It hasn’t been very well hidden but, in any case, it is now out in the open. The Trump administration espouses the Great Replacement Theory. This conspiracy-driven notion warns of a plot to replace white populations with nonwhite immigrants. It is a favourite of white supremacists.
Washington just released its new National Security Strategy, and it expressed a great deal of concern about Europe. Not its usual, and quite justified, concern about a lack of military preparedness, but about what it refers to as the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”
Not to worry, however, the Trump administration pledged that the United States would support like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent to prevent a future in which “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” America’s goal, it went on to say, should be “cultivating resistance … to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”
By “non-European” we can confidently assume they mean non-white and non-Christian. And by “current trajectory” they mean Trump’s favourite bugbear, immigration. This echoes Trump’s campaign against immigrants in the U.S.—at least black and brown, and Muslim, immigrants—in accordance with the Great Replacement Theory.
The administration feels good about its chances of converting Europeans to its cause, saying “The growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Some of Europe’s far-right parties expressed their appreciation for the support. Hermann Tertsch of Spain’s Vox party, said, “All these things are our message, our diagnosis, so we’re happy … It’s a new era.”
American concern about the sanctity of white populations goes back to the beginning, back to its founding fathers. Even as they declared “All men are created equal,” they decided to retain slavery, the greatest of inequalities.
There were a couple of reasons. One, the wealth of many of them depended on the slave system, and they weren’t about to impoverish themselves. And then there was miscegenation. They weren’t too concerned about white men and black women. Indeed, plantation owners took full advantage of the power imbalance—there’s a reason so many Black Americans are brown-skinned. But black men and white women they couldn’t abide. Race was the country’s nemesis from day one.
Eventually they fought one of the world’s most destructive civil wars to end slavery, but the racial fears and prejudices continued, including a terror-enforced system of segregation in much of the country. Indeed even a form of slavery persisted with Southern landowners exploiting a corrupt justice system for cheap labour.
After the Second World War, civil rights eventually won the day and the worst practices of discrimination were overcome. But racial chauvinism persists.
The Americans are not alone. Tribalism, or nationalism to use the political term, is rampant in the Western world. This the National Security Strategy is recognizing when it states that the U.S. should be “cultivating resistance” across Europe by supporting political parties that oppose immigration and promote nationalism. They are expressing their racial anxieties in the form of the Great Replacement Theory, and taking it international.
Not all that long ago we Albertans were treated to speeches by the American rabble-rouser Tucker Carlson who educated us, among other things, about how our MAID program was “genocide,” used by the federal government to kill native-born Canadians in order to replace them with immigrants. In Calgary he had an enthusiastic standing room only crowd of 4,000 and in Edmonton was introduced by our premier.
Ironically, for an outfit that wants to preserve Western civilization, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to quite grasp what it’s is all about. For example, they are busily corrupting the U.S. Department of Justice from a neutral enforcer of laws and administrator of justice into a personal instrument for pursing Trump’s enemies. They are trashing two hallmarks of the best of Western civilization, the rule of law and neutral civil services, in one assault.
They show contempt for democracy and human rights, gifts of the Enlightenment. And as for science, the crown of Western civilization, Trump calls global warming a fraud and appoints a science-denying flake as his secretary of health.
And where’s the Christianity, about which they express such concern? Christian love is not much in evidence among the Trump crowd. At the moment the president and his chief gunslinger, Secretary of “War” Pete Hesgeth, are amusing themselves by blowing up boatloads of people, a display of barbarism shocking even for this administration.
If the Trump regime is representative of the state of Western civilization, it is indeed in steep decline. But they aren’t and it isn’t. Most of the West, even most of the U.S., is as civilized as it has ever been. And if it has a shade darker skin tone, well, expanding the gene pool is generally good for the herd. The barbarians may have taken Washington, but elsewhere Western civilization is alive and well.