Ever since 6 January 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol, pundits have busily questioned who exactly were the people who engineered what many consider to be one of the darkest moments in US political history. The photos of the mob offered little clarity: one man wore horns and animal fur, others wore militia uniforms; still others looked as if they’d breezed in off the streets. Speculation tended to take the place of hard data.
University of Chicago researchers have now given a clearer view of the profile of participants, and it complicates traditional assumptions of the nature and make-up of far-right movements. They were largely middle-class, and included doctors, CEOs and other white-collar professionals. In other words, they came from the mainstream of US society, not from an aggrieved economic fringe.
The research, published in Foreign Policy magazine in January, also shows that for all the diversity of backgrounds, one anxiety united most of those present: that of an ascendent non-white majority. More than half of the 716 people arrested or charged for the insurrection, the report said, “come from counties [in the US] where the white share of the population is declining fastest”.
Their fears align with a conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement, popularised a decade ago by Renaud Camus. Camus was a former darling of the French left, a prolific gay writer whose earlier work was feted by Allen Ginsberg, Roland Barthes and others, but who, by the late 1990s, had come to see evidence of “ethnic and civilisational substitution” underway in western countries. One day, in rural southern France, he saw the “replacement” materialise before him. “You would go to a fountain, six or seven centuries old, and there were all these North African women with veils!” he told the New Yorker in 2017.
His ideas already had an audience in France – far-right leader Marine Le Pen had asked in 2011: “How could we be satisfied to see our adversaries continue their work of moral and economic ruin of the country, to let it be taken over by an organised replacement of our population?” But they were quickly taken up by white supremacists elsewhere who saw demographic shifts in the US and Europe as proof of a catastrophic upending of supposedly age-old hierarchies. Trump played heavily into this fear with his so-called “Muslim ban” (Camus believes that white Europeans are under particular threat from Muslims).
The urge to protect a national white majority has led to other regressive ideas. Alain de Benoist, who founded the New Right in France in the 1960s, is credited with birthing the identitarian movement via his promotion of an isolationist interpretation of diversity – that in order for supposedly discrete cultures to not become homogenised into non-existence, French people should stay in one country, Algerians in another, and so on. Identitarianism has come to be seen as the acceptable face of white supremacy, not just in France, but in the UK, the US and elsewhere.
The precise grip that Great Replacement theory holds on American voters isn’t clear. We do know that much support for Trump was propelled by powerful fears, imagined or not, that the United States many knew is disappearing. This evidently hasn’t gone away: one US poll in January put support for Trump at 51 per cent (most polls however put it between 30 and 45 per cent). If he does run for office in 2024, he’ll surely play to those fears once more.
Warnings of a “white genocide”, the supposed end-result of the Great Replacement, are of course preposterous. Yet three-quarters of the 6 January 2021 insurrectionists believed that the Democratic Party is playing a central role in the “replacement” of white Americans. One might pass them off as an extreme interest group, but as the latest research shows, the profile of radical political movements in the US is changing, as it is elsewhere, and some previously fringe ideas are no longer so fringe.
This piece is from the Witness section of our New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
