McDermott: Yes, real America is being ‘replaced’ — by a radicalized political right | Kevin McDermott

But the replacements aren’t the massed hordes of brown-skinned invaders from the fevered fantasies of the political right.

They are instead the Donald Trumps of the world, who reject the longstanding principle of acknowledging electoral defeat for the sake of democracy. They are the Tucker Carlsons, who seek to revive the grotesque legacy of Jim Crow, gaslighting it back into the national conversation with different narratives that mean the same thing. They are the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc, which would have us believe the Constitution isn’t a living document but a static one that dooms us all to the societal standards of 1787.

How is it that people who have nothing but contempt for the principles that define the best of this country today have somehow managed to designate themselves as the arbiters of what it means to be American?

The massacre of 10 people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, last weekend has highlighted the right-wing trope called “replacement theory.” It’s a melding of right-wing conspiracy culture and right-wing bigotry that goes like this: Democrats and liberals are purposefully filling the land with undocumented immigrants in order to “replace” self-described “real” Americans with outsiders who will help the left take control of the country.

Purveyors of the theory generally don’t specify that they’re talking about dark-skinned immigrants. They don’t have to. No one thinks they’re talking about Canadians.

The theory is usefully flexible. The Buffalo gunman, for example, posted a manifesto that referenced replacement theory but, by implication, applied it to Black Americans. But most Black Americans today are American-born. So how does that fit into a theory that outsiders are invading?

In his twisted way, then, the gunman got to the heart of the matter: Immigration policy is merely the way into an argument that finally comes down to plain old racism.

“Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength?” the gunman asked in his manifesto.

It’s the same question Carlson asked in 2018 from his Fox News platform: “How, precisely, is diversity our strength?”

It’s a fundamentally un-American question, but, again, a flexible one if the real point is racism. In America, more than in most countries, “diversity” defines not just immigrants but all of us. That’s the diversity they’re trying to delegitimize.

Trump, still the GOP’s standard bearer, is a master at recasting putatively legitimate debates about immigration policy into racist screeds against native-born Americans. Recall how, in 2019, he declared that The Squad, the four leading progressive women of color in the House, “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe,” and suggested “they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Three of the four women were American-born.

Most of today’s GOP purveyors of replacement theory are more subtle about it than Trump (the lowest of bars, I grant you). Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, for example, as part of his demagogic Senate campaign, has accused Democrats of “fundamentally trying to change this country through their illegal immigration policy,” adding: “We’ve got a country to save.”

Change it into what? Save it from whom? Use your imagination.

The irony is, there really is a great replacement threatening America. Just not the one the Carlsons and Trumps and Schmitts are talking about.

Polls consistently show that most Americans support, within reason, things like abortion rights, gun control, universal health care and easy access to voting. Yet on each of those topics, and many others, state and national policies sit well to the right of the populace.

Gun violence is epidemic, yet red states like Missouri continue to reduce firearms restrictions to virtually nothing. Medical debt — a concept that doesn’t even exist in much of the developed world — is the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy in America today, yet Republicans continue to prevent the nation from moving toward truly universal health care.

The Supreme Court is poised to eliminate constitutional protection for abortion rights, which will trigger draconian restrictions throughout red-state America and is spawning talk in Congress of a national abortion ban. Those same red states, meanwhile, are making voting more difficult and making it easier for politicians to ignore the expressed will of the voters — all in service to a former president who, alone in U.S. history, still refuses to accept the legitimacy of his 2020 electoral defeat.

The common thread is that Republicans and right-wing populists (they’ve long-since lost any claim to the word “conservative”) are continuing to transform policy in ways that solid majorities of Americans oppose. They’re using the idiosyncrasies of our system — the Electoral College, the filibuster, the structural advantage in Congress of small rural states over large urban ones — to carry out what amounts to a minoritarian revolution.

Real America is in danger of being replaced by a political movement that is hostile toward diversity, life-threatening to women and contemptuous of democracy. Whether they’re demagoguing from the campaign trail or lying into a Fox News camera or spraying bullets through a supermarket, they are the worst of us. The next two years will determine whether their alternate vision of America prevails.

Kevin McDermott is a Post-Dispatch columnist and Editorial Board member. On Twitter: @kevinmcdermott Email: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com