The Border

[Angrboda]

There really is a "great replacement" — but it's not what Tucker Carlson says it is

Very likely the reader is wearily familiar with one of the memes that American right-wingers endlessly repeat. It's called the "great replacement": the claim that shadowy but apparently omnipotent elites are deliberately replacing the old stock (meaning white) American population with immigrants from predominantly non-white or non-Christian countries.

The notion had its beginnings decades ago in the mental swamps of Southern segregationist politicians and has been recycled in various iterations through white supremacist groups. Donald Trump's election and the popularization of the phrase (in more or less coded language) by professional jackasses like Tucker Carlson made it into another of the Republican base's innumerable slogans.   

The idea is bunk, of course, and easily understood as yet another of the many myths designed to play into right-wingers' persecution complex. But it is also possible to understand it as a folk-psychological projection of something that is indeed happening in the strongly Republican regions of the country inhabited by what Sarah Palin called "real Americans." It's not so much the great replacement as the great die-off, and Republicans are both its chief promoters and its principal victims.

The phenomenon first received attention in 2015, thanks to a paper by Anne Case and Nobel Prize laureate Angus Deaton. They detailed first the stagnation and then the absolute decline in life expectancy among non-Hispanic white populations, particularly in white rural areas of the U.S. They charted a significant rise in "deaths of despair" like suicide or drugs (particularly synthetic opioids) or obesity-related illness among the white working class. 

This phenomenon cannot entirely be explained by the relative economic disadvantage of those who live in rural areas as compared to cities. Black and Hispanic populations, whether rural or urban, also experience economic disadvantage, but rates of midlife mortality among those groups continue to decline significantly, while they keep rising among white people with no college education. 

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With the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, the longevity disparity increased between regions in the United States, a gap that also correlates strongly with partisan political leanings. Statistical research has consistently shown higher COVID death rates in Republican jurisdictions than in Democratic ones and that gap increased after the rollout of COVID vaccines. A study by Lancet Regional Health-Americas found that the more conservative the voting records of members of Congress and state legislators were in a district, the higher the rate of age-adjusted COVID mortality was, even after compensating for race, education, income and vaccination rates.

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This year, Scientific American summarized the result of all these factors: a striking differential in overall death rates in Republican versus Democratic counties, a gap that has been widening for 20 years and shows no sign of leveling out. The article suggests that policy choices are a factor.

It is easy enough to rationalize this disparity by pointing to external factors, such as poorer quality and less available health care in the rural communities where Republicans are more likely to live, along with less developed infrastructure (such as roads) in general. But here as well, those conditions at least partly result from decades of political choices made by Republican voters in electing state and local officials. 

During the pandemic, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis prohibited localities from implementing masking and social distancing ordinances. The fact that DeSantis was overwhelmingly re-elected this year demonstrates that a majority of his state's voters approved of his policy and believed the resulting additional deaths were "worth it" (whatever "it" is"). 

Social scientists are likely to shy away from drawing admonitory conclusions about behaviors that link to partisan values. But there is enough evidence to infer that the blue-red gap in the death rate is determined mostly by political attitudes, not external economic factors.