The Not-So-Great Replacement Theory, Revisited

The success of Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral primary in New York City has predictably set off the worst possible takes from the worst possible people. And while I'm generally loathe to drag out any posts from the dilapidated Nazi bar that was once known as Twitter, this pairing deserves special attention:

That's Matt Walsh, a right-wing grifter, amplifying a tweet from Stephen Miller, the white nationalist who's apparently running the Trump White House in all but name these days.

They're insisting, as white nationalists have been insisting with increasing intensity in recent years, that the racist "great replacement" conspiracy theory – the argument that Democrats are deliberately bringing in non-white immigrants in order to push aside and politically "replace" the native white population – is not a conspiracy theory at all.

I've written about the long history of this racist paranoia before, including this CAMPAIGN TRAILS piece where I detailed how a century ago white supremacists spread these exact same lies, fueling the rise of the Klan at home and the spread of Nazism abroad.

I think that piece holds up in general, but there are two parts I want to underline today.

First and foremost, we should remember that the white nationalists complaining about the changing demographics of New York City in particular are just retracing the exact same arguments that a prior generation of white nationalists made about that exact same place: New York City.

Madison Grant, one of the most prominent nativist authors in the early 20th century, boasted of a lineage that traced back – on his father's side and his mother's as well – to the original European settlers of the American colonies. Born and raised in New York, he claimed the city and the country as his birthright and complained, endlessly, about how both were being corrupted by immigrants who came after the 1600s.

Here's a key passage from his best-selling book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916):

As we can see, the complaint of Stephen Miller, Matt Walsh and others – the charge that there's suddenly been a new "invasion" of immigrants that has recently changed New York City from its old, settled, perfectly acceptable population to a new, dangerous one made up of immigrants – falls apart at the slightest look.

First and foremost, we can see that this is nothing new. These exact same claims were being made a century ago, about the exact same city, with only the identities of the "immigrant horde" changing. The racist panic has been a constant.

But, second, note who Madison Grant is complaining about there – Jews from Eastern Europe – and remember that, as historian Seth Cotlar has repeatedly documented on Bluesky, Stephen Miller's own ancestors were precisely the immigrants that a white nationalist like Madison Grant was complaining about.

And if we roll the clock back another generation, back to the Civil War era when Madison Grant was born, we could see the exact same complaints being made by white nationalists in America about a different "immigrant invasion" that was taking over New York City in the 1860s – the Irish.

If you've seen Gangs of New York you're already familiar with the broad arc, but Irish immigrants were reviled by nativists who claimed – in the case of the corrupt Tammany Hall era, with some justification – that corrupt politicians were welcoming these new arrivals right of the boat, bribing them to vote in elections and reaping the political profit.

Again, take a second to think about who's being attacked as the unwelcome immigrant here and who's making the attacks today.

Matt Walsh insists that these new immigrants are pushing deserving native-born white Americans aside, but a century and a half ago, the last name "Walsh" would've been enough to put his own ancestors in the crosshairs of critics like him.

The cartoon I put at the top of this piece speaks to this dynamic. "Looking Backward" is a classic political cartoon from the great Joseph Keppler, first published in the popular magazine Puck back in 1893.

Keppler, too, was an immigrant. His Austrian father had immigrated to America in the 1840s, back when German and Austrian immigrants were still considered "invaders" themselves, but by the time he followed his father over here after the Civil War, much of that sentiment had died down (for a bit). But Keppler recognized that the old animosities against the Germans and then the Irish were in his days being turned against Italians, Poles, Greeks and Eastern European Jews, with many "assimilated" German and Irish immigrants turning from the targets of such attacks to the perpetuators of them.

It's a vicious cycle, and one we're still living with today. And while I agree that the descendants of once-reviled immigrant groups like Matt Walsh and Stephen Miller and, yes, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz too, should be ashamed of pulling up the ladder behind them, I also take a little bit of odd comfort in their hypocrisy.

There's no great proof of the elasticity of the American identity than the fact that the descendants of immigrants who were Irish, or Eastern European Jews, or Cubans – immigrants whose very arrival was decried as a sign of America's imminent collapse – have wormed their way into the heart of nativist politics to the point that they can blithely pretend that they have belonged here all along and now they get to judge who should and shouldn't belong.

Their prominence proves that the old attacks on their ancestors were completely wrong, and their new attacks will likewise fade into the dustbin of history too.