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

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.