American democracy is broken.  It’s very future is in doubt. I want to discuss two of the major issues that need to be addressed—1) the inability of the national government to produce action at the national level on critical, in some cases existential, issues and 2) the increasing threat, that in contraindication to Lincoln’s memorable phrase that “government of the people, by the people and for the people” shall not perish from the earth, there is evidence that it is perishing before our eyes.

The Failure to Deliver.  Gridlock is a feature, not a bug, of American democracy.  The framers of the US Constitution purposely designed the American Government to limit the ability of a majority to run roughshod over the rights of the minority.  Thus, they designed a federal government that gives a great deal of power to the states (The Tenth Amendment reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”). They also followed Montesquieu’s idea of “separation of powers,” by creating legislative, executive and judicial branches, limiting the power of each. The Constitution also created a bicameral legislative body, requiring all laws to be passed by both Houses.  Thus, inaction was preferred to rash action.

As Sarah Binder wrote in 2000, “Gridlock is not a modern legislative invention. Although the term is said to have entered the American political lexicon after the 1980 elections, Alexander Hamilton was complaining more than two centuries ago about the deadlock rooted in the design of the Continental Congress. In many ways, gridlock is endemic to our national politics, the natural consequence of separated institutions sharing and competing for power.”

Today, the Congress is unable (or unwilling) to pass meaningful legislation in three “hot button” areas –climate change, gun control, and immigration.

As an example, let’s look more carefully at gun control. When asked, “How strict should gun laws be, 57% of those polled believed laws should be stricter, while 9% believed regulations should be reduced.7

Gun Control.  The history of federal gun control legislation is quite limited:

• In 1968, following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Congress passed the Gun Control Act (GCA) of 1968. That act 1) required licenses for interstate sales and regulated the importation of firearms.
• In the 1980s Congress passed a series of laws stiffening the penalties for using a firearm when committing various drug crimes.
• In 1986, Congress took a step backward in passing the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act to ensure that the GCA did not “place any undue or unnecessary Federal restrictions or burdens on law abiding citizens,” but it opened many loopholes through which illegal gun traffickers could slip.
• In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act which requires criminal history background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and state agencies on persons who attempt to purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer.
• In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which made it unlawful, with certain exceptions, to manufacture, transfer, or possess semiautomatic assault weapons.  The law expired after ten years.

Now all this might seem to you like small cheese; that’s because it is.  By and large the effects on homicides, suicides and mass shootings of these laws are minimal or non-existent.  This may be because there hasn’t been a great deal of research on the topic or, as the Rand Corporation noted, these laws affect the flow of new guns into the system, or the legal ownership of purchased weapons. They don’t deal with the extremely high number of guns already owned by Americans, and, thus, have limited impact.  See the Rand Corporation’s article for a more nuanced take on what works and what doesn’t. Because our politics makes it impossible to enact serious gun control legislation, we are doomed to have the highest rates of gun deaths among advanced countries in the world (12.25 per 100,000 populations compared to, for example, 2.05 in Canada).  Despite years of high levels of gun deaths and a number of high-profile mass shootings, Congress is unable to pass stricter gun control.

The threat to American Democracy.  Donald Trump’s assault on our democracy has been well documented.  Among other things, he has

1. Said he supported many right-wing armed militia groups (including armed protesters who stormed the Michigan state legislature on April 30, 2020).
2. Said he would not necessarily accept election results (July 9, 2020 and September 23, 2020).
3. In the last days of his presidency he refused to concede the election and began to spread “the big lie,” that he actually won the election, and that it was stolen from him.
4. Consistently refused to denounce violent supporters including armed protesters in Charlottesville in January 2020, armed protesters who stormed the capitol in Michigan in April 2020, white nationalist-led protests in Wisconsin in August 2020, and refused to condemn white supremacist organizations such as the Proud Boys.
5. He asked Justice Department officials to state that the 2020 election was rigged so that he could plausibly ask Georgia officials to overturn result.
6. He supported “Stop the Steal” rallies and told his supporters that the “fraudulent” election would be overthrown.
7. He pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the Presidential votes saying, “What I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the 11,779 vote margin of defeat] we have, because we won the state.”
8. Supported a major protest on January 6, 2021 to pressure lawmakers not to certify the votes of the electoral college.
9. Told Vice President Pence that he has the authority to reject slates of electors which have been elected through voter fraud and send those votes back to the state legislatures.

Insurrectionists assault the U.S. Capitol, January 6, 2021.          Getty Images

The assault on the Capitol.  It is uncertain how much responsibility Trump bears for the January 6 insurrection, but it is clear that he encouraged supporters to come to Washington, and that he riled up his supporters, saying

“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol– and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.” and

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” and

“Something is wrong here, something is really wrong, can’t have happened and we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” and

“So we are going to–we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we are going to the Capitol, and we are going to try and give–the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote but we are going to try–give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re try–going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So, let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The aftermath.  In May, a poll taken by Reuters/Ipsos found that 61% of Republicans and 30% of all Americans agree with the statement, “The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.”  Because of the “rigged” election, a number of states have enacted voter laws which, depending on your point of view, have increased voting security or increased voter suppression.  Some of these laws empower state legislatures to review election outcomes.  For example, the new Georgia law removes the Secretary of State from the State Election Board and creates a review mechanism dominated by the state legislature.  Many of the reforms being enacted by the states follow the Georgia model and raise the ability of partisan legislatures to challenge election results.

Many observers have said that while the “big lie” and its aftermath threatened our democracy, the real takeaway is that the “guardrails of our democracy” held fast.  Elaine Kamark detailed the various major institutions of American democracy (Congress, judicial system, federalism, the press and the civil service) and found these were not weakened by Trump.  However, the real institution being assaulted by Trumpism is our election system and its tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one set of officeholders to the next.  Trump has continually called the 2020 election rigged and challenged the results.  The only reason he was unsuccessful was the fact that state officials like Brad Raffensperger, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Vice-President Pence stood up to him.  On the infamous day of January 6, 2021, six Republican Senators and 147 Republican members of Congress voted against certification of the election.  What would have happened if the GOP controlled one or both houses of Congress?

The only reason the “guardrails” of American democracy held was the courageous stands of a few people, mostly Republicans.  But this was a near miss.  Our institutions didn’t protect us; courageous people of impeccable integrity did.  The current trend to replace non-partisan election officials with partisan legislators threatens the future of our democracy.

Today is the five-year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlotteville, Virginia.  I watched the terrifying event on television, and it shocked me. Here were normal-looking white, college-age men marching through Charlottesville, Va. Chanting “Jews shall not replace us.” I am Jewish. My daughter and son-in-law attended the University of Virginia. Charlottesville has a special place in my heart. What brought us to this place where neo-Nazis were marching through an iconic city in Virginia shouting antisemitic slogans and what did those slogans mean?[i]

This was my first exposure to “The Great Replacement Theory.” This idea has its origins in French antisemitism, specifically in the writings of Jean Raspail and Renaud Camus. According to Wikipedia, “Camus (not to be confused with the Nobel Laureate Albert Camus) is a French novelist, conspiracy theorist and white nationalist, and the inventor of the “Great Replacement“, a far-right conspiracy theory that claims that a ‘global elite’ is colluding against the white population of Europe to replace them with non-European peoples.” Camus writes of “replacement elites” who are driving this process.

The important word here is “colluding.” It is a demographic fact that non-white populations are growing faster in Europe and North America than are white populations, although the exact numbers are in dispute. In Europe, in general, and in France, in particular, for “non-white” read “Muslim.” According to the Pew Research Center, Muslims made up 4.9% of Europe’s population in 2016 (and 8.8% of France’s population).  By 2050, that proportion could grow to 14.0%. Clearly, some people could see those numbers as threatening. But what’s important is not the influx of Muslim immigrants, caused largely by violence in Syria and other parts of the Middle East, but the idea that this result is part of a conscious plot.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “The great replacement narrative provides the central framework for the global white supremacist movement. The racist conspiracy says there is a systematic, global effort to replace white, European people with nonwhite, foreign populations. The ultimate goal of those responsible — Democrats, leftists, “multiculturalists” and, at times, Jews — is to reduce white political power and, ultimately, to eradicate the white race. The theory has motivated multiple terror attacks, including the 2018 attack at the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tree of Life Synagogue, the 2019 attacks at two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques and an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, and, most recently, an attack targeting Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.”

This conspiracy theory would have probably died in the dark corners of the French-language internet if it hadn’t been revived by Tucker Carlson. Let’s trace how the Great Replacement became mainstream in America and how it has been used to trigger mass shootings in Pittsburg where 11 congregants of a Jewish Temple were killed, Christchurch New Zealand where 51 people were killed in attacks on mosques, El Paso, Texas, where 23 people were killed in an attack on a Walmart, and in Buffalo, NY where 10 African Americans were shot in an attack on a grocery store. Each of the shooters had pieced together a manifesto citing that they were acting to protect the white race from replacement.

According to The National Immigration Forum, “In mid-September 2021, the U.S. media turned its attention to an increasing number of Haitian migrants seeking protection at the border in Del Rio, Texas. While most of the arriving migrants were either turned back into Mexico or deported to destitute conditions in Haiti, some Haitian families were allowed to stay in the U.S. and pursue asylum claims in immigration court. On Sept. 22, cable television host Tucker Carlson provided his own theory as to what was happening at the border. In a segment titled “Nothing About What’s Happening Is an Accident,” Carlson said that current U.S. border policy is designed to ‘change the racial mix of the country. … In political terms this policy is called the ‘great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.” Carlson concluded that President Biden’s policies with regard to the Haitian migrants have put the U.S. on a “suicidal” path.”

Note several pieces to Carlson’s syllogism here:

1. Non-white populations are growing faster than white populations. This is true. By 2045, white, non-Hispanics will become the minority in America according to the US Census Bureau (see chart below)
2. Democratic politicians are actively seeking to increase immigration from Latin America in order to gain future voters. Carlson argues that Democrats want open borders. “Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions. Let’s say that again for emphasis, because it is the secret to the entire immigration debate: Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions. In order to win and maintain power. Democrats plan to change the population of the country. They’re no longer trying to win you over with their program. They’re obviously not trying to improve your life. They don’t even really care about your vote anymore. Their goal is to make you irrelevant.”
3. Immigrants not only threaten our jobs, they also are dirty and bring litter (this was a major point of Carlson’s broadcasts of December 13, 2018, and several weeks following).

There is no evidence for any of this. Democrats do call for reforming a broken immigration system. These reforms would include:

• Finding a path to citizenship for Dreamers
• Eliminating the Draconian policies of the Trump Administration
• Having a logical and generous asylum system
• Linking work visas to labor force needs (particularly in high tech fields)
• Providing short-term work visas for seasonal workers like farm workers who are needed by American agriculture
• Unite families when possible

Carlson turned his anti-immigration stance into a campaign, and it certainly sounded like “replacement theory.”  In fact, a study by The New York Times found more than 400 episodes over five years in which Carlson generally espoused the slogan “they want to replace you.”  The “they” is apparently Democratic politicians; the “you” they want to replace are “white Americans,” and the replacers are immigrants, mostly from Latin America (and Haiti).

The results were predictable. A few disturbed people saw this theory as the reason their lives were not what they hoped they would be. The most recent example is Payton Brendon Gendron who drove more than 200 miles from his home in Conklin, N.Y. to a predominantly black part of Buffalo where authorities say he fired approximately 60 shots at shoppers and workers, killing ten of them.  His writings give some idea as to what drove him to kill black people. They included “statements that his motivation for the attack was to prevent Black people from replacing white people and eliminating the white race, and to inspire others to commit similar racially-motivated attacks.”

His manifesto begins: “If there’s one thing I want you to get from these writings, it’s that White birth rates must change. Everyday the White population becomes fewer in number. To maintain a population the people must achieve a birth rate that reaches replacement fertility levels, in the western world that is about 2.06 births per woman.” The “Manifesto” goes on for 180 pages.  He writes, “Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic ties, destroy our cultures, destroy our peoples. Long before low fertility levels ever could (sic). Thus, before we deal with the fertility rates, we must deal with both the invaders within our lands and the invaders that seek to enter our lands. We must crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil. It is not just a matter of our prosperity, but the very survival of our people.”

Much of his manifesto is in a Q&A format and shows him to be very self-aware. For example.

Q: Why did you decide to carry out the attack?

A: 1) To show to the replacers that as long as the White man lives, our land will never be theirs and they will never be safe from us; 2) To directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the replacers themselves; 3) To intimidate the replacers already living on our lands to emigrate back to their home countries; and so on. He claims he got his ideas from the internet and is following in the steps of Brenton Tarrant. Tarrant was the Australian white supremacist who killed 51 worshippers in a March 2019 attack on two mosques in New Zealand.

He never explains why, if immigrants are the enemy, he mostly killed native blacks (unlike Tarrant). He says of himself that he is a fascist, a racist, a white supremacist, and an antisemite. Much of his screed is centered on antisemitism. He is predominantly a separationist as the following Q and A shows.

Q: Did, or do you personally hate blacks?

A: A black man or woman living in their homelands? No.

A black man or woman choosing to invade our lands, live on our soil, live on government support and attack and replace our people? Yes, I dislike them. (Here he ignores the fact that most blacks in America are descendants of slaves and didn’t come here out of their own volition).

The Southern Poverty Law Center conducted a poll on extremism and found, “that the ideas underpinning the white nationalist “great replacement” narrative recently cited by an alleged white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo, New York, have become thoroughly mainstream on the political right. Nearly 7 in 10 Republicans surveyed agree to at least some extent that demographic changes in the United States are deliberately driven by liberal and progressive politicians attempting to gain political power by “replacing more conservative white voters.”

Summary.  The “Great Replacement Theory” has its origins in French antisemitism though going back to the late 18^th century.The main idea is that there are groups of people (Jews, primarily, but also other elites) colluding to replace white European culture as the predominant culture in Europe and the rest of the Western world.Tucker Carlson is the most prominent voice and face of the idea, although many internet sites espouse the same, or worse views. Some disturbed individuals in America and elsewhere have decided take the next step and resort to violence against the replacers.

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[i] The International Remembering the Holocaust Alliance insists that the correct spelling for “antisemitic” does not include a dash (“anti-semitic”) because such a spelling implies that there is something called “Semitism” “which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews”