You read now and then, especially on the internet, about the “Great Replacement Theory.” “Now and then” is gradually becoming more and more often, as various right-wing politicians refer to it, usually obliquely, in an effort to secure the votes of the simple-minded and credulous. The theory goes that shadowy, but powerful, groups are actively attempting to undermine the stability, and even the existence, of white Western society by shipping hordes of other-than-white immigrants into countries they’ve targeted.
The idea has gained the most traction in parts of the nation in which Jim Crow once ruled, where there seems to be a lively appreciation of the fact that democratic trends predict the minority of white citizens sometime in the next few decades. That shrinking group of people seem horrified at the prospect, and have been and are passing laws making life and voting ever more difficult for the current underclasses.
Various images spring to mind. The Dutch boy with his thumb in the dike, for example, or the Norse king Knut setting his throne at the water’s edge at low tide and forbidding the sea from wetting his feet. The changes, unless something drastic occurs, are inevitable. We old white guys are bound to be replaced politically, whether we thrash about or not. I can’t imagine that’ll be a dire outcome. Those of us who pontificate that the young, the unwashed, or the non-white politicians of the future won’t be sufficiently educated, sophisticated, or acculturated to run the show should take a sober look at the state into which we’ve devolved in 250 years.
If the old white guys should ever think clearly about their impending replacement, they’d find it less in people of other ethnicities than in the members of the opposite sex. Ever-increasing majority percentages of women are attending law school, medical school, and even undergraduate institutions, and appear on ever more staffs and boards of, for example, legal firms and Congressional committees. To watch one of them pose yes-or-no questions to an evasive, squirming cabinet secretary is to watch an artist at work. There may still exist a large and largely inert body of controlling male authority, and it’s certainly true that large sections of the United States can’t countenance the thought of a female chief executive, but like stones in running water, that will slowly be eroded away.
I was just talking to my kids during one of our twice-weekly FaceTime talks, and my son reminded me of his mother’s reaction to the much-ballyhooed Equal Rights Amendment. “I am not a feminist. I don’t need a law to guarantee me equal rights with men. I’m already superior to most of them.” I watched her demonstrate it often enough that finally I couldn’t doubt it.
It’s hard to imagine any social or cultural power greater than the patriarchy that’s been the rule in almost every society. There’ve been a few tears in the fabric over the centuries — Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, and Margaret Thatcher spring to mind — but generally, to mention one for instance, it’s been the women who’ve done the years of work for which men got the prize. Many churches cling to patriarchal traditions that were established long ago. I’ve listened to many a sermon that made me think that no woman could do worse.
This past Sunday my friend Bea’s colleagues threw her a potluck retirement party (there’ll be another, more formal one later). Dining on lentil salad, lab-grown smoked salmon, and lasagna, I chatted with a variety of men and women in a bewildering jumble of conversations. I had to remind myself, as I watched and listened, that almost everyone in this group of equals, men and women, was a PhD in a discipline I still understand but dimly. If there was a patriarchy involved in any of this happy, chattering crowd, it wasn’t evident to me.
In the past couple of weeks we’ve lost a pair of prominent women who were about as different as they could be. Dolly Parton, about the most innocent sex symbol there could be, used her dumb blonde persona (“I’m not dumb, and I’m not blonde”), her songwriting talent, and her voice to earn millions that she used to advance literacy in Appalachian children. Gloria Steinem, a crusading feminist, founded Ms. Magazine, inspired millions of women around the world, and in a coup especially dear to me, went undercover as a Playboy bunny and exposed the exploitation and hypocrisy in the heart of the so-called sexual revolution. We’ll miss them both, but there are more coming — many more — to take their places.
