The Master Key of Modern Politics?

‘‘Now that SCOTUS has opened the floodgates for foreign invaders to flock across our borders and spawn, the only choice we have is to triple down on immigration enforcement.’’ Furious at the continued existence of the pernicious doctrine of birthright citizenship, online right-wing commentator Sean Davis joined the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh in calling for drastic measures: deny entry to all pregnant and/or female foreigners, require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry, and if needed, dissolve the Union. What could explain such an extreme reaction to a judicial decision upholding the status quo? 

One answer, proffered by Ibram X. Kendi in his recent book Chain of Ideas, is that these amazing events are the latest episode in the grand history of racism in America. Indeed, the current reaction to multiracial immigration is but one facet of a larger ideology which blames powerful elites for enabling ‘‘disadvantaged groups to steal the lives, livelihoods, cultures, electoral power, and freedoms of privileged groups, who now need authoritarian protection’’ (Chain of Ideas, xxvii). 

An elite figure like Justice Amy Coney Barrett may be a ‘conservative’ by tradition and upbringing, but by casting her lot with the liberal defenders of birthright citizenship, she revealed herself to be just another lib pining for the dilution of America’s racial stock. ‘‘Amy Coney Barrett is a turncoat. She’s constantly siding with the left,’’ a frustrated Megyn Kelly told her radio listeners. ‘‘Because of an interracial family, my grandchildren may not get to have a country,’’ wrote viral right-wing pastor Joel Webbon, in reference to her two adopted Haitian children. No matter her credentials and conservative bona fides, Judge Barrett cannot be acting in the proper interest of the country if she allows people from ‘alien’ cultures to lay a foothold on American soil. ‘‘If your rule of constitutional interpretation leads you to conclude that your nation must destroy itself,’’ wrote Stephen Miller a day after the court ruling, ‘‘then your rule of constitutional interpretation is wrong.’’ 

Matt Walsh, a man with a flair for the dramatic, took to X to lament that ‘‘I at least got to live for 40 years in a country that looks and functions something like America. The fact that my children are having that opportunity stolen from them fills me with rage so deep I can’t describe it. I truly hate the people who have done this to us.’’ The idea that immigration will spell the end of ‘white’ civilization as we know it finds its most vivid expression in the political philosophy of the French cultural critic Renaud Camus. According to this marginal figure with outsized influence in right-wing circles, the ‘West’ is facing an existential battle between the forces of tradition and biological continuity, and the anarchic power of Jewish financiers who wish to replace white natives with culturally degenerate but fecund lay-abouts from ‘third-world’ failed states. Much of modern right-wing politics, says Kendi, can be understood as a working-out of this theory (Chain of Ideas, p. 58). 

Those who subscribe to this ‘great replacement’ theory tend to express their opposition to immigration in cultural terms. To use the words of Kelly, the issue seems to be that new arrivals ‘‘won’t assimilate…they don’t want to live like Americans live.’’ Evidence of this cultural incongruence is usually substantiated by reference to some form of blood libel. On June 30, 2020, for example, Italian leader Giorgia Meloni commented on a video of an African migrant cooking ‘‘a poor kitten as if it were nothing’’ on a public street in Livoro, Italy. Meloni reminded her followers that ‘‘these barbarities are not allowed in Italy.’’ Four years later, the Trump administration famously condemned the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, for eating dogs and cats (Chain of Ideas, p. 378-379). The truth of these claims did not matter. If creating ‘‘stories’’ (JD Vance’s words) helps bring attention to communities in need, then that is what is important.  

Kendi notes that humanity seems to be entrapped by these racist ideas. They are recycled with great effect to confine us to a very narrow vision of what a truly humane society could be like. In order to break free from this cycle of fear and paranoia, says Kendi, humanity must learn to recognize the patterns of history which testify to the endurance of white supremacy (Chain of Ideas, p. 502). There is much in Kendi’s book that is interesting and would be illuminating to persons unfamiliar with the racial anxieties of the current crop of right-wing politicians. As a guide to global politics, however, the book falls short. Kendi’s emphasis on ethnic replacement actively misconstrues the relationship between past and present. 

‘‘When historians consider the broad sweep of the American past,’’ writes political historian Timothy Shenk, ‘‘they often reach for a single overarching story to hold the narrative together’’ (Realigners, p. 10). These ‘skeleton-key’ histories, as he calls them, offer readers a ‘master key’—in this case, the idea of the great replacement theory—through which they can perceive the skeletal structure of American history and then trace its curvature from the present day to some far distant place of origin. Skeleton-key histories, Shenk explains, tend to emphasize continuity. Their source of power is their ability to show ‘‘the same patterns repeating themselves time and again, finding the center in a story that might otherwise devolve into a disconnected string of events.’’ Looking at history from the perspective of realignment, on the other hand, will tend to highlight discontinuity, scrambling our picture of what holds American history together and exposing our facile assumptions (ibid.). 

This is what happened at the last U.S. general election. One of the more perplexing causes of the Trump trifecta of 2024 was the President’s appeal among a certain subgroup of Latino voters. Astonished that a targeted group would vote in such large numbers for a crass authoritarian, former MSNBC anchor Joy Reid warned Latinos not to come crying when their relatives get scooped up by ICE: ‘‘You own everything that happens to your mixed-status families.’’

Looking at the results of the federal election, Kendi came to the conclusion that Latinos were the successful victims of a psyop, an elaborate political scheme conducted by crafty Republican strategists to hoodwink unsuspecting Latinos into believing the lie that without border control migrants would soon take over their jobs (Chain of Ideas, xxvii). As we have seen, the great replacement theory has great explanatory power within the confines of right-wing politics. When Tucker Carlson says that the ‘‘whole point of [Democratic] immigration policy’’ is to ‘‘Replace the population…legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries,’’ we have good reason to take him at his word (Chain of Ideas, p. 58). Kendi argues that the same logic underlies Trump’s surprising support among targeted groups. He claims that gays and people of color are increasingly becoming ‘‘great replacement politicians,’’ for the simple reason that ‘‘privilege is relational.’’ Any person ‘‘who feels their group has more, deserves more, is losing more—is more—than other groups can be targeted by great replacement theory’’ (ibid., xxvii).

Yet as an explanation of large-scale voting patterns, the great replacement theory proves inadequate. Apart from the unproven assumption that Latinos were brainwashed en masse, our best evidence suggests that Latinos voted for Trump for a multiplicity of reasons which cannot simply be reduced to a fear of outsiders. Latinos living along the southern border of the U.S., for example, repeatedly identified border security as one of their top concerns—the physical flow of people on the run through their communities and, in some cases, back yards. Fear of losing economic opportunities to cheaper foreign laborers does not feature as strongly in those areas, falsifying the claim that this was the primary motivation for a Trump vote. 

Even if we assume for the sake of the argument that fear of losing social status was the animating factor behind the Latino vote, this just-so story does not make sense of the Latino vote in urban areas where undocumented workers are already well-integrated in the community, and where inflation was the common theme in multiple exit polls. The inadequacy of the great replacement theory comes more clearly to the fore when one considers the fact that these same voters soured on the Republican Party the moment the President enacted policies that posed a threat to their standard of living. This suggests that these voters wished to give Republicans a chance to bring down the cost of living, rather than carte blanche to eliminate their recently-arrived competitors. 

To summarize, the great replacement theory is a good explanation of the political radicalism of certain right-wing individuals, and may even make sense of some extreme statements online, but as a theory of human behavior it cannot adequately explain the complexities of global politics. Kendi, while right in certain respects, overstates his case, creating an opening for needless public anger and misunderstanding. As Shenk observes, ‘‘Turning history into a never-ending feud between red and blue teams’’—just one of the more popular ways of looking at the past—‘‘guarantees that the only lesson you’ll learn is how right you always were.’’ More dramatically, ‘‘it sets you up to turn against voters the instant they deliver a verdict you don’t like’’ (Realigners, p. 11). The anger that followed the most recent election centered around the claim that some Latino voters simply malfunctioned—they did not vote as people with their particular standpoint in life are supposed to vote. A less singularly-focused approach to history would have recognized that Latinos, not unlike other human beings, are complex individuals who act in ways that do not always fit whatever grand theory we happen to favor at any one given time. 

This is not to say that race and racism are not an important dimension of global politics, or that we should not pursue an inquiry into the role of these sentiments in shaping public policy. As political theorist Kevin Elliott recently remarked on Bluesky following the court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship, ‘‘Great replacement theory has become the right’s master narrative of contemporary politics. It’s no exaggeration to say that it plays a similar role to that of anti-communism in the 20th century, uniting its factions and jumbled set of policies. It must be met at the same level of generality.’’ Both Kendi and Elliott are most definitely onto something. The question is whether this big idea—that liberal elites are trying to replace ‘legacy Americans’—can easily migrate from a discussion of right-wing tendencies among some popular online figures to a much broader discussion of what motivates large groups of people not just in the U.S. but around the world. While there are reasons to doubt this more generalized claim, this does not nullify the insightful observations of those who correctly point that fear of being replaced is at the heart of much of the right-wing reaction to birthright citizenship. 

Featured image is "The Vision of Saint Jerome," Caravaggio.