“YOU’RE REPLACED !”
“THE GREAT REPLACEMENT” is a paranoid theory now addressed realistically and with “scraped data” by ROBERT A. PAPE, a U OF Chicago professor who studies all this on a global basis. I suspect we’re going to hear a LOT more about these insights. It goes far beyond the excitement of a TV cosplay nutcase and into the motivations of seemingly respectable and dependable people.
Decades ago people who study these things predicted that older white guys in what are considered “good” jobs would be crowded by an assortment of uncontrollable factors, including automation, computer knowledge, women joining the workforce because their husbands weren’t earning enough money to sustain a family, lack of college degrees, the nature of the jobs themselves. This was considered unfortunate but inevitable because times change and driving a stagecoach is just not done anymore.
There’s no argument about whether older middle aged men are increasingly pushed aside. When I taught at Heart Butte in 1989 there were three administrators, none of whom were computer literate. It wasn’t just that they never had the education, it was the keyboards — this was the tail end of the jokes about secretaries having two duties: typing and making coffee. The men worried about their significance and did NOT want a “girl’s” job. The present superintendent, Mike Tatsey, and I were the only teachers I knew of at the time who were using the first cute little Macintoshes. One of Mike’s classes was about shoeing horses, not usually a girl’s job. He’s an excellent superintendent.
Another factor never discussed is that in order to build infrastructure and housing, both blue and white collar employees are necessary. When political money does not go into maintenance and construction of housing, bridges, highways, those things don’t get financing — financing that would otherwise make jobs for several levels of work from architecture to plumbing.
Now comes this very detailed academic study of the Jan. 6 insurrection and who was there, where they came from, and — just beginning — what are we going to do about it? This Great Replacement theory in the minds of the Right Wing has become weaponized, justifying invasion of lawful authority, maybe to the point of suicide terrorism. In the case of Ashlii Babbitt, that’s close to it was: “Suicide by Cop” as martyrdom. The cops were not suicides until afterwards. They WERE close to being martyrs, but for the liberal side. This is deadly theory.
This show is recent, a clear and sane description of what the Pape study is showing. it is startling. No one mentions Camus. No one talks about secret wealthy cabals plotting to exclude old white men from the job market they have always dominated by secretly financing people of color, the “others”. But I don’t watch Fox so haven’t paid attention.
Neither do I hear anything yet about generations. If these ages are right, the attackers are the grandchildren — more or less — of the WWII soldiers, enough time for a miserable and desperate past to be made into romantic heroisms, framing the recovery of peace and prosperity afterwards as an earned consequence that might never end. There were still a lot of farmers on the land then. And a lot fewer people. The technology of television had not yet become the growing and transforming Internet. There was no Covid nor climate change.
My father’s core belief system was based on the cooperatives of the prairies early in the 20th century and his job was in a wholesale co-op, going around to the little member farmer co-ops. When it was bought out by a corporation, he was laid off, no longer needed. The key products, oil and gas, practically sold themselves. In the last twenty years in Valier I’ve seen the farmer co-ops here wink out, bought out, lingering only in the machinery of the small town infrastructure. Power has left the hands of the People. But the rocking horse oil pumps have slowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaud_Camus
Renaud Camus is NOT the same as the famous philosopher Albert Camus. Nor is he a fox, though Renaud is a common name applied to a fox as a character. He is a gay man, a socialist, restorer of a castle in France using some national funds, and a worrier that Islamists might invade Europe. Somehow, his idea — which he thought up in Europe — has become a point of rallying for extreme right wing Americans.
In the process of idea emigration to the US, the idea became more paranoid and a book was called “You Will Not Replace Us,” the same rallying cry, but slipping the enemy over from Moslems to Jews, always the default villains. I’m told Camus is very active on Twitter. (I got all this stuff from Wikipedia, but you know — of course — that Wikipedia writers are always anonymous.) He is quoted as saying the terrorists begin with “very small things like attacking old ladies in suburban trains”. He speaks of “genocide by replacement.” I expect some indigenous people have noticed.
“Camus sees democracy as a degradation of high culture and favors a system whereby the elite are guardians of the culture, thus opposing multiculturalism”. In other words, his complaint is actually about class and which culture is naturally more high class. This might appeal to the kind of people described by Pape, the kind of dads who would want their sons [sic] to graduate from Harvard and Yale — like the legislators. There’s class envy here.
“Likewise, the manifesto of Brenton Harrison Tarrant and the Great Replacement theory were also cited in “The Inconvenient Truth” by Patrick Crusius, the perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, United States, that killed 22 people and injured 24 others.”
This is incendiary stuff but I haven’t seen anything about it in mainstream media until now. Granted, I don’t exactly follow politics. But this Renaud is clearly a publicity hound who came of age in the Seventies in Paris, “circulating” with Roland Barthes and Andy Warhol, sensationalists and theorists — very fashionable. My guess is that the idea didn’t come to America through Washington DC, but rather through Manhattan. Possibly LA. “You’re replaced” is close to “You’re fired.”
I suspect it would be hard to find a half-dozen attackers of the Capital who had ever heard of any fancy French philosoophers. The scowlers of Fox News (Renauds?) might refer to Camus, but I doubt they know they’re not talking about Albert. The whole lot of them are worthy of Molière.
(Oh, maybe I don’t mean Renaud — maybe I mean Reynard. I’d better look it up.)
