A decade ago, the GOP recognized that it needed to diversify to win. Now, many of its members are implicitly defending a conspiracy theory aimed at keeping non-whites from the country entirely
No one was harder on Republicans’ lack of outreach to minority communities, and the party’s accompanying losses at the polls, than the GOP itself. In a brutally frank self-examination, the party concluded in a 100-page “autopsy” of the 2012 election that it was focusing too much attention on white, Christian, straight Americans, ignoring the demographic changes that threatened to make an unchanged GOP irrelevant.
Nine years later, the dialogue has taken a far uglier turn, with a substantial number of Americans buying into the “great replacement” theory, the discredited argument that policies welcoming immigrants are a disguise for a plot to “replace” native-born (and generally white) Americans with minority groups. In its most extreme and violent form, the great replacement conspiracy theory has been cited by racist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and in an online screed that authorities say was penned by the shooter who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket last Saturday.
Far from the racist “separate but equal” policies of the mid-20th century (which were endorsed by conservative Southern Democrats), devotees of replacement theory don’t want separate lives for minorities, experts say. They want to keep non-whites from the country entirely.
“White supremacism is really seeing itself on the defensive and needing to transform through action” as the country becomes more diverse, says Brandeis University sociology professor David Cunningham, author of the book “Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan.”
“They’re ready to take action against what they see as a threat to white supremacist world, what they think of as a traditional world,” he adds.
In Republican politics, the idea – if not the exact language – of the “great replacement” has been woven into the campaigns against Democrats.