Those who subscribe to the theory — many of them White conservatives — believe a secret group of elites are using non-White immigrants and Black people to intermarry with and “outbreed” White people “until they no longer exist.”
“Over the past days … (replacement theory) has, for very good reason, been widely condemned,” Mounk says. “But the uncomfortable truth is that a less conspiratorial cousin of it has long been embraced in mainstream public discourse. In fact, it is one of the few things that both liberals and conservatives, both Democrats and Republicans, can now agree on.”
Some progressives may cheer such a projection. But Mounk calls this belief the “most dangerous idea in American politics.”
He says it promotes a dystopian future in which White Americans and people of color are reduced to members of “mutually hostile tribes,” politicians have little incentive to reach beyond their base, and many Whites panic over the fear of being permanently sidelined.
Even so, Mounk, who describes his political values as “left of center,” offers an optimistic vision of America’s future in his new book. He explains why diverse democracies — countries with a multitude of racial and ethnic groups — sometimes fail, and how the US can succeed.
Drawing on lessons from social psychology and countries as diverse as Lebanon and India, Mounk arrives at a surprising conclusion: A genuine, diverse democracy in the US, where all groups are treated fairly, is still a realistic goal.
“It is far too early to resign ourselves to a vision of the future in which most people will still eye anyone who has a different religion or skin color suspiciously; in which members of different identity groups have little contact with one another in their family lives; in which we all choose to emphasize the differences that divide us rather than the commonalities that could unite us,” Mounk writes in “The Great Experiment.”
This issue is not abstract to Mounk. He was born into a Jewish family in Germany that was victimized by the same forces of hate that have destroyed many democracies.
Mounk, an authority on the rise of populism, recently spoke to CNN. His answers were edited for clarity and brevity.
You describe yourself as unfashionably optimistic. Why is that optimism so important when it comes to building a democracy?
If you look at the history of deeply diverse societies, they very often fall apart in violent ways or oppress minority groups within them in the most terrible manner. When you look at social psychology, you see how easy people find it to form groups and discriminate in favor of the in-group versus the out-group. So what we’re trying to do here is really very hard, and we’ve often failed throughout American history.
But you can look at the current state of our society, and at the changes over the last few decades and recognize that there is a lot which justifies a hard-won optimism. Our country is less segregated and less racist than it used to be. Immigrants from all over the world are integrating very well and making a lot of socioeconomic progress.
When you look away from Washington in the heart of our society, we are actually cooperating with each other across ethnic and religious boundaries much more than we used to. None of that should make us complacent, but it should give us confidence that we can build a better society. Without that confidence, the likelihood of failure is going to be much higher.
You say Americans are cooperating more across these boundaries that we used to. What’s your evidence for that?
I start at the most stark level. As recently as three or four decades ago, a majority of Americans thought interracial marriage was immoral, and that it was immoral for Black and White people to have children together. Today that number is down to the single digits because of real psychological changes in our society and the number of interracial newborns has gone up.
Even at the most intimate level, Americans are…
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