there is something to be said for white people who refuse to have children. It’s kinda their own fault. Their selfish cat hording, self medicating, abortion loving, wait til 30 to get married lifestyle just leads to their genetic death. Mean while the third world understands the value of family and children.
I can’t speak for the supremacist.
The growth of non-white/anglo populations is not ‘replacement’ of white populations. The white Anglo population is not shrinking or being driven out by the non-white non-Anglo population, which is what ‘replacement’ means. When I look at that chart, I see America growing by including new groups of people. At a global level, “mixing” is the best description of what’s going on. Plenty of people have moved from Europe to other countries.
This idea that people immigrate in order to get political power is silly. Voting is such an abstract concern - people are more concerned with security, jobs, and building up community institutions like grocery stores and places of worship. Political representation follows immigration - it’s just paranoid to think it drives immigration.
No, once in power a group will try to make a area favorable for immigrants from their culture. You should be able to use your imagination for all the ways this is possible. I don’t really care that much to prove it.
The white population is shrinking by both absolute value and percentage.
Does that statement imply that US Americans from Western European cultures aren’t in power, and haven’t been in power for a long time? They’re the majority of billionaires and politicians. Over-representation doesn’t change that.
I think a more accurate hypothesis is that a group in power will try to increase their power. That’s why you noticed the economic outsourcing of wage labour to immigrants by the ruling class of capitalists, and the appeasement of shallow progressivism through populist American ‘leftism’ in politics. Liberal capitalism (note: both Democrats and Republicans are almost entirely liberalists, whether socially conservative or progressive) drives the recursive accumulation of capital, and that capital is used politically to ensure further capital growth. That’s why ‘the whites’ aren’t bringing waves of whites and ‘the jews’ aren’t bringing waves of jews. Hispanics sure as fuck aren’t in power compared to other demographics, they share a regional interest, alongside a minor regional interest in Asia, and Europe stopped having a so-called World War so their mass immigration slowed massively.
I actually think that (1) & (2) is true. (2) maybe not because they consciously desire replacement for replacement’s sake, but because they want to keep the economy going and save as much cost as possible.
This statement is interesting:
Are you suggesting that the Jews are so powerful that it’s now super easy to conclude the elites are basically all Jews…?
(1) I disagree. I think it’s pretty easy to conclude that anyone would rather live in the USA than El Salvador, so it is not hard to place the anger back at the topic. In fact, the Great Replacement stuff helps draw the ire back to the top.
(2) How is it a fantasy to believe that elites actively want to import more people for cheap labor to replace the rapidly declining white population…? Especially when it is far more costly to educate lots more white people who have much greater demands, and it will take a lot longer to replenish the population.
I kind of saw a variant of the second theory being circulated: that current citizens who have higher stabdards of freedom and wages are being replaced by immigrants who are willing to work for less and have less rights.
Ann Coulter quoted some mainstream liberals basically saying they believe in some variant of GRT: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2022/05/18/ann-coulter-here-are-the-nutcases-who-believe-in-replacement/
That’s a super old theory. Like, Lenin wrote essays about why capitalists were doing this and globalism, and I doubt he was near the first to notice. At this point I don’t even know if it should be called a theory.
Edit: Labor Aristocracy
The economic version is out there too – and it actually is fairly appealing to Democrats (they don’t want US workers to compete with other workers).
Coulter takes her quotes out of context. For instance, I dug up her Patrick Reddy quote (which she did not properly cite, of course), and Reddy did not assume that immigrants inevitably vote for Democrats. Instead, he said that their support for Democrats was a reaction to anti-immigrant actions from Republicans.
Coulter and Carlson also use equivocation to confuse the issue – they act as though building a political coalition that includes immigrants and their children is the same thing as engineering a demographic change to create a new majority. To see those two things as being even remotely connected, you have to assume that immigrants inevitably favor Democrats.
It’s basically just turning it around, though… Instead of we directly benefit from importing the Third World, it becomes aren’t these Republicans terrible for not wanting to import the Third World…? Of course they don’t get the votes, they’re rae-rae.
Keep in mind, though, that the leading GOP figures are guys like
Etc.
The GOP has also been doing its best to appeal more & more to the latino vote.
It’s just not racist at all.
Jeb is a leading figure?
“They took our job”