THE QUESTION IS no longer whether we live in a time of democracy’s collapse in the U.S. The question is how we got here. Historian Ibram X. Kendi might have uncovered that history.
In Chain of Ideas, Kendi shows that the current mutation of authoritarianism has wrapped many white people in its web by narrating a story of how white people are bound for extinction. Kendi refers to the “great replacement theory,” or the idea that the “lives, livelihoods, cultures, electoral power, and freedoms” of white people are threatened by the “invasion” of Black and brown people, especially immigrants. The only solution, according to this racist logic, is to end the demographic growth of nonwhite people in the West—and that work begins with assenting to dictators.
For proponents of the “great replacement theory,” authoritarianism is the critical means for white people to preserve their liberties. In their view, the democratization of the West has opened national borders, allowing an influx of migrants to threaten white civilization. Kendi, of course, diagnoses that many white people “[fight] for privileges provided by dictators instead of power provided by democracy” precisely because they have lost faith in democracy. They have believed a story—a conspiracy—that their whiteness must be defended at all costs, even if that means submission to a dictator.
Chain of Ideas illuminates the power of stories. Kendi shows that the stories we assent to carry direct material consequences, from the mass deportation, incarceration, and killing of immigrants by ICE to the rise of neo-Nazism. To build a just society, then, we must unravel the history of these ideas and concretely challenge them.
Ultimately, Kendi explores why authoritarianism is so alluring for so many people. Authoritarianism is not merely a political system—it is an architecture of desire that unearths deep racial anxieties. The “great replacement theory” is not backed by history or hard data. It is simply a story that has “chained” hearts and minds to a white ideal.
Kendi hungers for a different story, which he finds in democracy: an antiracist vision that considers pluralism to be a gift, something that enriches rather than threatens.
Chain of Ideas is an accessible interrogation of the ideas beneath authoritarianism and urges readers toward an antiracist form of democracy. However, antiracism alone won’t achieve a truly democratic and just society. As a Christian leftist, I understand racism to be symptomatic of a larger structural reality. Racism must be taken seriously and abolished, but if we do not also reckon with our agonistic capitalist structure, we can pursue as much racial reconciliation as we want and still not solve the problem of severe economic inequality. Chain of Ideas falls short when it fails to recognize that without eliminating capitalism, people of any race will continue to be cogs in a multicultural machine.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). We need to sit with those words longer. Racism is certainly a great evil, but it does not function on its own. It is funded by oligarchs and billionaires who want to maintain their power over the minds, hearts, and bodies of the public. All they need is a story compelling enough to conceal the very structure that has granted them power in the first place.
Yanan (he/him) is a writer from the Philippines who serves as editorial director at the Center for Barth Studies, where he guides initiatives that examine Christian faith and practice through the lens of progressive politics.
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