Irreplaceable

I used to read The Atlantic quite a lot. Then they adopted a soft paywall for their content, and I find myself reading less of it, never having decided that I would subscribe in order to be allowed to do more than sample the content a few times a month. But I do still like many of the writers at The Atlantic, and so I pop over there from time to time. Like today.

In No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory, Ronald Brownstein takes aim at the fact that rightist pundits like Ann Coulter (whom I had not realized was still a thing) and Tucker Carlson (whom I am starting to grow weary of hearing about) were blaming Mr. Brownstein, the authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority (which I have not read) and other Liberal thinkers as the people responsible for White "nativist" Americans' fears that there is a global plot afoot to replace them with voters who are more likely to vote Democratic as a means of stripping them of their rights via democratic processes. But as vapid as I find "Replacement Theory," my disdain for it is not in concept, but in scale. There have been other schemes of this sort, such as the Christian Exodus movement, which planned to move enough people into South Carolina "to establish a government based on the Ten Commandments and conservative Christian values," and possibly even secede from the United States. So the idea of a demographic hostile takeover of a place is not one that always targets Conservative America. But the idea that there could be any sort of coordinated, yet secret, plot to do the same over the whole of the United States is laughable, especially considering that these people would all have to be shuttled in Red states, to vote out their Senators and secure their Electoral College votes.

Instead, I and other analysts have long argued that Democrats have the opportunity to build a multiracial coalition composed of both the increasing minority population and groups within the white population that are most comfortable with a diversifying America: namely those who are college-educated, secular, urban, and younger, especially women in all of those cohorts. The combination of these white groups (many of which are growing) and the expanding minority population is what I have called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation.”

Fair enough. But there's an assumption there. One that Mr. Brownstein doesn't call out, and one that I think people like Ms. Coulter and Mr. Carlson are well aware of. For the "expanding minority population" to reliably be part of "the Democrats' 'coalition of transformation'," that population, as a whole, has to have different perceived interests than the stereotypical "coalition of restoration" that Mr. Brownstein identifies as making up the Republican base. Otherwise, their growing numbers wouldn't push Democrats towards a majority. And what I think the right-leaning pundits have done is simply doubled down on that assumption, and then laid out a simple scenario: If there are non-White people who could be reliably expected to vote for Democrats, why wouldn't the Democrats want them to come to the United States?

And it's worth pointing out that while Le Grand Remplacement draws upon themes that were around in the 19th century, The Emerging Democratic Majority was published nearly a decade before Renaud Camus published his book. To be sure, I agree with Mr. Brownstein's assessment that it's incorrect to blame people who believe that a more diverse America will favor Democratic policies for the idea that Republicans are being subjected to "'genocide' by substitution," both thought processes involve buying into certain of the same assumptions. And I'm not so certain that those assumptions will hold up in the long run.

But as long as they are in place, there is something of a problem. Granted, people like Mr. Brownstein see newer non-White immigrants to the United States as having different, but interdependent, interests then "White America," but they don't have the ear of Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson's audiences. And they don't appear to have a plan to gain it. Imagining what would happen "if instead of trying to convince older white Americans that younger nonwhite Americans are displacing them, political leaders from both parties emphasized the growing interdependence between these two groups," is pretty much a concession that Mr. Brownstein and company have no means of emphasizing this themselves.

And that's really the problem. The ideas that Mr. Brownstein and those like him have put forward are reaching the ears of others only after being filtered by people who wish to use those ideas for their own political ends. And so it doesn't matter if the theory of demographic change is one of interdependent populations having an ability to enjoy prosperity together. What matters is the United States has never been a unified political body; and visual differences between groups have typically been the dividing lines. Complaining about being misrepresented won't change that. Finding a way to take the message directly to the people one wants to hear it just might.