“You Will Not Replace Us”: The Melancholic Nationalism of Whiteness

• Author: Michael Feola
• Published date: 01 August 2021
• Date: 01 August 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720972745
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720972745

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(4) 528 –553

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720972745

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Article

“You Will Not Replace

Us”: The Melancholic

Nationalism of

Whiteness

Michael Feola1

Abstract

This article addresses recent strains of white nationalism rooted within

anxieties over demographic replacement (e.g., “the Great Replacement”).

More broadly, the article argues that the contemporary politics of white

grievance cannot be reduced to an ahistorical desire for racial supremacy.

Rather, these anxieties represent the political reflex to perceptions of loss

on the part of historical white majorities—a loss that takes a distinctly

melancholic form in both discourse and practice. To understand white

nationalism as a melancholic politics is to recognize the pathologies that

stem from its underlying psychodynamics. At the affectual level, for instance,

the subject of white grievance is constituted as the subject of politicized

rage through its organizing narratives. And ultimately, the politics of

melancholic whiteness raises significant challenges for a democratic polity.

Most fundamentally, the melancholic fixation upon loss forecloses the

futurity required by a democratic politics. Upon diagnosing these destructive

pathologies, the article goes on to propose alternatives to approach civic

change in less destructive, more democratically generative fashion.

Keywords

white nationalism, white supremacy, ethnonationalism, whiteness, melancholia,

Great Replacement, politics of loss

1Government & Law Department, Lafayette College, Easton, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Michael Feola, Government & Law Department, Lafayette College, 101 Kirby Hall, Easton,

PA 18042, USA.

Email: feolam@lafayette.edu

972745PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720972745Political TheoryFeola

research-article2020

Feola 529

To begin, an episode from recent political history. On August 11, 2017, a

variety of white nationalists gathered at Charlottesville, Virginia, for the

“Unite the Right” rally—ostensibly to protest the removal of statues memo-

rializing the Confederacy. As the night progressed, however, the demonstra-

tions took a more aggressive stance. The protesters gathered en masse, lit

torches, and marched through the local university campus. In a scene that

burned itself into the political imaginary, these angry, white subjects chanted

“you will not replace us” (or, alternately, the anti-Semitic variant: “Jews will

not replace us”) as they made their way through the night. These demonstra-

tions continued for another day, yielding renewed skirmishes throughout the

city and eventuating in the death of a counter-protester, when a white suprem-

acist drove his car into a crowd of bodies.

The central question of the article stems from this appeal to irreplaceabil-

ity. Indeed, what anxieties are conveyed through this claim—that a process of

replacement is underway and must be contested? As much of the “replaceist”

literature suggests, this concern reflects a longstanding discomfort toward the

grammar of fungibility at the heart of capitalist modernity. From the field of

object-relations, critics have long lamented the growth of “throwaway cul-

ture” and the seamless array of exchangeable objects, each rendered identical

by a manufacturing apparatus that produces without distinction or variance.

This interchangeability does not only characterize the objects that roll off the

assembly line, but also the cultural icons that are reproduced in ever more

places, torn from the specific historical or geographic milieus in which they

originally appeared (e.g., the replica icons that now appear in places such as

Disneyworld or Las Vegas). As Renaud Camus, a prominent critic of repla-

ceist politics, argues, “Replacing is the central gesture of contemporary soci-

eties. For better or worse, everything is being replaced by something else:

something simpler, more convenient, more practical, easier to produce, more

at hand, and, of course, cheaper.”1

Although hardly comprehensive, such instances highlight the depth of

these fungibility concerns within the normative imagination of modernity.

And yet, the cited examples do not capture the performance of white anxiety

that opened this essay. It is not replaceability as such that animated these

demonstrations, but rather a specific staging of the anxiety: a replacement of

a specified us by other groups within the geopolitical unit of the nation.

According to a growing ethnonationalist literature, recent decades have seen

a “Great Replacement” in liberal democracies, where immigration generates

fundamental transformations in the demographic characteristics of a given

nation. This is the phenomenon that Eric Kaufmann has described as

“whiteshift”—“a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of

different peoples through intermarriage . . . replacing the self-confidence of