July 26, 2022 - 10:30am

Do you believe that life begins at conception? In that case, to paraphrase a famous SNL sketch, you might be a racist.

That, at least, is the thesis of an article at FiveThirtyEight called “How the Fight to Ban Abortion Is Rooted In The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory”, a reference to the far-Right theory (examined in this magazine by Eric Kaufmann) that Western elites are intentionally using immigration to replace white natives with more politically pliable minorities. 

How could the American anti-abortion movement, which began in earnest in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, be “rooted” in a theory first articulated by a French intellectual in 2010? The authors identify a handful of modern pro-lifers concerned with the white birth rate, point to the nativist and eugenicist sympathies of certain historical anti-abortion campaigners, and cite an expert from something called the “Institute on Male Supremacism” who says that 19th-century abortion restrictions were a product of Anglo-Saxon demographic panic. There’s also something about the Buffalo shooting. The conclusion is that the “anti-abortion movement, at its core, has always been about upholding white supremacy.”

Well, how about that? Never mind that the most reliable predictor of pro-life sympathies in America is religiosity, such that even black Christians, though more pro-choice than white Catholics and Evangelicals, are significantly more opposed to abortion than the religiously unaffiliated. Or that foreign-born Hispanics are more opposed to abortion than those born in the United States, which would be odd for a belief premised on the desire to exclude immigrants. Pay no attention to that — the experts have spoken, and their verdict is that whatever pro-lifers say they believe in, they’re in fact motivated by a racist, debunked conspiracy theory, not so different from the racist conspiracy theories that motivated people to storm the Capitol

The article is a good example of what the media critic Andrey Mir calls “post-journalism”, which accounts for a lot of what is now published under the banner of news. Rather than establishing the facts and then attempting to build a narrative around them, the point is to fit the flux of events into a preconceived ideological narrative. Here, that narrative goes something like this: we American progressives are rational, kind and civilised people, while conservatives are backward and racist. (The Right is not immune to post-journalism, though it’s version has considerably less prestige.)

The trick works on almost any topic. Conservatives like Tucker Carlson have recently been making noise about the overprescription of antidepressants, so here’s Rolling Stone to explain that criticism of SSRIs — a longstanding position that transcends ideological boundaries — is a “bullshit moral panic” cooked up by the “Far Right”. The article quotes a doctor to the effect that SSRI side-effects are “very tolerable” and “usually short-lived.” Is that true? Well, maybe. The details aren’t important. The important thing is that the nutjobs are getting worked up over nothing again.  

One of the most long-standing criticisms of liberalism as a political philosophy is that it has difficulty conceiving of non-liberal positions as real political beliefs, rather than as simple ignorance or malice. If anything, the recent fad among the American media class for “fact-checking” and combating “misinformation” has made this tendency worse. 

The problem is that there’s no purely factual answer to the question of how we should evaluate the costs and benefits of SSRIs nor how we should set our abortion policy; these are partly political and in some sense partly religious questions, involving disputes about human nature and the purpose of life. It’s a child’s view of the world in which only the stupid or the evil can come to different conclusions than one’s own. 


Park MacDougald is Deputy Literary Editor for Tablet

hpmacd