American political discourse, or what passes for discourse these days, is awash in conspiracy theories. Some are novel — and, it must be acknowledged, rather creative — while others mimic schemes from earlier eras of American history.
Since 2017, QAnon has been spinning outlandish tales about pizzerias and a Satanic cabal operating a child sex trafficking ring. This conspiracy, you won’t be surprised to learn, was working somehow to undermine Donald Trump during his presidency.
Alex Jones has transformed the peddling of conspiracies into a multimillion-dollar empire, although the legal system may finally be catching up to his malevolent lie that the massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook in 2012 was faked, an elaborate stunt, he claims, to push for gun control.
And then the Big Lie, endlessly reiterated by Trump himself, the fiction that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that Trump actually defeated Joseph Biden.
Biden, of course, prevailed by 7 million votes in 2020, and the very few instances of voter fraud that have been verified appear to be Trump voters casting multiple ballots or voting on behalf of deceased spouses.
Republican-dominated state legislatures have nevertheless used the Big Lie as a pretext for limiting access to the ballot box, but one of the more persistent conspiracy theories is the so-called replacement theory, which has gained traction in some precincts of the Republican Party. Replacement theory takes many forms, but at its core it claims that liberals and Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration in the expectation that people of color, putatively reliable Democratic voters, will soon replace white, native-born voters.
Replacement theory is nativism, pure and simple — well, maybe not so pure, especially when antisemitism gets thrown into the witch’s brew. And we should probably stipulate here that the people who should be exercised about replacement theory are Native Americans. If anyone has been injured by “replacement,” it is the Algonquin and Cherokee and Iroquois and Ojibwe and Pueblos and countless others — Indigenous peoples who were “replaced” by generations of while immigrants, who brought disease and violence and chased Native Americans from their ancestral lands.
Earlier waves of immigrants, especially Roman Catholics, were suspected of being pawns in a vast conspiracy to replace Protestants. The December 1836 issue of the Quarterly Christian Spectator, for example, warned that Europe had an overabundance of Catholics who might be headed across the Atlantic to subvert Protestant Christian principles.
Europe “possesses a population to send to our shores, sufficient to outnumber and overwhelm us, in time, unless they can be prevented from coming,” the nativist publication warned. The only solution was conversion to “real” — Protestant — Christianity. “Efforts must be made to impart the benefits of the true faith,” the article continued, “to all the unenlightened and vicious who come among us from abroad, and to produce their conversion unto God.”
The article, entitled “The Danger of Our Country,” painted a dystopian picture of an America overrun by Catholics: “our liberty turned into despotism or licentiousness, — our intelligence into ignorance — our religion turned into infidelity or papacy.” Such a society may survive, the article continued, “but we shall not be the present happy United States.”
These conspiracy theories were not unusual. A passel of nativist organizations emerged in the antebellum period, including the Native American Democratic Association, the American Protestant Association, the Order of United Americans and the United Sons of America. All of them warned that the country was in danger of being overrun — being replaced — by Catholic immigrants, who were often caricatured as docile and prepared unquestioningly to do the bidding of the pope.
Nativist attacks on Catholic immigrants continued throughout the 19th century. The American Protective Association, founded in Clinton, Iowa, in 1887, spread antiCatholic sentiment, especially in the Midwest. Half a million members pledged not to vote for a Catholic, hire a Catholic or go on strike with a Catholic. Members took an oath, which read in part, “I furthermore promise and swear that I will not aid in building or maintaining, by my resources, any Roman Catholic church or institution of their sect or creed whatsoever, but will do all in my power to retard and break down the power of the Pope, in this country or any other.” In addition, members pledged, “nor will I enter into any agreement with a Roman Catholic to strike or create a disturbance whereby the Catholic employees may undermine and substitute their Protestant co-workers.”
Replacement theory has a long and sordid history.
One of the people propagating replacement theory these days is Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona. “What the left wants to do is change the demographics of this country,” he declared. “They want to do that so they can consolidate power and so they can never lose another election.”
Let’s set aside for a moment that the composition of the Senate and the structure of the Electoral College ensure that Republicans wield outsized influence in American politics; Wyoming, with a population of 581,000 has the same number of senators as California, population 39-plus million. Nevertheless, the replacement theory conspiracy clearly resonates with many Americans, and right-wing politicians are more than willing to wield it as a political cudgel.
Such rhetoric, such conspiracy-mongering, is just as odious today as it was two centuries ago.
Randall Balmer, the author of