By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, May 17,
2022
The horrific massacre in Buffalo,
N.Y., has created a debate about the “great replacement theory,” the rancid
theory adopted by white supremacists that Jewish people are conspiring to
destroy the influence of white Americans by importing non-white immigrants.
The Buffalo shooter was in thrall to the
theory, as have been other racist and antisemitic killers.
The theory should be denounced by all
people of goodwill and, indeed, it thrives only in the most sewerish precincts
of the Internet.
Yet, there is an attempt to tar
Republicans more broadly with the theory and somehow attribute
responsibility for the atrocity in Buffalo to them on this basis. The argument
is that the likes of Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman from New York,
have warned that the Democratic Party views immigration as a way to change the
electorate in its favor and so is mainstreaming the hateful replacement
ideology.
This is a smear, and especially perverse
since Republicans sounding the alarm about this Democratic view have been
unquestionably correct. There hasn’t been any secretive cabal at work — it’s
all been out in the open, discussed by progressive political operatives and
think-tank analysts, and celebrated in the press.
The left-wing Center for American Progress
issued a report in 2013 titled “Immigration Is Changing the Political Landscape
in Key States.” It summarized its argument thusly, “Supporting real immigration
reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million
undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the
future.”
Books were written about this idea. The
widely cited (and overinterpreted) 2004 book, The Emerging Democratic
Majority, by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, called the Democrats “the party
of transition” as “white America is supplanted by multiracial, multiethnic
America.” In 2016, Steve Phillips wrote Brown Is the New White: How the
Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. The website for
his publisher says the latest edition of the book contends that “hope for a
more progressive political future lies not with increased advertising to
middle-of-the-road white voters, but with cultivating America’s growing, diverse
majority.”
Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 suppressed
some of this sentiment since it made it clear that white, working-class voters
didn’t appreciate being spoken of as if they were a relic of the past; and the
2020 election and its aftermath made the assumption that Democrats will own
Latino voters forevermore seem increasingly shaky.
But the Left wants to create rules that
define it as perfectly acceptable for Democrats to advocate high levels of
immigration as a means of gaining political power, and out of bounds for
Republicans to call them on it.
Washington Post writer Greg Sargent slammed Stefanik for allegedly flirting with
the great replacement theory in Facebook advertisements last year. They warned
that Democrats want a sweeping amnesty for illegal immigrants in order “to
overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in
Washington.”
Never mind that Stefanik could have drawn
her warning directly from various left-wing writers and advocacy organizations.
Or that Sargent himself wrote after Barack Obama’s victory in 2012 that the
election had been “all about demographics” and that the outcome showed the
electorate wasn’t “reverting to the older, whiter, more male version
Republicans had hoped for.”
What makes Sargent’s basic view different
from Stefanik’s, other than the fact that he welcomes how immigration trends
have changed our politics, and she doesn’t?
Immigration has been hotly contested
throughout our history and is an inherently highly emotive issue, involving the
composition of our polity and core questions of national identity. It can only
inflame the issue further to explicitly weaponize demographic change, as the
Left has for decades now. We should have an immigration policy that serves the
national interest, not the narrow interest of one political party.
Yes, by all means, further shun and
marginalize replacement theory, but don’t support high levels of immigration
for partisan reasons and expect the other side not to notice.
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