Very likely the reader is wearily familiar with one of the memes that American right-wingers endlessly repeat. It’s called the “great replacement”: the claim that shadowy but apparently omnipotent elites are deliberately replacing the old stock (meaning white) American population with immigrants from predominantly non-white or non-Christian countries.
The notion had its beginnings decades ago in the mental swamps of Southern segregationist politicians and has been recycled in various iterations through white supremacist groups. Donald Trump’s election and the popularization of the phrase (in more or less coded language) by professional jackasses like Tucker Carlson made it into another of the Republican base’s innumerable slogans.
The idea is bunk, of course, and easily understood as yet another of the many myths designed to play into right-wingers’ persecution complex. But it is also possible to understand it as a folk-psychological projection of something that is indeed happening in the strongly Republican regions of the country inhabited by what Sarah Palin called “real Americans.” It’s not so much the great replacement as the […]
Good article and I realize the Great Replacement Theory was only a lead-in. But the theory was not originally applied to blacks and slaves but rather to Catholics. It was pushed by what was generally called the Know Nothing Party, but officially the Native American Party and then the American Party. Their anti-immigration, paranoid themes were similar sounding to Trumpist themes, just a different enemy. They believed the Pope was taking over the US through Catholic immigration from Europe. The claim was that Catholics would replace real Americans, Protestants. They did pretty well and one of their leaders was Samuel Morse. Know Nothing was a name they liked, referring to their instructions to members to say I know nothing when asked what was discussed as t their get togethers. The Civil War led to the crumbling of their movement even though it lasted well into the Twentieth Century.