This diary is a work in progress & I am hoping that Daily Kos readers can help me flesh out some of these ideas into a working strategy to steal a major issue from the GOP.
I know some people who are nice enough folk except for the fears that drive them to believe in delusional B.S. promoted by the likes of Tucker Carlson & other evil people. They aren’t entirely stupid because, like every other conspiracy theory, there is always a grain of truth to make the lies more believable. Such is the case with “The Great Replacement theory.” These aren’t evil people, they are fearful people (which sadly often motivates people to do evil)
Here’s the seed of truth behind the conspiracy. Many people who have power & capital have always striven to reduce the cost of labor. There’s a case to be made that the demise of feudalism was heavily influenced by the bubonic plague making labor scarcer & therefore more valuable. Another argument that can be made is that the Irish potato famine influenced the demise of slavery in America because Irish labor became cheaper than maintaining slaves. After all, as dehumanizing & evil as was the institution of slavery, the slaves, even if being treated as equivalent to farm animals, still required a certain level of care. Something that was not required for Irish workers. Simplistically put, businessmen came to realize that it was cheaper to lease labor than to own it. If a slave died, the owner lost valuable property. If an Irish worker died, you just hired another one. The treatment of workers in the Gilded Age (such as depicted by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle”) was demonstrative of the low value placed on the lives of laborers.
The reforms of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive movement helped to usher in the modern movement to provide workers with some level of protection on the job. Ever since then, greedy capitalists have striven to undo these Progressive reforms & return us to the world of Upton Sinclair & Charles Dickens. In the last several decades, starting with Reagan’s evisceration of the labor movement, those greedy capitalists have worked ceaselessly to weaken regulations protecting workers & the general population. They have exported many manufacturing jobs overseas where weak regulations allow for the abuses of labor in countries beyond America’s shores & modern transportation has allowed for the cost of importation of those goods to undercut domestic production. However, they would like to institute the same types freedom to abuse labor in America. In essence, there has always existed some mode of “The Great Replacement theory,” which is more about getting the cheapest labor rather than some form of ethnic cleansing as depicted by the conspiracy mongers.
In modern times, the hiring of illegal immigrants is mostly attractive to businesspeople because they do no have to pay for the protections required for American legal laborers & the “illegals” have no legal recourse to protect them from abuse. I recently heard a discussion of illegal immigrants on NPR suggesting that many of the “illegals” have jobs waiting for them when they arrive. That suggests that businesspeople are recruiting “illegals” to come here as “replacements” for legal workers.
Thus, clearly there is something like a movement to “replace” American workers. However, it has little to do with Jews & is primarily about the same sort of greed that has always valued capital over labor in society. I’m pretty confident (perhaps research could provide proof?) that many, if not most, of the people behind the movement to undermine labor protections are donors to Republican causes. This is also a driving force behind the refusal of Republican’s to support any sort of legitimate immigration reform that would facilitate work permits for foreign workers.
So here is how we can make “The Great Replacement theory” work for Democrats. Ideally, produce lists of Republican supporters who are hiring “illegals.” Then we need to make it clear that this isn’t about ethnicity, it’s about greed. As Jon Stewart illustrates beautifully:
https://youtu.be/i8PkAmYUPpg?si=l0tcTv9vB7X2pPQj
These people would happily employ Americans to do many of these jobs so long as they could treat Americans as badly as they treat the foreign workers. We need to drive home this truth in the media sphere – it isn’t about race, it’s about greed & the ability to treat working class men & women as badly as they treat workers in undeveloped countries. We have all seen how the modern GOP doesn’t want to return to pre “New Deal” conditions so much as they want to return to Gilded Age conditions. The Gilded Age was a time when people worked 12 hour days with no benefits & 90% of the American population lived from paycheck to paycheck or worse. That is what is truly at stake in the 2024 election & we need to make that clear to the American electorate.
These ideas are still a bit rough but let’s start a conversation about how we can make it clear that voting for democrats will provide for greater protection for workers (foreign & domestic) & American jobs.