White replacement theory is fascism's latest political tactic

Since Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, mass murders in the name of white replacement theory have become prevalent. Many of these killers, including Breivik; Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter; and Payton Gendron, the suspect in the massacre in Buffalo, New York, are self-identified as fascists.

It's not surprising that this resurgence of WRT comes as fascist political tactics — banning books and viewpoints associated with the political left, demonizing and then imprisoning members of the political and minority groups, creating tiers of citizenship between members of the dominant racial group and destroying democratic processes — are on the rise. WRT and its ideological predecessors have been central to fascist movements in Europe, Asia, the United States and elsewhere.

Today we're seeing an emergent wave of new right-wing populist leaders throughout the world. And as with fascist leaders of the past, much of their political power is derived from questioning reality; endorsing myth, rage and paranoia; and promoting lies. In this context, WRT is increasingly normalized. From Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, these fascist ideas are shared at the highest level of so-called illiberal politics.

WRT, for instance, is central to Orbán's explicit governing ideologies and also to the messages of powerful public figures such as Fox's Tucker Carlson. Just days before addressing the Conservative Political Action Committee, which chose to convene in Budapest, Hungary's capital, Orbán placed WRT at the center of state ideology, declaring: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations — migrants.”

To normalize something is to legitimate it, to make it a topic of legitimate public disagreement. These major figures have normalized WRT. The distortion of truth in the name of promoting an alternate reality is a phenomenon common in fascist history.

In “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler wrote: “This pestilential adulteration of the blood, which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is being systematically practiced by the Jew today. Systematically these black parasites in our national body corrupt our innocent blond-haired girls and thus destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world.”

Democracy is essentially a system based around two values — freedom and equality. Fascists promoted the idea of replacement as a way of arguing that democracy and its ideals were incompatible with the nation.

If enemies are people who either look, think or behave differently and their mere existence poses a threat to the imagined homogeneity of the nation, it is not surprising that the most radicalized believer would carry out mass murders, as has happened in the United States, Europe and New Zealand, and pogroms as in India.

And, of course, we see it in Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ideas of replacement are central to Russian extremist, nationalist, antisemitic and fascist traditions. They motivate the nature of its attack in Ukraine, such as wiping out Ukrainian identity culturally and physically.

The link between WRT and fascism is not accidental. WRT is a relatively recent label for old fascism. In terms of propaganda, it is a rebranding of the same thing, namely long-standing fascist paranoias and lies about invasion and racial and political replacement. WRT's logic justifies mass violence. When it is normalized, it poses an existential threat to democracy and its ideals. It targets the very idea of common humanity that underlies them.

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University. His most recent book is “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” Federico Finchelstein is a professor of history at the New School. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Fascist Mythologies.” © 2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.