Damon Linker makes a key point about the peculiar role that “great replacement” theory now plays in our electoral politics:
Everyone who's talked about the US becoming a minority-majority country over the coming decades has spread the "great replacement" theory. The real distinction is between those who think it's good thing and those who think it's bad.
— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) May 16, 2022
This is exactly right. As I wrote last year, we ought to acknowledge more often how downright weird it is that the social appropriateness of this idea
seems to depend entirely upon the political worldview of the speaker. When made triumphantly by figures such as Dick Durbin, or in books such as The Emerging Democratic Majority, the claim that “demographics will destroy the GOP, all we need to do is wait” is held to be fine. When it is made in anger . . . it’s a racist conspiracy theory that is only advanced by white supremacists.
Personally, I don’t like the theory from either side. It’s racially deterministic, it’s overly simplistic, and, over the long term, it’s probably wrong. But other people seem to like it, and it simply cannot be the case that those people are rendered Good or Bad depending entirely on whether they smile or frown when confronted with it.
In 2018, Julián Castro tweeted:
The Hispanic vote in Texas will continue to increase. By 2024 Democrats can win Texas, Arizona and Florida. A big blue wall of 78 electoral votes. https://t.co/6FT0NJyjyP
— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) January 23, 2018
Surely, we are not to believe that if one responded to this prediction by saying “Terrific!” then one is a-okay, but if one responded to this prediction by saying “Ugh!” then one is a white supremacist conspiracy theorist? That would be absurd.
Today, NPR explained that one version of the “great replacement” theory
assumes that immigrants and non-white people will vote a certain way, ultimately drowning out the votes of white Americans.
Is this not what Julián Castro was doing in 2018? It you contend that it was not, please show me your work.
Almost to a man, Linker’s critics have pointed to the other version of the “great replacement” theory — the narrower, more sinister, more antisemitic, fringier version that is popular with white supremacists around the world. But, of course, if one adopts that version as one’s working definition, then one must adopt it for both sides of the aisle. Yesterday, Rolling Stone ran a piece by the disgraced fabulist, Talia Lavin, in which she attempted to play the issue both ways. Per Lavin, the “great replacement” theory with which Republicans engage is the same one that was entertained by the Buffalo shooter, whereas the “great replacement” theory that Democrats talk about is “morally neutral.”
I’m sorry, but that dog won’t hunt. As Damon Linker has correctly argued elsewhere, the reactions of the two parties to our unfolding demographic change are inextricably linked. “Why are demographics shifting?” Linker asks. “Because of immigration policies favored by Dems, many of whom also think Dems benefit politically from the change.” And why do conservatives tend to oppose this? Because, as Linker paraphrases it, the same Democrats keep insisting that “‘the US will soon be minority-majority because of immigration policies Dems and the pro-business GOP support, and when that happens, Dems will win permanently because those people vote Dem.'” One can like this theory, hate this theory, or be wholly indifferent to this theory, but one must not insist that the theory changes character depending on which party happens to be talking about it.