The toxic myth of white decline

“They have seen the passing of the American Indian and the buffalo,” William Ripley, one of America’s most renowned academics, wrote, despondently, in 1908, “and nowthey query as to how long the Anglo-Saxon may be able to survive.”

A few years later, the white supremacist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was warning that it was not just Anglo-Saxons going the way of the buffalo. The Caucasus, the “ancestral homeland” of the white race, had, he mourned in his 1920 bestseller The Rising Tide of Color, become a “racially brown man’s land in which white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance”. The same was beginning to happen in Europe, too. “What assurance,” he wondered, could there be “that the present world order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?” The early decades of the 20th century were pregnant with a sense of near terror about the vanishing of the white race.

A century on, the racial dread has returned. Corralled within far-right fringes for much of the postwar period, alarm about white decline has burst out over the past decade, becoming a key motif in mainstream political discourse. “By the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive,” Douglas Murray wrote in his 2017 bestseller The Strange Death of Europe, “the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.” The echoes of Ripley and Stoddard are unmistakable.

The animating theme for much of the racial foreboding is the “great replacement theory”, the belief that liberal elites are deliberately importing immigrants to replace the white populations of Europe and America. “There are political forces,” Viktor Orbán, until this month the long-serving prime minister of Hungary, has warned, darkly, trying to engineer “a process in which the European population is replaced”. Across the Atlantic, prominent figures, such as Elon Musk, claim that the Democrats have sought deliberately to “import untold millions of illegals” to act as voting fodder and entrench “single party rule”.

There could not be a more apposite time for a book that unravels the history of the great replacement theory and elucidates its many contemporary incarnations. Ibram X Kendi’s Chain of Ideas has the ambition to be such a study. Unfortunately, it lacks the necessary depth and judgment.

Kendi, a historian of race who has become a key figure in the American culture wars, describes his new book as a “global history of the present” that lays bare the essence of “the dominant political theory of our time”. It is also a chaotic jumble of ideas and facts thrown together with considerable verve and erudition but with little sense of a coherent narrative.

The book is divided into 10 sections, each identifying a particular idea that forms a link in Kendi’s putative chain (Link 1: “White people lose out as peoples of colour gain”; Link 4: “Racism against peoples of colour is over”; Link 9: “Insurrections against democracy protect the nation”). Each idea is associated with a particular politician – Marine Le Pen, Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and so on. Yet, even after 500 pages, it is difficult to discern how Kendi’s links form a chain or why that chain should lead to the great replacement theory.

The meaning of that theory has, in Kendi’s hands, been made so expansive that it is rendered almost worthless. The Jim Crow system in the American south was “justified” by “the great replacement political equation”. Underlying Nazi antisemitism “was what is now named great replacement theory”. It underlay Brexit, too. Most bizarrely, Kendi imagines the brutal crackdown on gangs by Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, has made his country “a new cradle of great replacement politics”, because “gangs are being stamped as replacers”.

And then there is this about the American electorate: “What separated the Sanders and Trump voters? Great replacement theory.” It is true that most of Donald Trump’s supporters probably accept some form of the great replacement theory while only a minority of those who back Bernie Sanders are likely to do so. But the idea that this is the principal way of distinguishing between the two sets of voters is baffling, not least because Sanders’ own views about immigration – that it needs to be cut to stop immigrants taking jobs from American workers – could be defined as an expression of “great replacement” from Kendi’s capacious perspective. To ignore the fundamental differences between Trump and Sanders on the economy, healthcare, taxation, government intervention and foreign policy, and point instead to the great replacement theory as the primary distinction between their supporters, is a warped view of politics. It illustrates how questions of class, and wider social and political issues, become submerged under Kendi’s singular obsession with race.

For Kendi, the main reason for the success of great replacement theories and parties is “disinformation”. “Great replacement politicians,” he writes, “persuade everyday people to crave an inequitable dictatorship where they have limited power but more privileges than others over an equitable democratic society where they have expansive powers but no privileges over others.”

There are two fundamental problems with this argument. First, it is not that white workers, say, are today afforded “privileges”. It is, rather, that many have come to believe that the problems they face – lack of jobs, low wages, inadequate housing, high crime rates, and so on – stem from there being too many immigrants or Muslims, and that minorities receive better treatment than white workers.

Kendi’s argument draws on the work of the great American sociologist, historian and activist WEB Dubois, who suggested in his masterwork, Black Reconstruction in America, that the reason white workers in the south had accepted Jim Crow was that they had been “compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage” in being “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks and the best schools”.

Black workers, white workers and small farmers had in fact combined in the 1890s to form “fusion” parties, successfully challenging Democrat rule in many southern states, and introducing policies that helped the poorest, both black and white. These included capping interest rates, extending public schooling, regulating big business and making it easier for illiterate voters to cast a ballot. The Democrats, originally the party of slavery and then of the southern ruling class, responded by introducing Jim Crow laws – a system of apartheid. It was not an early version of great replacement politics but naked racism designed to break the cross-racial working-class alliance and restore the rule of the southern elite. It succeeded.

The context today is very different. This leads us to the second, and even more troublesome, problem with Kendi’s argument. Working-class people have never had “expansive powers”, as Kendi suggests, and over the past 40 years, the powers they did possess have been stripped away.

Contemporary great replacement theories, and indeed the broader debates over immigration, have emerged out of two key developments. The first is popular disenchantment with liberal and neoliberal policies, with globalisation and with mainstream social and political institutions. The second is the decay of class politics and the rise of identitarianism, which has meant that social problems are often understood through the lens of ethnicity rather than of class.

It is the fusion of these two developments that has drawn some to see migrants and Muslims as the enemy and helped validate great replacement theories. It is also that fusion that makes today’s debates distinct. The arguments of Ripley and Stoddard were about maintaining the power of an elite they perceived in racial terms. They were not driven, as today, by hostility towards that elite. And while, a century ago, race acted as a means of undermining expressions of class solidarity, such solidarity still possessed real foundations. Today those foundations have decayed, allowing identitarian forms of belonging to flourish. Without recognising, and addressing, these shifts, it is impossible to understand great replacement theory.

Kendi is right to see disinformation as a problem that needs combating. It has become a problem, though, within a social and political context that appears to give legitimacy to such disinformation. That wider context Kendi largely ignores.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Kendi thinks the most “effective” way of challenging great replacement theories is by “outlawing political parties” that promote them. Between 1945 and 2015, he observes, “Europeans outlawed more than 50 political parties”. Why not a few more now? Many leaders of the Republican party in America, from the president and vice-president down, echo great replacement arguments. In Britain, prominent Conservatives and politicians within Reform UK rage about “white decline”. Should these parties be banned too?

Kendi also wants “the banning of great replacement politicians when they break the law”. Given that all politicians face possible judicial sanction if they commit a crime, the implication seems to be that great replacement politicians – and only great replacement politicians – should be further punished with a political ban. It takes considerable chutzpah for a writer who has spent more than 500 pages rightly denouncing great replacement politicians for censoring ideas and banning political opponents, and so undermining democracy, to then suggest that we should tackle this by… censoring ideas and banning political opponents.

A major reason so many people are drawn towards “great replacement parties” is their sense of being abandoned by mainstream parties, and of being rendered politically voiceless. Attempting to address this through policies that can only deepen the sense of resentment illustrates the idiocy of much contemporary political thinking.

At the very end of the book, Kendi acknowledges that “nothing minimizes the draw of great replacement theory like radically improving societal conditions”. Had that thought appeared on the first page and shaped the subsequent narrative, it might have been illuminating. On p502, it feels perfunctory. What could have – should have – been an important study of a pernicious concept reads, instead, like an opportunity missed.

Chain of Ideas is published by The Bodley Head (£25). Order a copy at The Observer Shop for £22.50. Delivery charges may apply.

Photograph by Sue Dorfman/ZUMA Press Wire