Perhaps I’m flattering myself or my country. But the language and mindset of great replacement and of race armies overrunning a primarily white, Christian country seems much more widespread, entrenched and pervasive across a wider swath of the political spectrum in the United Kingdom than it is here in the United States. I don’t really have an argument here or a even a question here. And this may seem like quite a lot to say given that the federal government here in the U.S. fairly openly propagandizes with white nationalist imagery and is more than a year into a campaign of mass deportation. But it is still my perception based on reading the language of statements from people across the political spectrum in the UK, the reaction to pogrom-like incidents in the UK and so forth.
It is also why I think there’s a majority negative response when Americans see the reality of “mass deportation” as opposed to intentionally vague statements about deporting undocumented violent criminals and the like — something that is basically impossible to oppose and has been U.S. policy under every administration for decades.
To the extent this is true, and my ability to compare these things in a systematic way is of course limited, I assume it is rooted in the fact that the U.S., for all its problems, for all its history of recurrent episodes of nativism and xenophobia, has experience with pluralism fairly deep in its currently and civic DNA. I also wonder the extent to which these differences can’t escape the history of colonialism — and this of course applies just as much to France. To a significant degree, mass migration into these countries is migration from former colonies, formerly subjugated peoples. And that has to shape societal responses in some basic way.
