Trump’s
latest proposal to expel asylum seekers to the tiny Pacific
island nation of Palau continues the pattern of performative cruelty already
well established by the illegal deportations, the establishment of
a grifty concentration camp on American
soil, the declaration that people previously granted
legal entry are no longer entitled to be here, the grotesque mistreatment of foreign visitors and former aides to the U.S. military, and other
outrageous actions by the present administration. It is already evident that Trump’s
interlocking immigration schemes will drive up inflation in the United States and
reduce economic output. In spite of Trump’s vow to go after “the worst of the
worst,” most of those being deported and incarcerated have never been accused of any crime in the
U.S. or elsewhere. Meanwhile, the need for a genuine, long-term policy to deal
with immigration, asylum, and the existing undocumented population goes almost
entirely unmet. So, what is really behind the needless and public exercises in
sadism that pass for immigration policy?
The
short answer is a version of the Great Replacement Theory: the idea that
immigration is part of a deliberate plot to destroy the United States by
replacing “real” or “true” Americans with aliens. The point of Trump’s immigration
policies is to satisfy the desire, on the part of Trump’s base as well as nativist
ideologues in his administration to see pain inflicted on undesirables and
their supposedly malevolent supporters—liberals, “the woke”—within the
country.
The Great Replacement Theory and its variants have a long history, and they
have always been in the wrong. The 19th century physician Horatio Robinson
Storer, an early anti-abortion campaigner, lamented that “abortions are
infinitely more frequent among Protestant women than among Catholic,” and wondered
whether America’s western and southern territories would be “filled with our
own children or by those of aliens?” The sociologist and eugenicist Edward
Alsworth Ross argued that
Japanese immigrants should be banned from entering the country and coined the
term “race suicide.” In Charlottesville in 2017, the neo-Nazi crowd chanted,
“The Jews will not replace us.”
But this idea does have a polite version, an intellectualized variant, articulated
at the kind of think-tank gatherings where people in suits and ties with
advanced degrees from highly respected institutions can pretend that their
dehumanizing and racist ideology is not, in fact, dehumanizing and racist.
By
virtue of his Yale law degree and his apparentdesire to make the “intellectual”
case for a corrupt, kleptocratic, cronyist regime based on nationalist
demagoguery and unhinged conspiracism, JD Vance has now presented himself as an
exponent of the “thoughtful” version of Replacement Theory that now underpins
the immigration policies of the present government.
In
his speech accepting the vice presidential nomination, JD Vance casually sidelined
the ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg
Address: that the United States is a nation dedicated to the proposition that
all people are created equal. The purpose of America, he suggested, doesn’t
have much to do with inalienable rights, or the right of people to govern
themselves.
Rather,
said our vice president, America “is a
group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a
nation.” At the Claremont Institute, he made the point even clearer. American
identity as “purely an idea,” he said, is “the logic of America as a purely
creedal nation” and would “reject a lot of people that the [Anti-Defamation
League] would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans
had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.”
America’s
founders, he further argued in his Claremont speech, understood “that our
shared qualities, our heritage, our values, our manners and customs confer a
special and indispensable advantage.”
“Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” he added,
“They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church.”
Vance
is using a sleight of hand here. Of course social bonds form when people share
things in common! Of course a nation consists of a group of people with a
shared history and future! Those are just truisms. They say nothing about how
we define the purpose and meaning of America. Maybe some other countries can
define themselves according to the church their grandparents attended—but
that’s not the America that Lincoln and Jefferson, among countless others
established. We the people have agreed to promote the general welfare not by
conducting a survey of the views of some subset of ancestors who happened to be
present at the Civil War, but by making laws through representative government
based on the idea that all people are free and equal before the law.
Vance
is a clever ideologue—Yale must count for something—and so he includes a pro
forma nod to those who “gave their life to build the kind of society where
his family can escape racial theft and racial violence.” But those people who
gave their lives on the pro-slavery side of the Civil War, along with a great
number of the people attending JD Vance-approved churches today—the same people
that Mr. Vance says have a “helluva lot more claim to be American” than any
recent immigrants—were in fact fighting to promote racial theft and violence.
To
get an idea of what Vance’s version of the Great Replacement ideology looks
like in practice, you need only look at the Department of Homeland Security’s
twitter feed. In one post, the words “Remember
your Homeland’s Heritage” appear above a painting, titled New Life in a New
Land, by Morgan Wistling, of a young family in a covered wagon; in another
post, the words “Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth defending” appear
above the Manifest Destiny-themed painting American Progress by John Gast. Most
of the rest are images of people of colorwho they identify as criminals.
Versions
of the Vance ideology show up throughout American history, and it has always
been for the same malicious intent: to divide the “real” Americans from the
ones who don’t belong.
The
intent becomes clear the moment you ask the speaker who the “real” Americans
are. Are they the descendants of the Mayflower? That’s just silly; those
descendants would have represented a tiny minority even at the time of the
American Revolution. Are the real Americans white? That’s not just racist but
stupid; most Black Americans today have ancestors that lived in America
significantly longer, on average, than white Americans, and their contributions
to American culture and identity are immeasurable.
Would
the real Americans be Christian? Consider that many Protestants in the early
republic vehemently condemned the religion of America’s other Christian sects,
and would have viewed the quarter of the American population that identifies as
Catholic as fake Christians. Are Latinos really American? Much of the
Southwest, along with California, belonged to Mexico until 1848—and the largely
white settlers coming from the existing states were the immigrants.
One
story that these reactionary nativists tell is: sure, there were different
immigrant groups that originated in Europe and elsewhere, but somehow the
“good” ones assimilated and became honorary members of the white Christian
Pilgrim tribe. But that isn’t the way it happened at all.
When
outsiders came in, pretty much wherever they came from, nativists greeted them
with contempt. In the late 19th century and beyond, members of the Pennsylvania
Dutch, for example, experienced rampant discrimination. Irish immigrants encountered
employment ads that read, “No Irish need apply.” The early and mid-19th century
was marked by deadly anti-immigrant riots. The Southern and Eastern Europeans
who poured in during this period century were generally not considered “white.”
Later,
when their descendants decided that they were white after all, what this really
meant is that they were not Black. It did not mean that they had become copies
of the Pilgrim tribe. On the contrary, American culture diversified and
flourished.
The
Know-Nothings were also keen on keeping “un-American” groups out —which would
have meant keeping all those Catholics out of JD Vance’s home state of Ohio.
The America Firsters of the 1930s liked the Nazi idea of keeping American
racially pure—which is why the Nazis in Germany loved them back.
As
a rule, the movements that rely on the Great Replacement theory and its
variants involve an unhealthy dynamic between two distinct groups in society.
To put it simply, it’s a story that a small number of big people push on a
large number of little people to convince them that there is something in the
system that works for them. Consider that all the riches of the slave system
were concentrated in the hands of a tiny slaveholding elite; but the
impoverished white majority could at least bask in the illusion that they
belonged to a superior racial group. The stakes are very different now, but the
process is still the same. Essentially, nearly all the benefits of the Trumpian
economic policy will fall into the hands of a tiny financial elite; but the
broad mass of Trump supporters can find happiness in the illusion that they
will not be replaced by some inferior group—or at least they will be expected
to do so.
It
is not necessary for the elites who propound the noxious, anti-American
ideology of the Great Replacement to actually believe in it for this kind of
counter-revolutionary movement to flourish. They just need a critical mass of
people in their thrall to believe in it. It should be noted here that Vance is
married to a second-generation Indian-American. Since she, along with her
parents and his children, presumably share just a little bit less of our
blessed American history, one has to wonder if he also draws the necessary
inference that they are less American than he is.
We
can’t know what’s in JD Vance’s heart. What matters is that he seems to believe
that, to keep himself and his associates in power, the U.S. government needs to
ship asylum seekers off to random islands and engage in an ever-expanding menu
of sadistic acts. Meanwhile, none of our actual immigration issues are resolved
and the rest of us are simply forced to pay the price. Our rights are eroded,
our economy is damaged, and our culture diminished—all to keep a corrupt regime
in power and fund a massive welfare program for the cronies running America’s
very own gulag archipelago.
The post JD Vance’s “Intellectual” Spin on the Racist Great Replacement Theory appeared first on New Republic.
