Remember the “tyranny of the majority”? That fear Tocqueville held about US democracy? Autocrats rely on it, but it takes fear. Like a fire in a crowded theatre, an entire nation can (or just enough of it) be stampeded by fear of “dangerous” minorities, even when the minorities are far less dangerous than the legal citizens of the country (as in the US, where the percentage of crimes committed by US citizens is much higher than those committed by immigrants**). Facts can be drowned out if the voices of unreason are loud enough. “They’re eating the dogs and cats” was a bald faced lie, and yet the perpetrators got elected. Don’t let it happen to you!
Ms. Le Pen, the far right French candidate who is leading in the polls just six months before the election, promises “law and order.” So did Trump. So did Hitler. Their law and their order, as far as you will allow them to take it. A glance at the US in the past two years should be enough to scare you away from Le Pen. She and her party echoes the rhetoric of “replacement theory” (the latest attempt in the tradition of eugenics to make racism sound scientific) (spoiler alert: it is not). Only yesterday Trump and Vance continued to do the same. Trump posted “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country. Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!” Vance blamed the violence on “Western liberals” who “imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.” He added: “I hope Americans are paying attention. This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.”*** Chicken Little and Goosey Loosey attempt to strike again, with the same hysterics they used to get elected.****
They continue to play the same cards from the same old autocratic playbook. Why not? It works! It is up to citizens who value democracy all over the world to not fall for these dated old tricks. But to make wise choices, citizens have to know that the man behind the curtain is trying to con them.
With that in mind, I offer here two excerpts from my upcoming book, Democracy versus Autocracy, which uses the social science of Kurt Lewin to understand what it takes to sustain democracy, and the tricks autocrats use to undermine it. He lived from 1890-1947, and was the primary founder of my profession (organization development). His same theories (based on group dynamics) apply to organizations and to nation states. Lewin, having lived as a German Jew during the rise of Hitler, was an expert on democracy and autocracy.
The first is a simple table of the democratic and autocratic playbooks:
| Democratic Playbook | Autocratic Playbook |
| Values reason | Values loyalty and obedience |
| Treats education as a public good and protects critical thinking | Treats educated dissenters as enemies and prefers compliance to inquiry |
| Holds elections that are free and fair | Holds elections as ritual while controlling outcomes |
| Protects a free press and tolerates criticism | Attacks the press and floods the zone with propaganda |
| Values fact-based discourse | Treats facts as valid only when they support the autocrat’s interests |
| Subjects officials, including the highest, to the rule of law | Places leaders above the law and uses law against opponents |
| Extends equal standing across differences (class, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, origin, identity, etc.) | Elevates a favored in-group and scapegoats other groups |
| Establishes checks on power | Concentrates power and rejects limits on it |
| Tolerates difference but not intolerance that would undermine democracy | Uses the freedoms of democracy to divide and conquer |
| Aligns with democracy abroad | Aligns with autocrats abroad |
| Asks loyalty to democratic principles and the constitution | Asks loyalty to the leader |
Support what is in the left hand column, please, and resist what is on the right.
The second excerpt is a chapter on replacement theory: Chapter Eleven: Scapegoating and pseudoscience
Scapegoating an outgroup to consolidate power is one of the dirtiest and oldest tricks in the autocratic playbook, and dressing the scapegoating in pseudoscience is nearly as old. The line runs from Blumenbach’s eighteenth-century skull measurements — the source of the durable — despite being completely absurd — myth that “white” people are Caucasian (originating from the Caucasus Mountains) — through American eugenics, which the Nazis studied and admired, to today’s “great replacement” theory, which casts nonwhite immigration as an engineered attack on the white majority. A 2018 YouGov-Cambridge poll found that roughly 30 percent of Americans believe a version of it (Kendi, 2026, p. xxix).
This chapter examines the long history of pseudoscientific racism and its contemporary manifestation as replacement theory. The argument is simple: the same autocratic myths that powered slavery, the rebirth of the Klan, the Nazi regime, and Jim Crow are alive today, dressed in different language but identical in function. It scapegoats all outgroups. It claims scientific legitimacy. It convinces ordinary people that those who differ from them are a threat to be feared rather than fellow citizens to be embraced. For democracy to survive, all such pseudoscientific racist theories must be exposed for what they are.
Replacement theory: an old trick with a new name
As mentioned last chapter, in August 2017, white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “You will not replace us — Jews will not replace us,” echoing the 1930s German Nazis. This chapter examines what the slogan claims, where the claim came from, and the danger to democracy that it poses.
Replacement theory, as historian Ibram Kendi explains, is “a political theory that powerful elites are enabling peoples of color to steal the lives, livelihoods, cultures, electoral power, and freedoms of white people, who now need authoritarian protection” (Kendi, 2026, p. xxiv). There are many subtle manifestations of the same theory — claims that white livelihoods, cultures, electoral power, and freedoms are being stolen — and these subtle versions are politically dangerous because people who are facing their own economic and self-esteem pressures are prone to believe them.
The name of the theory was coined by a French novelist. Renaud Camus, born in 1946, had been a respected literary figure — a gay[1] novelist, a winner of the Académie Française’s Amic Prize, a supporter of France’s Socialist Party. In 1996, the French government commissioned him to write a travel book about the Hérault region in southern France. Hérault had become the Florida of France: aging population, growing fast, attractive climate, popular with retirees. About half of the region’s immigrants were Europeans (Spaniards, Portuguese, British, Italians, Danes, Irish, Dutch). About 40 percent were Africans, primarily North Africans from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. African immigrants made up roughly four percent of the total Hérault population (Kendi, 2026, p. xx).
Camus saw something that, by his own description, troubled him to his core. Walking through the old fortified villages of Hérault, he reported seeing people of North African descent “nearly exclusively at the windows and thresholds” of the oldest houses. He felt the impression of “having changed worlds without having left the old one” (Kendi, 2026, p. xx). Other European immigrants — Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English — walking through the same villages, speaking foreign languages, did not register for Camus as evidence of change. White immigrants apparently did not signify replacement. Only the dark-skinned immigrants did.
With this biased perception, Camus articulated the question that has organized the autocratic politics of our century: who do the nations of the West belong to? Whose presence belongs, and whose presence represents an invasion?
Years later, Camus delivered a campaign speech in Hérault in which he declared himself as a candidate for president of the French Republic. In 2011 he published the speech as a book titled Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement). The name stuck. In 2018, listening to the Charlottesville chant on the news, Camus found the title for his next book, You Will Not Replace Us! He named the demographic change he claimed to see as “by far the biggest and most urgent problem Western countries have to face” and called for “remigration” — the mass deportation of citizens and immigrants of color from majority-white countries (Kendi, 2026, p. xxi).
The theory has three protagonists, by Camus’s own description. The “replacers” — immigrants and citizens of color, mostly from Africa, often Muslim. The “replacees” — the white indigenous population being replaced. The “replacists” — elites who allegedly engineer the change for their own benefit, primarily industrialists and high finance, with the philanthropist George Soros named as a particular target (Kendi, 2026, p. xxii).
Demographic data refutes Camus’ claims. About 90 percent of French residents are not immigrants. About 91 percent of European Union residents come from within the European Union. About 86 percent of US residents are not recent immigrants. Camus’s response to such data is striking: “So long as statistics demonstrate that there is no such thing as a Great Replacement, it is not the Great Replacement which becomes laughing stock, it is statistics” (Kendi, 2026, p. xxii). Like any autocratic theory, replacement theory does not require evidence. It requires only adherents.
The long and twisted pseudoscientific tradition
Replacement theory did not appear in 1996 from nowhere. It is the contemporary repackaging of a pseudoscientific tradition that runs back through American eugenics, nineteenth-century race “science”, and eighteenth-century racial taxonomy. The pseudoscientific theories have been built, and when debunked, rebuilt across three centuries to provide racial autocracy with the appearance of intellectual respectability.
An early attempt to explain racial superiority through taxonomy came in 1795 from the German physical anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Blumenbach himself concluded that all humans were one species and that superficial physical characteristics were due to climate. But he also asserted that blond, blue-eyed people were the “most handsome and becoming” and had originated in the Caucasus Mountains (Bhopal, 2007, p. 14). The aesthetic preference was unscientific; the geographic claim was unfounded. Both stuck. Blumenbach’s coining of the term Caucasian became his enduring legacy, despite the term having no scientific basis whatsoever.
The next major movement originated with Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and one of the early figures in psychology. The American Psychological Association, in its 2021 apology for the field’s historical role in promoting racism, acknowledged that Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius ranked the “comparative worth of different races” and concluded that “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.” In 1883, Galton coined the word eugenics, which he described as the science of improving “racial stock” (APA, 2021, p. 22). The discipline he founded would be embraced by racists in both the United States and Europe, including Adolf Hitler, who used eugenic theory to justify the murder of six million Jews between 1941 and 1945.
In 1876, the Italian prison doctor Cesare Lombroso published Criminal Man, which Ibram Kendi describes as having “given birth to the discipline of criminology.” Lombroso claimed that criminals were born, not made, and emitted physical signs that could be measured. He believed dark skin was associated with criminal behavior because “the inability to blush had always been considered the accompaniment of crime.” His 1895 follow-up, The Female Offender, argued that Black women were the prototypical female criminals because they were less differentiated from men. Lombroso’s student Raphael Garofalo coined the term criminology in 1885. The British physician Havelock Ellis popularized Lombroso in the English-speaking world by 1890 (Kendi, 2016, p. 257). A pseudoscience that linked skin color to inborn criminality became the foundation of an entire academic discipline.
Eugenics in operation: sterilization, immigration, and Tuskegee
The pseudoscience did not stay in books. It became law.
The American Medical Association published among its goals “a scientific process” to decrease the population of the “unfortunate classes.” The Chicago Ugly Law[2] of 1911 prohibited from public view any person “who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” (Coates et al., 2018, p. 164). Eugenics had become a license to remove human beings from public space.
Beginning with the Immigration Law of 1891, anyone deemed inferior could be deported. Immigration officials determined whether arrivals suffered from a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” — a category that included pregnancy, poverty, and lack of morals, and was applied especially to widowed or unmarried women (Coates et al., 2018, p. 164). To assist immigration officials in maintaining eugenic standards, the psychologist Henry Goddard developed IQ tests which he claimed showed that approximately 80 percent of Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian immigrants were “feeble-minded.” Deportations for the reason of feeble-mindedness increased 350 percent the year the tests were introduced, and 570 percent the year after (Coates et al., 2018, p. 164).
In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in Buck v. Bell that Carrie Buck, a young woman raped at 16 and confined to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, could be involuntarily sterilized. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, declared: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind… Three generations of imbeciles are enough[3]” (Coates et al., 2018, p. 164). Backed by the courts, 33 states enacted involuntary sterilization laws. By the mid-1930s, more than 60,000 US citizens had been forcibly sterilized.
The American eugenics movement was studied, admired, and copied abroad. Hitler’s National Socialist regime drew explicitly on American eugenic law in designing its racial purity legislation. The categories the Nazi regime ultimately targeted for extermination — “Jews, homosexuals, Romani gypsies, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners, habitual criminals, the asocial, and immigrants” (Coates et al., 2018, p. 165) — overlapped substantially with the categories American eugenicists had targeted for sterilization.
President Calvin Coolidge, who held the office from 1923 to 1929, embraced eugenic theory openly. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides” (Kendi, 2016, p. 321). The sitting president of the United States was articulating, in his own publications, the same logic the Charlottesville marchers would chant ninety years later.
In 1931, Ernest Hooton published Up from the Ape, which became a standard text in physical anthropology courses for decades. Hooton claimed that physical characteristics determining race were “associated, in the main, with specific intangible and non-measurable but nevertheless real and important, temperamental and mental variations” (Kendi, 2016, p. 333). The qualifier non-measurable is worth pausing on. Hooton was a physical anthropologist claiming that mental differences between races existed but could not be measured. He was asserting on faith what he could not demonstrate, while teaching it as science.
In 1932, the United States Public Health Service began its “Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male” at the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama. Six hundred Black sharecroppers were enrolled. They were not told they had syphilis. They were not treated. They were observed, for forty years, while the disease progressed through their bodies and was transmitted to their wives and children. The study’s purpose, according to the researchers, was to confirm that syphilis damaged the cardiovascular systems of Black men while bypassing their “underdeveloped” brains — a hypothesis with no scientific basis. The study was not stopped until 1972, after exposure by the Associated Press (Kendi, 2016, p. 333). The federal government of the United States ran a forty-year medical experiment based on the deliberate neglect of Black men on the premise of racial difference.
Immigration restriction and the case of Kurt Lewin
With pseudoscience as authority and eugenics as policy, the United States transformed its immigration system in the 1920s. The Statue of Liberty had been completed in 1886, bearing its famous inscription about “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Between 1900 and 1920, fourteen million immigrants arrived. With “science” explaining that nonwhites were undesirable, Congressional sentiment turned. The Immigration Act of 1924 imposed national-origin quotas: 51,227 immigrants per year from Germany; 34,007 from England or Northern Ireland; 28,567 from the Irish Free State; 3,845 from Italy; 2,248 from Russia; 100 from China; 100 from Bulgaria; 100 from Palestine; and 100 from any African country (Zinn, 1980, p. 373).
The Irish, once despised, had been elevated to the favored category. Italians and Jews had not. Future President Theodore Roosevelt described the lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans as “rather a good thing” and boasted that he had said as much at a dinner attended by “various dago diplomats — all wrought up by the lynching” (Zinn, 1980, p. 293).
The 1924 quotas remained law for forty-one years. They restricted Jewish immigration severely, even after the United States had detailed knowledge of the Holocaust. Kurt Lewin — whose work on understanding democracy and autocracy is the foundation for this book — was permitted to immigrate only because, after an extensive search, he was able to be sponsored by the University of Iowa. Harvard, Stanford, and other prominent institutions had turned him down. In the process of considering Lewin’s application, the eminent Harvard psychologist E. G. Boring wrote to Stanford professor L. Terman: “In the first place Lewin is a Jew… also the wife is a Jew and their child, who has figured in some of the movies of Lewin’s child psychology, is a perfect little yid” (Crosby, 2021a, p. 25). As previously mentioned, despite Lewin’s years of effort, his status as a Doctor of Psychology, and the money he spent on various attempts, he could not get his mother out of Germany. She was executed in a Nazi concentration camp.
Two generations later, Lewin’s social science is one of our best hopes in the struggle between democracy and autocracy. His mother was murdered because the United States, applying its eugenic immigration framework, would not let her in. The pseudoscience of race is not an abstract policy debate. It continues to support a system that determines who is allowed entry, who is allowed to stay, and all too often, who lives and who dies.
Debunked but not eradicated
In 1942, Ashley Montagu published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, which, alongside other postwar scholarly voices, effectively debunked eugenics and all theories of racial superiority based on physiology. The scientific case for race as a biological category collapsed. The case had never been sound; the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust made support for the pseudoscientific racism of eugenics untenable.
But the autocratic currents the pseudoscience served remained. Those who relied on the autocratic playbook did not give up scapegoating. Racism continued through other explanations: cultural inferiority, family dysfunction, and the failure of individuals to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” in an allegedly “post-racial” modern world where there is equal opportunity and the playing field is even. The story shifted; the political function remained. As with any autocratic scapegoating, fear becomes more important than facts, and facts can be twisted to support the latest scare.
The most recent repackaging is replacement theory. The myth of race, although thoroughly debunked by science, has morphed into a contemporary form that does not require biological claims — only the claim that some unspecified “they” are engineering the replacement of one population, the “good” one, with others, the “bad” ones. The theory continues to be scientifically bankrupt and yet persists as a powerful tool in the autocratic playbook.
Cause and effect
If racist pseudoscience has been debunked over and over again, what explains its persistent power?
Three things, at minimum.
Cause: economic anxiety. The German economists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch analyzed more than eight hundred elections from 1870 to 2014 in advanced democracies. They found that financial crises allow what they called “far-right parties” — what we might call great-replacement parties — to boost their share of the vote by approximately 30 percent on average. “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners” (cited in Kendi, 2026, p. 30). When economic conditions create insecurity, autocratic explanations gain traction. The pattern is not new — Hitler rose to power during the Weimar economic collapse — but it is well-documented across more than a century and dozens of countries.
Cause and effect: the zero-sum story. This belief is a sibling to replacement theory. Public policy expert Heather McGhee, in her book The Sum of Us (2021), documented how white Americans have repeatedly chosen to forgo public goods rather than share them across racial lines. During desegregation, towns across the United States closed public pools, libraries, and parks rather than open them to Black citizens. The white population lost the pools, libraries, and parks. So did the Black population. The autocratic logic — that white well-being requires minority exclusion — produced outcomes in which everyone, white and Black, ended up worse off than before. McGhee has documented the same dynamic in contemporary debates over healthcare, retirement, childcare, and college funding. White Americans, encouraged to believe that resources are scarce, that if other groups rise it will be at their detriment, and that public benefits are “handouts” to people of color, have supported cuts that have diminished their own available resources and raised their own costs. They are doing to themselves the very thing they fear will happen.
Cause and effect: for many whites, the perception of bias has reversed. This is both propagated by and supports replacement theory. A 2007 Pew Research Center survey showed that white respondents were nearly twice as likely as Black respondents to believe Black Americans were better off than they had been five years earlier. A 2011 study by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers found that many white Americans had come to believe racial progress had come at their expense. The researchers documented that white Americans had begun viewing anti-white bias as a larger societal problem than anti-Black bias — “a relationship not observed in Blacks’ perceptions” (cited in Kendi, 2026, p. 17).
Nor is it supported by the vast majority of facts. Current and recent research shows that minorities, women, and the LGBTQ population are still discriminated against in hiring practices, in lending practices, in admissions to higher education, in policing and security behaviors, by realtors[4], etc. Individual and institutional prejudice in America against these historically scapegoated and vulnerable groups still runs deep. But some facts run the other way. If a minority person is hired, or admitted into a university, that does take a spot that could have been filled by a white person. If the playing field were actually even, these choices should be left to merit. Because the playing field has not been even close to even, and remains lopsided,[5] well intentioned attempts have been made to increase opportunities for under-represented groups. Sources that lean toward our autocratic currents have pounced on any such facts. The polarized response from the left has been to mostly ignore “reverse discrimination” even when it holds truth. The result has increased the tension amongst many whites and fueled the backlash against DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) efforts, and anything else perceived as sneakily advancing the “great replacement.”
These three currents — economic insecurity exploited by autocratic rhetoric, the zero-sum framing that turns public goods into private grievances, and the mind trick that recasts dominant-group members as victims — explain why a scientifically empty theory continues to gain ground. Replacement theory has the same political utility in 2026 that the pseudoscience of race had in 1925. It scapegoats. It explains insecurity. It provides a villain. It offers the comforting suggestion that the listener belongs to a wronged group whose mistreatment requires authoritarian protection.
The hidden costs
Replacement theory has costs. Three episodes from recent years suggest the scale of them.
On May 14, 2022, an eighteen-year-old white gunman drove three and a half hours to a Tops Friendly Markets supermarket in a Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. He killed ten people and wounded three others, all but two of his victims Black. In a manifesto posted before the attack, he cited replacement theory directly as his motivation. He believed his white American identity was being engineered out of existence by Jewish elites using Black and immigrant populations as instruments. The manifesto echoed the Nazis, echoed Camus, echoed the Charlottesville chant, echoed Madison Grant’s 1916 book. The shooter was not deranged in any clinical sense. He had absorbed the political theory of his historical moment and acted on it.
In the 2024 US presidential campaign, the Republican candidate and his running mate repeatedly claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets. Yes, it was true that a woman in Springfield, Ohio, had called local authorities to accuse her Haitian immigrant neighbors of eating her cat. It is also true that the cat came home. The woman herself later tried to clear up the story. The correction was overlooked by the politicians and commentators who had seized on the original accusation. The story moved from neighborhood grievance to presidential debate to international news within days. The scapegoating did not need the story to be true; it only needed the story to be useful.
The claim was false. It was retracted by the original complainant, and frantically refuted by local officials, police, and journalists. None of this slowed its spread. The Springfield Haitian community — twelve to fifteen thousand legal immigrants who had been recruited to fill labor shortages in local manufacturing — faced bomb threats against their schools, hospitals, and city offices, requiring evacuations.
Across the world, what Kendi calls “great replacement politicians” gained traction in democracies by convincing voters to “crave the privilege” of being a member of the ethnic majority, of being Christian, of being a citizen, of being male, of being cisgender, of being heterosexual, of being white (Kendi, 2026, p. 448). Fanned by fear, they were being encouraged to place the value of being part of the in-group above the value of being part of democracy, and to support authoritarian leaders who are on “their side” in the great mythological ethnic war. Some of the privileges are real, but the costs are high — a devil’s bargain that costs white Americans, and all of us, our public schools, our healthcare, our public infrastructure, our public services, and, potentially, our democracy.
An even more subtle cost is the continuation of prejudice in our society. Replacement theory legitimizes and drives the wedge of race and other differences further between us, myths that can be used against anyone. In other words, by supporting prejudice as valid one opens the door to others being prejudiced against you in return. Never ending warfare, both cultural and violent, is the logical result. Those who are clinging to the inherently anti-democratic comfort of being part of the “in-group” today, may well be setting the conditions for the actual targeting of their own group in the future.
Replacement theory as one-size-fits-all autocratic strategy
Replacement theory is the contemporary master-theory of autocracy in the United States and elsewhere. It synthesizes scarcity logic, ethnic grievance, conspiracy thinking, anti-democratic sentiment, and the cult of the great leader into a single political instrument. From the perspective of replacement theory, the following are all suspect: candidates who aren’t white men. Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Voting rights legislation. Government. Election results. Universities. The press. History that does not idealize white men. Feminists. Immigrants. Minorities. Anything that threatens the social construction of white supremacy. The great leader who at least winks knowingly at the theory and claims to defend “his people” is to be revered no matter what. Attacks on him are painted as lies by those who are behind the “great replacement.”
This is, as Kendi points out, the replacement of democracy with dictatorship (Kendi, 2026, p. xxiii). The political theory that white people are being replaced by people of color is the cover story. The actual replacement underway is the replacement of representative government by autocratic government, of public goods by private grievances, of fact-based public reasoning by tribal allegiance. The theory has done substantial work toward that replacement already. Whether this anti-democracy current becomes our future remains to be seen.
The pro-democracy response
Democratic citizens have to expose replacement theory as the genuinely unscientific, historically discredited, autocratically functional doctrine that it is. This work has three components.
First, the pseudoscience must be named. Race, as a biological category, does not exist in the form replacement theorists need it to exist. Skin color is environmental adaptation, not genetic destiny. All humans share African ancestry. The differences within any racial group dwarf the differences between racial groups. These are not contested findings. They are genuinely scientific. The reason replacement theorists do not engage with the data is that the data refutes their theory, and the theory does not need to engage with what refutes it. Naming this evasion is part of the work of democracy.
Second, the historical continuity must be visible. Replacement theory is not a new threat. It is the latest expression of an autocratic tradition that runs through American history — through Madison Grant, through the 1924 immigration quotas, through Tuskegee, through Buck v. Bell, through the second Klan, through McCarthyism, through the John Birch Society. Each generation, the theory has been repackaged. Each generation, democratic citizens have been required to recognize it and resist it. This generation is no different.
Third, scapegoating itself must be refused. When Haitian immigrants in Ohio are accused of eating cats, the response cannot be to debate the specifics of the false claim. The response is to name what the accusation is — an attempt to play the most obvious card in the autocratic playbook. This should be something any schoolchild, any pro-democracy politician, and certainly any voter, can easily recognize and call out for what it is.
Replacement theory will not be defeated by scientific facts alone. The scientific facts have been available for years. The theory persists because it, with very little effort, is a powerful autocratic political tool. Again, the autocratic playbook is easier to deploy. The democratic playbook takes more work. This is part of the reason autocratic currents are so hard to disperse. On the other hand, the vision of democracy is inspiring across all of our differences and is so in a way autocracy never can be. Only democracy is based on respect. Only democracy is potentially inclusive of the majority of citizens. That motivation, when it is understood, gives democracy the moral high ground and the competitive edge. Lifted by these advantages, the pro-democracy response, like the autocratic playbook, must be political as well: a consistent refusal to accept the temptation to think of yourself as superior to any of your fellow citizens and a refusal to fall for any scapegoating.
The next chapter explores the type of education required to prepare each new generation for the challenge of participating in and firmly supporting democracy.
[1] Ironically his own theory in the hands of others targets the LGBTQ community of which he is himself a member.
[2] They got one thing right. It was an ugly law.
[3] Arguably, not the first or last imbecile on the Supreme Court.
[4] All of these are documented in my previous book, Diversity without dogma. And all of these were happening even before the 2024 election.
[5] Think of generational wealth for instance, which for most Americans has come from home ownership, which has historically been made easily available to whites while being denied to Blacks in many despicable ways…even denied to Black GIs who fought in World War II!
The end.
Democracy my friends, is far better than autocracy. A stable democracy will have less crime and more prosperous citizens. Immigration, which of course should be orderly (but not racist), strengthens society. Scapegoating weakens it. Like the Who, I’ll get on my knees and pray, we don’t get fooled again.
*The US.
**Please verify anything I claim…facts matter to a democracy…facts and reason are the enemies of autocracy.
***From: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/19/france-far-right-protests-riots.html
****Judging from the past two years, getting elected by fomenting hysterics does not equate well with knowing how to govern.
