How Did Great Replacement Theory Go Global?: Nonfiction

 “In “Chain of Ideas,” Ibram X. Kendi argues that a modern form of xenophobia has come to dominate conservative movements across the world.

 

CHAIN OF IDEAS: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, by Ibram X. Kendi

 

By some lights, our current political predicament comes down to a single powerful idea, which was born 30 years ago in the south of France. In 1996, the French novelist Renaud Camus took a break from restoring his 14th-century castle in Plieux to write a travel book — commissioned by the French government — about Hérault, a department on France’s Mediterranean coast.

 

According to Camus, he was horrified to find Hérault’s “old round fortified villages” overrun by migrants from North Africa who had arrived from former colonies seeking economic opportunity.

 

As he watched Black and brown faces stare out at him from the windows and thresholds of medieval European dwellings, it seemed to Camus that, “during our lifetime, and even less, France was in the process of changing people.”

 

In 2011, Camus published “Le Grand Remplacement,” a manifesto elaborating his epiphany in Hérault: Liberal elites were conspiring to replace white Europeans with migrants from Africa and the Middle East.

 

As the historian Ibram X. Kendi writes in “Chain of Ideas,” his wide-ranging survey of modern xenophobia, great replacement theory has since become “the most dominant political theory of our time.”

 

Kendi, the author of lauded accounts of American bigotry like “How to Be an Antiracist” (2019) and the National Book Award-winning “Stamped From the Beginning” (2016), is careful to note that Camus merely provided a new name for “an old conspiracy theory,” one that has animated many generations of ethnonationalists. He begins his story with Camus, but he eventually reaches as far back as the reign of King Leopold II in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the 20th century.

 

“Chain of Ideas” is an ambitious book: “a global history of the present,” as Kendi writes. It is divided into 10 sections, each narrating the rise of a particular right-wing leader (or “great replacement politician,” as he puts it) — Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Alice Weidel in Germany, José Antonio Kast in Chile and so on.

 

As a series of capsule histories of 21st-century right-wing movements, the book is serviceable. Kendi has amassed a wealth of detail from sources in French, Spanish and Dutch; he generally writes in a lucid, ambling style that is engaging enough page by page.

 

Kendi has long had a tendency to distill big ideas into simple categories. In “Stamped From the Beginning,” every racist person or idea in American history is divided into one of two categories: “segregationist” or “assimilationist.” Likewise, in “How to Be an Antiracist,” every public policy is either “racist” or “antiracist.” No policies are merely nonracist, which may seem a bit crude, but at least his point — that neutrality is tantamount to complicity — is easy to follow.

 

In “Chain of Ideas,” Kendi’s love of taxonomy goes haywire. Each of his sections identifies one of 10 “interlocking ideas” — links in a chain — which together “give great replacement theory its reach and strength.” (“Link 1: White people lose out as peoples of color gain”; “Link 2: Racial inequity data should be ignored”; “Link 9: Insurrections against democracy protect the nation.”) The connection between each idea and its associated politician sometimes seems arbitrary. Why, for example, does José Antonio Kast best illustrate the idea that “racism is biological prejudice and interpersonal discrimination”? It’s not apparent.

 

By the time I got to learning how the Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre was supposed to represent fighting “for freedom as patriots, like the nation’s founders,” my head was spinning. (Canada does not share America’s reverence for its “founding fathers”; Canadians don’t even agree who their “founding fathers” were.) Reading “Chain of Ideas” ends up feeling like going through an ambitiously organized junk drawer after 10 years of careless use. The compartments are labeled, but everything is all mixed up.

 

Kendi also sometimes sacrifices clarity for the sake of metaphor and clunky wordplay, as in: “I did not want my privilege to be my prison. I wanted to imprison my privilege to free my power”; or: “A senseless belief in stranger danger sustains a history of all people being no stranger to danger.”

 

The least productive metaphor in this book might be the one on its cover. Kendi derives the notion of a “chain of ideas” from the French Enlightenment jurist Joseph Michel Antoine Servan, who in 1767 advised King Louis XV to bind his subjects with something stronger than iron and steel: “A fool despot can constrain slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them much more strongly by the chain of their own ideas.”

 

Kendi’s contention is that great replacement theory is, today, the ideological fetters by which the rich persuade the white, heterosexual, Christian working and middle classes to prefer their own domination by oligarchic elites over the prospect of shedding their privilege and struggling for freedom in solidarity with more vulnerable minorities.

 

It’s a familiar notion; Marxists used to call it “false consciousness.” But unlike the Marxists, who believed ideas were merely window dressing for material domination, Kendi appears to believe it is the ideas themselves that “chain” the populace. For instance, of Anders Breivik, the neo-Nazi terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, he writes, “Humans are not born mass political murderers. Political theories turn humans into political murderers.”

 

As such, Kendi’s solutions for our present social ills mostly aim to quarantine dangerous ideas. Kendi recommends “the banning of great replacement politicians when they break the law.” He also writes, “We must expel conspiracy theories, disinformation and hate speech from social media platforms, political debates and political advertisements.” And, he goes on, “we must systematize civic, antiracist, queer, feminist and multicultural education.”

 

But even a sympathetic reader will wonder how to follow this advice in 2026, on the other side of the backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion programs that once swept through liberal statehouses and the corporate world. After 500 pages describing the terrible effectiveness of “great replacement parties” at winning electoral majorities, I had to ask: Who is this democratic “we” empowered to ban and expel and systematize?

 

Kendi does acknowledge that economic insecurity has made people more susceptible to right-wing populism. “Nothing,” he writes, “minimizes the draw of great replacement theory like radically improving societal conditions,” adding that “intellectual historians cannot separate how people think from how people live.”

 

But this admission feels perfunctory. Despite a few pages here and there on the links between great replacement party success and inflation, Covid and the Great Recession, Kendi tends to treat racist ideas as an all-powerful means of control, and the global realities underlying right-wing grievance — especially mass migration generated by war, want and climate change — as exaggerated if not illusory.

 

By focusing too much on what fascists say, rather than what they do — or the circumstances they are responding to — Kendi has written a book that is simultaneously too pessimistic, about the inexorable appeal of right-wing rhetoric, and too naïve, about the effort required to beat them back. “We can liberate ourselves from the ideas that fetter us by recognizing what binds us,” Kendi writes. Fine words — but feeble in the face of a world increasingly defined by literal chains, real coercion and undisguised violence.

 

CHAIN OF IDEAS: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age | By Ibram X. Kendi | One World | 550 pp. | $35

 

Sam Adler-Bell is a co-host of the podcast “Know Your Enemy.”” [1]

 

1. How Did Great Replacement Theory Go Global?: Nonfiction. Adler-Bell, Sam.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Mar 17, 2026.