"THE GREAT REPLACEMENT" IS NOW MAINSTREAM CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT

Midway through last week’s Republican primary debate, Vivek Ramaswamy started running through conspiracy theories like the frustrated child he is, claiming the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and that the “Great Replacement” theory “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

That the Right now claims the insurrectionists of January 6 are “political prisoners” and “hostages” is no longer shocking, even when it comes from Republican presidential candidates. MAGA vacillates between denying it happened, justifying and valorizing those who attempted to overthrow the government so Trump could remain in power, or insisting that the participants were somehow tricked into it by undercover agents provocateurs. No matter how hard they try, the basic facts remain: January 6 was a genuine attempt to overthrow the constitutional government, which MAGA supporters think is defensible because only conservatives should be allowed to hold power.

It was a bit more bizarre to watch Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu, try to justify “the Great Replacement.” This is the white-supremacist conspiracy theory that holds, in the words of Tucker Carlson, that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

This belief motivated the mass killers in Buffalo, New York; El Paso, Texas, and New Zealand who targeted African-Americans, Latinos, .0and Muslims. How Ramaswamy manages to convince himself that he is not someone these people would include on their list of targets defies belief.

The Great Replacement has gone from the far-right fringe to the conservative mainstream in the seven years between 2016 and now. When the white supremacist in Texas killed 23 Hispanics in 2019, there were many conservative leaders who offered condemnations of both the act and the ideology that motivated it. Only three years later in 2022, when another white supremacist murdered 10African-Americans at a Buffalo supermarket, some prominent leaders of the Right actually claimed there was some validity to the argument that white people are being “replaced.”

Ramaswamy’s support of this bullshit resulted in white supremacists celebrating. He briefly liked and reposted one of those celebrations, despite having said on CNN after the debate that “I don’t care about skin color.”

The Great Replacement conspiracy theory does not make sense without reference to race. The theory takes as a given that white Christians are the only true Americans; it doesn’t oppose illegal immigration, it opposes immigrants who are not white, and states the purpose of immigration policy should be to preserve a white majority.

It is also racist in the assumption that nonwhite people are “obedient” or even liberal simply as a consequence of not being white. It continues the tradition of most right wing thought being both ignorant and stupid in assuming that political coalitions are permanently stable, that they are not affected by the importance of specific issues, voters’ personal experiences, or world events.

Arab-American voters - both Christian and Muslim - have withdrawn support from Biden over his unconditional support for Israel in its war with Hamas. This shift, along with a drift to conservatism that began among segments of the Muslim community over LGBTQ rights is an obvious example of how religious and ethnic minority groups can realign politically in unanticipated ways as the result of external events.

Muslims in America were largely pro-Bush in 2000; their switch to the Democrats followed the GOP embrace of anti-Muslim bigotry after 9/11. Hispanic voters gave their largest support to Republicans in 2000 and 2004. Trump showed surprisingly-similar strength with these voters in 2020, and made gains as a Republican with Black male voters. Immigrants who fled left-wing or Communist regimes in Asia and Latin America—Vietnamese, Venezuelans, Cubans—support Republicans, as did the Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Immigrants from West Africa are often highly religious and socially conservative. There are huge regional, cultural, class, and educational differences between Puerto Rican voters in Chicago and Tejano voters in Laredo or El Paso. The far right is too busy battling “diversity” to understand that diversity is precisely why “the Great Replacement” is bullshit. Racial identities, including definitions of whiteness, have not been stable or permanent across time, and have always been entirely dependent on politics.

The Republican Party’s acceptance of racial intolerance is the major reason the Democrats have been able to hold their multiracial coalition together.

The fantasy that a “Great Replacement” will defeat conservatism is a really dumb idea on its own terms, unless you are a white nationalist who simply thinks that nonwhites should not be allowed to live in America. The most telling thing about Ramaswamy’s support of the Great Replacement is that he clearly believes it’s what the MAGA Republican base wants to hear.

The Great Replacement is simply another manifestation of the ideology of right-wing victimhood, the belief that conservatives would have unquestioned political hegemony over American life if not for the powerful, shadowy “leftist” forces arrayed against them. For the right, the greatest injustice of all is the simple existence of Americans who oppose them politically, a situation so traumatic it requires a library of conspiracies to explain.

This is the logical end of what Sainted Ray Gun meant when he went in 1980 to Philadelphia, Mississipi - site of the murders of civil rights workers Andrerw Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan - to announce his campaign for the presidency by declaring his support for “states’ rights.” In the years since, Republicans I knew have turned into the frog in the simmering pot, taking on beliefs and attitudes I know they were opposed to at one point because I heard them say so, to the point where they can now enthusiastically support a political campaign directly aimed at dismantling the constitutional democratic republic they once claimed to support.

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