everyone replaces everyone else
I skip over to see the headline at The Atlantic, “No, Ann Coulter. I am Not Responsible for The Great Replacement Theory”. Robert Brownstein, who a quick Google search to recall a vaguely recognizable name I see wrote a book with a title excoriating Obama as ” Worst President” and a failure, and another on the looming Civil War. At least in parts he should be sympatica with Counter –who probably has the sin of characterizing Brownstein as work in a way he doesn’t like or cherry picking from his theses, or subscribing political analysis as what is desired. I right now do not know if II is worth one of my free five monthly articles for this magazine web site to find out. (This is as opposed to my certainties that I can skip the headline “Only a Broken Society Would Focus on the Police Failures in Uvailde” as I can more or less write his script and yell at it in my head, only uncertain on one or two points in his argument — the last line of defense needs to be a line of defense, whatever the more nebulous first through twentieth lines of straightening out society are.)
When I hear of the, quote in quote, “Great Replacement Theory”, the innocuous description that cones to mind — and one of a celebratory description — is the book from the early 2000s by Judis and Ruy Teixeira called ” The Emerging Democratic Majority”. They furiously had to explain why 2002 and 2004 didn’t matter, and then stood smug with 2006 and 2008. Last I saw, one was holding onto his premise where another had abandoned it. Checked in later, and I saw that he has forlornly offered that the Democratic Party message is all wrong, and not in any way compelling or appealing. The suggestion is losses loom on the ballot; his script has been dashed. His Great Replacement dream has been thwarted. Hey! If the right of center party cannot find votes from immigrants out of a culturally conservative Catholic country of Mexico, or from refugees of a Cuba and Venezuela, they are just guilty of political malpractice.
And, granted quite a bit more comes out as important than whether someone with a ‘d’ or someone with an ‘r’ holds a majority of elected offices. So, turning to other “great replacements” — and there are great replacements everywhere you look. Taking stock of one of the states Judis and Teixeira had and seems to have largely taken the Democratic shape — Virginia, as the urban Washington suburb grows and the rural countryside suddenly sees an influx of people in a neighboring community coming with an influx of politics that may, for instance, take their guns away. Resentment or frustratiom is understandable, though in party politics the losing party should be able to find its footing. Gentrification. Granted, the biggest problem is the long time residents getting priced out of their longtime neighborhood, but in all descriptors of the events the antagonisms land on cultural changes — a history ripped out and replaced by something else — the local tavern is gone and now we are saddled with a damned Whole Foods.
What this has to do with a jackass racist shooting a bunch of black people is a tad difficult. Somewhere other than The Turner Diaries or the pronouncement that “The Jews will not replace us” lies a reality of cultures clashing against each other that warrants observation, and can’t be shoved in as a single racist conspiracy theory you automatically glom to acts of hatred. And I can’t quite tell whether it is relevant that the killer’s droppings charging Fox News — the boogeyman that is now being blasted for mainstreaming his hate concepts — charges the network as being the tool of the Jews. I could go either way on whether that is important. At the very least it slides the viewers of Tucker Carlson into some other category, or if on the same category far down the slide.