The horrific slaughter of ten Americans in Buffalo last week is yet another warning, as if we needed one, that violent white supremacism is a growing threat to American lives and safety. But the apparent centrality of the racist “Great Replacement” theory to the shooter’s motivations provides an opportunity — paid for in the blood of innocent victims — for us to understand that these very same white supremacist ideas are in fact behind the broader right-wing wave that brought Donald Trump to power and that is fueling authoritarian GOP policies in state after state. The violence that Buffalo suffered is the sharp end of a continuum of domination, exploitation, and demonization that, if allowed to fully gain power, would transform America into a debased and undemocratic land.
In one of several excellent articles from various writers that explore the links between Great Replacement theory and Republican politics, Amanda Marcotte describes the theory as positing that a “cabal of rich Jewish people [. . .] has conspired to “replace” white Christian Americans with other races and ethnic groups in order to gain political and social control.” And writer Talia Lavin notes that the theory is not limited to the U.S., and constitutes “the idea that white people, in the United States and white-majority countries around the world, are being systematically, deliberately outbred and “replaced” by immigrants and ethnic minorities, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of whiteness.”
In her piece at Rolling Stone, Lavin gets right to the heart of the linkages between proponents of the Great Replacement theory and the political aims of the Republican Party and the right-wing movement it represents:
The gnawing fear of a minority-white America has utterly consumed conservative politics for the past half-decade, creating a Republican Party whose dual obsessions with nativism and white fertility have engendered a suite of policies engineered to change the nature of the body politic. What unites murderers like [alleged Buffalo shooter] Gendron, and the long list of white supremacist attackers he cited with admiration, with the mainstream of the Republican party is the dream of a white nation.
But as Lavin and others have documented, it’s not just that the Great Replacement theory overlaps with the GOP’s white supremacist vision for America. Conservative pundits like Tucker Carlson and GOP politicians like Representative Elise Stefanik (the number three Republican in the House) have embraced what was previously a fringe white nationalist position, and have nestled it into the center of the contemporary conservative movement. The New York Times recently documented the hundreds of times Carlson “amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration”; meanwhile, Stefanik has used Great Replacement messaging in recent fundraising efforts.
But perhaps the single most-damning point in the aftermath of the Buffalo shooting is Adam Serwer’s observation that, “Three years ago, when a white-supremacist fanatic killed dozens of people in El Paso, Texas, the reaction from the right was unreserved condemnation. When another white-supremacist fanatic killed 10 people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, last week, the reaction from some figures on the right was to acknowledge that the guy had a point about this whole “replacement” thing.” In other words, given an opportunity to denounce this sordid theory, many in the GOP have instead chosen to double-down. At a minimum, this provides legitimization of extremist beliefs that slide inexorably into violence; more darkly, this doubling-down suggests that the Republican Party views terroristic violence as an acceptable side effect of the white supremacist garbage it uses to motivate its base.
Particularly striking is how the deranged consequences of Great Replacement theory are indistinguishable from the GOP’s raft of right-wing policies. Historian Kathleen Belew describes how an “obsession with protecting white birthrates” is central to Great Replacement theory, and enumerates the logical consequences of this obsession:
This belief transforms social issues into direct threats: Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation.
Yet on all the policy fronts that Belew notes — immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights — the Republican Party’s retrograde policy ideas are fully aligned with those of Great Replacement adherents (the links between anti-abortion belief and the need for more white babies is particularly chilling in light of the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade — it is so utterly dystopian that the power of the Supreme Court is being used to advance the goals of a delusional and violent belief system). This goes back to Lavin’s point I noted above — the GOP and Great Replacement adherents share a belief in the non-negotiability of a white nation. From this perspective, Great Replacement theory might be viewed as an evolution of white supremacist ideology when faced with a fear of white majorities disappearing — a hysterical road map for the perpetuation of white supremacism that posits diabolical conspiracies and “white genocide” as the intentional acts of malevolent, all-powerful forces.
What should be clear by this point is that white supremacist and Great Replacement ideology are on a collision course with any meaningful idea of American democracy — one where every citizen is considered equal, regardless of skin color or national origin. As Serwer notes, “The ideology of the Great Replacement is a particular threat to democratic governance because it insists that entire categories of human beings can or should be excluded from democratic rights and protections.” This observation also neatly captures how there’s really no simple distinction between the legislative consequences of the Great Replacement mindset and outright violence in service of its vision. If non-white Americans are part of a sinister plot to replace white Americans, then even second-class citizenship and exploitation are ultimately too good for them. As Serwer chillingly puts it, “Any political cause can theoretically inspire terrorism, but this one is unlike others in that what it demands of its targets is their non-existence.” And so laws that disempower black and brown Americans ensure that both state and vigilante violence can be unleashed against these groups, without fear that they might wield countervailing political power to protect themselves.
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The fact that GOP politicos are doubling down on the rhetoric and substance of Great Replacement ideas in the wake of the Buffalo massacre signals that we have passed a tipping point in American politics. The Republican Party obviously sees the incitement of racial paranoia as key to gaining and retaining power in the coming years, and sees any accompanying violence as acceptable collateral damage at worst, and a useful part of their power play at best. The central goal of white power inexorably leads the party ever deeper into authoritarian politics, as it becomes necessary to deny the legitimacy and political representation of non-white voters — both as a logical consequence of white supremacy, and as the path to enacting its vision of an America in which whites hold unchallenged power.
This is not a fever that will break or a fire that will burn itself out. It is a movement of hatred and evil that will not stop on its own, but will need to be stopped by a greater opposing force, as observers like political scientist Thomas Zimmer have argued. The past six years have demonstrated the limits of a Democratic strategy that has declined to call out and counter head on not just white supremacist violence, but the entirety of white supremacist and Great Replacement thinking that put Donald Trump in the White House, and that has driven what amounts to a Republican insurrection in the year and a half since he was driven from office. In particular, the fact that the GOP has embraced Trump’s insurrectionist lies about a stolen election and is moving en masse to subvert the 2022 and 2024 contests is solid evidence of a growing, not diminishing, threat, as much as is the GOP’s increasing boldness in making openly racist appeals to its base.
President Joe Biden’s response to the Buffalo shooting is a perfect encapsulation of how the Democrats have worked to capture the moral high ground while refusing to engage in the political hardball and necessary confrontation that would actually roll back the white supremacist threat. To his credit, during his visit to Buffalo in the wake of the murders, Biden stated that, “White supremacy is a poison” that is “running through our body politic,” and that, “We need to say as clearly and as forcefully as we can that the ideology of White supremacy has no place in America.” He even referenced Great Replacement theory, remarking that “the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced … by The Other, by people who don’t look like them and who are, therefore, in the perverse ideology that they possess and (are) being fed, lesser beings.”
Yet, having condemned white supremacism and its purveyors in general terms, the president declined to actually identify any particular politico who disseminates these ideas. And this is the point where the Democrats’ reluctance to fully engage in the fight against white supremacism stands revealed as ineffectual and absurd. President Biden, after correctly making the case that white supremacism is an unparalleled evil and threat to American democracy, also simultaneously told us that it’s just not important enough to get into a fight about, or existential enough to actually name names. This isn’t just self-contradictory; by Biden’s own reasoning, the failure to defeat white supremacy is a recipe for disaster for our democracy, not to mention for the civil rights of literally millions upon millions of Americans (including all those Democratic voters whose rights the Democratic Party would be failing to protect). It’s not enough to condemn white supremacism — the Democrats need to condemn the purveyors of white supremacism by name, make their political identities indistinguishable from their repugnant ideas, insist on the guilt by association of every GOP politicians who refuses to disavow their fellow politicians and such rancid notions, and, crucially, use these critiques in their appeals to voters to choose Democrats over Republicans.
Here’s one concrete idea of how this might work. Following the Buffalo shooting, some reporters, opinion writers, and even Democratic politicians did call out Representative Elise Stefanik for her inclusion of Great Replacement notions in her campaign advertising. However, within days of such critiques and denials that she had invoked the Great Replacement theory, Stefanik tweeted that, “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote.” Her tweet, directly echoing the idea that Democrats want immigrants to replace white voters, represented a defiant embrace of Great Replacement thinking. But at that point, rather than simply shaking fists in Stefanik’s general direction, Democrats should have immediately called for her resignation from her House leadership role, if not from her House position itself. In conjunction with this, and assuming that Stefanik would not resign, they should have ensured that every press encounter in the coming weeks not only reiterated calls for her resignation, but recapped her white supremacist ideology and how it taints the entire GOP caucus that has entrusted her with such a senior leadership position, and which is indeed shared by many in her caucus. How else do the Democrats expect to turn back the white supremacist uprising if they don’t actually take aim at the politicians leading the charge?Do Democrats themselves not understanding how shocking and unacceptable it is for a GOP politician to claim that Democrats want to literally replace white voters, and how this incites hatred and violence against both American citizens and immigrants? If this is not a political offense worth taking a stand on, then what is?
This returns us to a common theme here at The Hot Screen: the basic imbalance between the two parties in terms of their willingness to court conflict. Even as Republicans supercharge racial animus among white Americans in a quest to institute one-party rule in the country, Democrats again and again shy away from using the GOP’s open white supremacism as a weapon against them — both as a way to discredit the GOP in the eyes of the decent American majority, and as a necessary wake-up call to Democratic-leaning voters as to the stakes of the 2022 and 2024 elections. Instead, the Democrats perversely keep insisting on keeping the upcoming midterms on terrain hugely disadvantageous to them, emphasizing their ineffectual efforts to control inflation (which really is largely beyond their control) and plans for the economy and environment that have very little chance of making it through the narrowly divided Congress.
This is not to say that the Democrats should only talk about the GOP’s white supremacist goals. But it is essential that the Democrats ensure that this is a key framework through which Americans view our political struggles and stakes. For instance, take the imminent loss of abortion rights, which if handled correctly may inspire a wave of Democratic base organizing and enthusiasm leading up to November. Defense of the right to abortion becomes all the more compelling if Democrats are able to link GOP abortion opposition to Great Replacement theory and the repugnant belief that white Americans must try to outbreed those of darker skin. The same principles apply for Democrats going to war against voting restrictions that target minorities and hostility to trans rights; the goal should be to depict the GOP as openly aligned with the ends of white nationalist extremists and white supremacist thinking.
Democratic failure to confront this ideology of hate and the way it is driving the GOP towards authoritarianism would represent an unforgivable, not to mention horrifying, betrayal of the citizens they’ve been elected to serve. When African-Americans are gunned down by a terrorist inspired by the same ideas spouted by GOP politicians and right-wing pundits, we can see the incalculable cost of allowing this American cancer to grow without nearly adequate pushback. Democrats are deluded if they think they can defend American democracy by speaking in generalities about the evils of white supremacism. They must take the obvious next step, and target the GOP as the political wing of a white supremacist movement that has put American democracy and equality in it crosshairs. They must name names and describe their anti-American ends in detail, and rally Americans to their righteous cause of driving the white supremacist GOP from all levels of power.