Socially Transmitted

 

To understand the underlying passion of MAGA adherents, with claims of stolen elections and an orchestrated deep state conspiracy dedicated to their replacement, it is worth taking a step backwards to examine how and why this happens. It is hardly new. The Economist (February 4th) takes on this topic:

“Most people like to think that conspiracy theories are confined to the margins of society, but they have never been merely peripheral. They are expressions of something important about the cultures from which they emerge. From the Manchester United superfan who believes that covid-19 was engineered by global elites to the 4chan-dwelling adherents of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, the people who invent and spread conspiracy theories are channeling the preoccupations of the societies in which they live. Three centuries ago Jonathan Swift wrote that ‘falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.’ No-one will ever put an end to such theories—but as our coverage explains, by looking closely at them, and the reasons why some people are so keen to share them, something useful may be learned about real-world anxieties.”

A modern view of this perspective is well summarized in this 1920s book: “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy, by Lothrop Stoddard… about racialism and geopolitics, which describes the collapse of white supremacy and colonialism because of the population growth among ‘people of color’, rising nationalism in colonized nations, and industrialization in China and Japan.” Wikipedia.

The Economist tells us: “Stoddard was admired by Adolf Hitler. He argued that the ‘Nordic race that he held responsible for all world progress was being outbred by darker-skinned, supposedly inferior types. In Fitzgerald’s novel [The Great Gatsby], [Tom] Buchanan’s support for Goddard is a sign that he is a stupid, dislikeable man.” The notion of White superiority was the notion behind colonialism, a justification for the exploitation of wealth and natural resources from indigenous people all over the earth. Noblesse obliges – bringing true faith and culture to inferior peoples – drove the missionary zeal that empowered European conquests of distant lands for centuries. But when those colonial conquests showed signs of rising independence, it was very often seen as a direct attack on that axiom of White supremacy that fueled global expansion and European mega-wealth.”

In the United States, this notion the rise of these “inferior peoples” – reflected in Stoddard’s book – has come the modern backbone of “replacement theory,” where people of color push their White masters out and take over the earth. In the summer of 2017, the chants of the Charlotteville torch bearers (above) – “fine people” according to our then President – were repeated: “They shall not replace us.”

“Almost a century [after Stoddard’s book], the shooting of 13 people, 11 of them black, at a supermarket in Buffalo, a city in upstate New York on May 14th, points to the continuing popularity of such racist ideas. The suspect, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old who streamed his massacre on Twitch, a gaming website, had apparently published a 180-page document online explaining his motivations. Much of it was copied directly from a similar ‘manifesto’ written by the man who went on a killing spree in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. In essence, it argued that there is an international Jewish conspiracy to engineer the migration of non-white people to historically white countries in an attempt to ‘replace’ whites with a more pliant, racially inferior population. This is known as the ‘Great Replacement’ theory.’…

“Such ideas are spreading beyond extremist websites like 4chani to the broadcast media and mainstream politics. Tucker Carlson, a powerful Fox News host, has argued that Joe Biden and other Democratic politicians want to replace Americans with ‘more obedient voters from the third world’. [Yale-educated] J.D. Vance, a [successful] Republican candidate for the Senate in Ohio, has claimed that Mr Biden is ‘intentional’ in encouraging Mexican traffickers to bring fentanyl, a powerful opiate, to America in order to kill Donald Trump’s voters. In France Eric Zemmour, a failed presidential candidate, said that ‘an Islamic civilisation is replacing a people from a Christian, Greco-Roman civilisation’. These ideas are nonsense. But as their persistence shows, they are powerful. And in America, the people who believe them all too often have access to guns.” The Economist.

Indeed, to generate such a mass following within the motivation of a conspiracy theory, author/ philosopher Eric Hoffman (in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements) explains that there must already be seeds of discontent spready widely throughout society before such theories can take root. He believes that these angry movements begin with a growing "desire for change" from discontented people who believe that they have lost power and position and who also have no confidence in existing culture or traditions.

Feeling their lives are “irredeemably spoiled" and believing there is no hope for advancement or satisfaction as an individual, true believers seek "self-renunciation" (letting go of their own wishes, desires, or ambitions) to find hope within a wider movement. These formerly empowered incumbents who believe they have been left behind are the most likely source of converts for “replacement theory” movements, for they recall their former wealth with resentment and blame others for their current misfortune. This is the roadmap for rising autocrats. They reinforce to a massive group that they have been left behind, place the blame on an easily identifiable slice of society, hammer home the “truth” of the resulting conspiracy theory and attack any effort to substitute reality for the conspiracy theory. The culture war against any opposing thought becomes an essential part of their effort.

This US effort lifted from a generic feeling of amorphous discontent into mainstream thought with Donald Trump’s presidency, was exacerbated by his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s reference to the Trump’s followers as “deplorables,” and accelerated through his de facto presidential legitimization of White supremacy and toxic immigration by people of color. But this MAGA platform has now shifted to Ron DeSantis, clearly evidenced by the Florida Governor’s “Stop Woke Act.” He has successfully led a large red state charge to ban teaching at all levels of education (from elementary school well into college) of any historical facts that would diminish the power of the underlying conspiracy theories and White supremacy.

As we watch the reconfigured Republican Party become nothing more than a vessel for such MAGA beliefs, we are watching a dangerous and exceptionally well-armed faction of deeply discontented White Americans, who truly believe they are being left behind.

I’m Peter Dekom, and those zealots that F Scott Fitzgerald once described as “stupid” and “dislikeable” are exceptionally angry and even more exceptionally well-armed.