Analysis | Do a Third of Americans Truly Believe Replacement Theory?

By Faye Flam | Bloomberg,

After last weekend’s massacre in Buffalo, NY, news headlines announced that a third of Americans and half of Republicans subscribe to some part of replacement theory, a racist idea believed by the alleged shooter. Those headlines were based on a survey by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. A closer look at the data show those headlines were exaggerated, but even so there is something seriously wrong in this country. We’re being subjected to dangerous forms of political manipulation.

So-called replacement theory holds that a shadowy cabal is engineering an influx of immigrants for political gain — to “replace” conservative White voters with liberal-leaning minorities who will then have some harmful effect on American culture. 

To be clear, a third of Americans don’t subscribe to this entire theory. In fact, the part of replacement theory that a third of Americans agreed with in surveys had very little to do with their views of immigrants. They were asked if they believe that politicians want to increase immigration for political gain. It’s not conspiratorial to be cynical about politicians’ motives — I’ve questioned whether conservative politicians really care as deeply for the unborn as they claim. 

In these kinds of surveys, people answer questions quickly and may react to some small piece of the bigger picture, said James Shanahan, dean of media studies at Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media. Depending on how things are phrased, surveys and polls can leave the impression that an alarming number of people are saying they believe almost anything — even flat earth theory — he told me. 

Similar surveys after Jan. 6, 2021 suggested that millions of Americans and as many as half of Republicans subscribed to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which was a big factor driving the violent insurrection. That, too, was a conspiracy theory involving a controlling elite, in that case for the aim of running a child sex trafficking network. 

In a piece for the Conversation, Shanahan analyzed claims about the popularity of QAnon and found that polls taken before it became major headline news showed most Americans didn’t know what it was, and only 2% to 3% had a favorable attitude toward it. Other surveys have shown that only about 2-3% of people have both heard of QAnon and believe in its tenets, but even then it’s hard to distinguish devoted believers from those who are just choosing answers that reflect how they feel at the time, wrote Shanahan in his piece. “Surveys cannot replace the real forensic work that is needed to know how many QAnon ‘members’ there really are.”

That may be the case for replacement theory as well. On the reassuring side, 90% of Americans told the pollsters that increasing diversity was good for us. At the same time, 29% thought immigrants would decrease the political power of native-born Americans — though it wasn’t clear they all considered this a bad thing.

What was revealing about the AP-NORC survey was that it included a test of conspiracy-theory thinking. Scores on that test were correlated with other parts of replacement theory, including a fear that immigrants would have a deleterious effect on the country, and that immigration policy was being controlled by factions unknown to the electorate. That’s where things start to veer into the dangerous, antisocial views of the shooter in Buffalo. 

Politicians have been gaining favor by stoking fear of outsiders for centuries, said Mirta Galesic, a psychologist at the Santa Fe Institute who has studied the way beliefs fit together into narratives and how hate speech travels around the web. For academic purposes, she subscribes to Donald Trump’s mailing list and says there’s a common paranoid narrative that the other side is out to get you. 

Indiana’s Shanahan reminded me of an famous essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which appeared in 1964 in Harpers. It details a long tradition of politicians demonizing various groups for centuries — seeding conspiracy theories that were anti-illuminati, anti-mason, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. 

It’s the kind of rhetoric that provides fertile ground for susceptible people to get drawn into antisocial conspiracy theories — ones centered around other ethnic or religious groups plotting against them. (It’s not clear whether believers in UFO coverups or a faked moon landing pose the same kind of danger to society.)

Conspiracy theories might sound outrageous, but they have deep appeal for many. “There’s a protagonist and a villain, everything has a cause and they’re all connected,” said Indiana’s Shanahan. “They are never a boring story.” And they tie together loose ends in the same way as a compelling novel or movie.

In 2021, I looked into QAnon for this column, and learned that this weird matrix of beliefs gives people a satisfying sense that they’ve solved a mystery by connecting many dots. People love the feeling of thinking they’ve arrived at an answer to a question themselves, and QAnon was set up with “drops” of clues designed to lead believers to certain answers.

The paranoid style is something that might help politicians get ahead, but it doesn’t help people in either political party. It’s time for voters to stop tolerating it. We have freedom of speech but we’re also free to choose when to stop listening.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.

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