Who Would Be Replaced?

As a conspiracy theory, the Great Replacement is no more credible than the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You could even argue that the latter's story of an insidious menace (an ambivalent metaphor for either communism or McCarthyism in the original 1956 film) is a lot more credible and pertinent in its portrayal of an affectless society. But it is the former that is salient today. With this week's announcement by Eric Zemmour that he is to run for the French Presidency, the idea that France is under threat of being swamped by an alien culture has now achieved respectability among conservative politicians, a fact emphasised by the continuing lurch of les Républicains to the right. That Éric Ciotti wants a referendum "to stop mass immigration" and set up "a French Guantánamo bay" isn't in itself evidence of this lurch. Those are positions that would be supported by the current British Home Secretary and many centre-right politicians across Europe. But the renewed prominence of the big idea - first articulated by Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement - and its deliberate yoking to the bogey of political correctness, certainly is. 

In effect, the politics of the Front National have been absorbed into the wider conservative worldview, but it looks like Marine Le Pen will not gain from this. That she has invested so much in the rebranding of her toxic party is not the least of the ironies here. That the chief beneficiary may well be a rightwing Jewish media intellectuel, a combination that would have infuriated Le Pen's father, is perhaps the greatest irony of all. In many ways Zemmour is a perfect example of the politico-media elite's ability to adapt, something we saw with the similar trajectory of Nigel Farage in the UK. That adaptation arises from both cynicsm and an innate sympathy, which was all too obvious in much of this week's coverage, despite the pearl-clutching by various liberal media types. The Spectator's already notorious interview with Zemmour was short and cursory: little more than a snatched conversation in which he rehearsed his standard lines. The way that this was filled out by the journalist's own musings was a classic case of projection. The magazine has little interest in French politics beyond its touch-points with the UK, with the notable exception of that French strain of Islamophobia and its delicious combination with the "war on woke".

Zemmour, with helpful prompting, makes this explicit: "This wokeness, he argues, is a kind of Trojan horse for the Islamification of formerly Christian nations. ‘It is by destroying our cultures, our history, that they make a clean sweep of all that and allow a foreign culture, history and civilisation to come and replace it.’" The metaphor suggests that wokeness is a covert plot, which distracts us from the non sequitur that imagines delicacy over pronouns is somehow advancing the cause of the Taliban. The idea that Islam might replace (or, shudder, "cancel") the canon of Western civilisation reflects a profound ignorance of Islamic culture, not least its role in preserving much of Greek and Roman art and science and its borrowings from both Judaism and Christianity. If there is to be a defining "clash of civilisations", this would clearly be between the West and the Far East, specifically China. But any objective analysis would admit that the West has already won that particular battle, hence China's embrace first of communism and then of capitalism, albeit with "Chinese characteristics", a formulation that is obviously defensive. So if Western civilisation is globally hegemonic, what is the Great Replacement conspiracy theory really about?

One insight is provided by the nihilistic literature of Michel Houellebecq. His novel Submission, which was partly-inspired by the fuss that Camus' earlier work of non-fiction had stirred, is obviously a fantasy, hence the importance that access to nubile women (a perennial concern of the writer) plays in the narrative. But it does highlight two themes that inform the theory of replacement: the decadence of the West and the connivance of self-interested elites. Since the book was published in 2015, there have been a number of seismic political shocks, notably Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, that have revived the liberal theory of populism. This diagnoses a pathology of political weakness and the vicious nature of the people, with their propensity for vulgar xenophobia and derision of meritocracy. Central to this theory is the idea that populists set the people against a notional and misrepresented elite. But this is a self-serving trope that helps to divert attention away from actual elites, something that was obvious in the pushback against the left in the US and UK (the equivalence of anticapitalism with anitsemitism was a frank, if inadvertant, admission of this). 

In other words, the great replacement theory centres on the elite and their decision to either resist or collaborate in the face of an external threat. This has obvious resonance in France, not only in respect of the Second World War but in the anti-totalitarian discourse of the 1970s and 80s. Arguably, it originates in the Dreyfus affair, which not coincidentally marked the emergence of the intellectual as a key figure in the drama of French politics. That the inheritors of the Gaullist tradition are now embracing a worldview previously limited to the inheritors of the Vichy tradition is remarkable, but what's perhaps more troubling is the claim that this is being driven by thinkers (Ciotti talks of Zemmour's "lucid analysis") rather than rabble-rousers. That le grand remplacement has been such a pronounced feature of French culture in recent years is perhaps less to do with the country's Muslim population and continuing interference in North Africa and more to do with the structural decline of the intellectual, a topic covered by Shlomo Sand's book The End of the French Intellectual, which includes biting critiques of Houellebecq and Zemmour.

Despite the best efforts of David Goodhart and Douglas Murray, there hasn't been the same embrace of the great replacement theory in Britain's salons. This probably owes as much to the different role of "thinkers" in the production and management of symbolic and cultural capital in this country as it does to any innate tolerance or scepticism. While national identity has been an acutely divisive issue for the French since the Revolution, the British preference has generally been to avoid the topic through strategic distractions such as empire and monarchy. With those having lost much of their charm recently (thanks, Wokeness!), and with the running sore of Scottish independence prompting a revival of English chauvinism, it looks like we may be heading in a similar direction, but I doubt this will be led by public intellectuals, marginal cases like Richard Dawkins' militant atheism aside. As recent cases such as the risible "martyrdom" of Kathleen Stock suggest, and as the continuing prominence of the ridiculous Jordan Petersen attests, the intellectual in Britain and North America is a cat's paw of the media rather than an original thinker, and as likely to be triviliased as promoted as a champion of free speech.

As Sand puts it, in the French context of a shift from Bourdieu and Foucault to Finkielkraut and Zemmour, "The time when intellectuals first acquired prestige and authority in the field of creation and research, only then appearing in the public sphere, belongs to a bygone past. The directors of the mainstream media can nowadays do without public figures with their own charismatic authority, whom they see as uncontrollable. They are satisfied with manufacturing their own intellectuals, in other words 'clerks' who refrain from direct criticism of today's real ruling elites, who know perfectly well where power really lies, and are always ready to accuse and crucify the misérables." In Britain, the anti-intellectualism of the establishment has always meant a slighter role for the thinker, but even here there has been a notable structural decline from the days when Bryan Magee could present a BBC series on philosophy or Stuart Hall on Caribbean history. Instead we now have a production line in which newspaper columnists and minor academics are promoted to radio and TV prominence purely on the basis of their reliably provocative but fundamentally pro-establishment views.

It isn't Christian or Western civilisation that faces replacement so much as the relative privilege of particular groups within society, and it is "wokeness" - the challenging of established privilege - that drives this fear rather than the prospect of mass conversion. Islamophobia is not simply the latest iteration of the demonisation of the "Other" and the construction of a narrow national identity. It also serves to buttress the elite defence of privilege through appeals to popular bigotry: we must defend the right of middle-aged men to patronise and insult whoever they want or else accept sharia law. But this is less to do with the petit-bourgeois defence of marginal economic status that has traditionally fuelled the political right and more to do with a particular age cohort for whom the advances of multiculturalism and feminism have represented the decline of traditional social hierarchies, hence the disproportionate prominence of these ideas in a media industry dominated by the male, pale and stale. 

The perversity of this is the way that an essentially reactionary politics has been transformed into a condemenation of Islam as a reactionary religion, which has allowed the right to adopt not only the language of the Enlightenment and secularism but of progressivism more generally, leading to a striking continuity between the extreme right and many soi-disant liberals. A particular characteristic of this continuity is the way that an ardent philosemitism, manifested in a reductive image of Israel, has become the corollary of Islamophobia. While antisemitism remains as strong as ever on the right (and not just the far-right), it has become more nuanced in its expression. The historic role of the Jew as the ultimate outsider and threat to national integrity has been obscured by the recent coinage of "Judeo-Christian civilisation": a historically illiterate notion that serves to represent Israel as an outpost of Western values. This may not be entirely effective in legitimising settler colonialism, but it is effective in persuading European and American liberals that they should support the status quo. And it is the status quo, and all that this entails in terms of privilege and exclusion, that lies behind the fantasy of the great replacement.