The Times Versus Itself on ‘Replacement’

A fter puzzling over the media’s coverage of our demographic future, I’ve figured out what the problem is. The word “replacement” is racist.

Old white people who vote heavily Republican are dying out. No one disputes this.

The birth rate among American citizens has been falling steadily and is now at the level that will lead to a shrinking population, not counting immigration. No one disputes this either.

Yet America’s population continues to grow anyway because of immigrants, who are mostly non-white. No one disputes this either.

Put all of these ideas together, and it looks very much as if white voters are being [fill in verb] by non-white voters. What verb would the New York Times like us to use there? Apparently the words “replace” and “replacement” are now hate speech.

For the last couple of days especially, the Times has been inveighing against the “racist,” “white supremacist” “fringe conspiracy theory” known as “replacement theory.” Yet the same paper turns pleased and mellow if this exact same notion is adduced with a bit of polysyllabic circumlocution: The Times embraces the supposedly taboo idea when it’s called “the power of shifting demographics,” “the demographic tide,” or “the long-term implications of demographic shifts” (August 31, 2012).

If Tucker Carlson simply started saying “demographic theory” instead of “replacement theory,” would the Times acknowledge that it and Carlson are on the same page?

The Buffalo shooter evidently subscribed to an actually racist, extremist, lunatic view that imagines a conspiracy led by Jews to exterminate or commit genocide against non-Jewish whites. The more feverish corners of the Internet bristle with mentions of this invisible supposed “genocide.”

But that’s not what Republicans such as Elise Stefanik are talking about. As my friend Charles C. W. Cooke notes, some folks are happy about white American voters being replaced with non-white voters, others are unhappy, but the theory itself is not actually controversial, much less fringe-y. There is some disagreement about whether the expected demographic changes will necessarily lead to big gains for Democrats. Democrats certainly have believed this, for 20 years or more. They crow about it all the time. What they don’t do is deny the facts.

Sometimes a Times writer will submit the progressive recitation of these facts and the Carlson version of the same facts as though they are two incompatible versions of reality rather than merely two opinions about whether such a reality is desirable. Last year data analyst Nate Cohn wrote, in consecutive paragraphs, these contentions:

The surprising decline in the white and rural population is likely to bolster Democratic hopes that demographic shifts might help progressives secure a significant electoral advantage.

But the possibility that demographic changes would doom conservatives has loomed over American politics for more than a decade, helping to exacerbate conservative fears of immigration. . . . Tucker Carlson, the Fox News television show host, has repeatedly stoked racist fears of “white replacement,” warning his viewers that it is a Democratic electoral strategy.

Are “Democratic hopes” for “a significant electoral advantage” somehow different from “Democratic electoral strategy”? Maybe Cohn would have us believe that Democrats are too scrupulous to enact policies that (they think will) help them win elections. Funnily enough, they do indeed enact such policies, though.

Demographer Dowell Myers was quoted as an authority in this 2018 Times piece that discussed projections about when non-whites will become the majority in the U.S. (while hinting that such projections should be downplayed because “a group getting smaller could feel threatened”):

It was not just white nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. . . . “It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”

Yet the Times reporters today hint that all of this is unsayable by those who don’t like demographic change. If you aren’t in favor, you’re not allowed to notice. The paper’s reporters write forebodingly:

One in three American adults now believe that an effort is under way “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One America News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.

So it’s a Fox thing. And a Reddit thing. The Times goes on: “But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream.”

Quite mainstream; the Times itself has occasionally slipped up and itself used the dreaded R-word in discussing demographic change.

“Those in the silent and older generations are being replaced by younger voters from Gen Z who tend to be better educated, much more Hispanic and generally more liberal,” wrote Times journalists Ford Fessenden and Lazaro Gamio on October 22, 2020 (emphasis mine). Is the Paper of Record comfortable publishing insidious white-supremacist arguments?

In 2002, the Times thought that the oracle of this line of thinking, Ruy Teixeira, was so important that it published in its print edition the entire first chapter of his book The Emerging Democratic Majority, using as a subhead “The emerging Democratic majority looks as if it will mirror the conservative Republican majority it is replacing.” The book, co-authored with John Judis, famously foresaw a Democratic Party lock on nationwide elections as “white America is supplanted by multiracial, multiethnic America.” So should Carlson use the phrase “supplantation theory”? Maybe then he could write for the Times?

“Replacement theory is an attack on democracy,” the Times thunders in its editorial today. If so, by publicizing said theory for many years, the paper itself has been complicit in the attack.