How should we understand the violent imagery, discourse, and actions that have steadily steeped into contemporary politics? What is the relationship between extremist forms of violence and emergent political movements in the United States and Europe? Why are anxieties about birthrates, marriage rates, gender, and “pro-family” policies increasingly salient in electoral campaigns and political organizing? In The Rage of Replacement, Michael Feola explores the contemporary political context that underlies all these trends, and he identifies a set of effects and anxieties that help to explain why the political environment is so violently charged.

For Feola, the affective pressures shaping the political landscape are largely coming from one direction: the right. Over the past several decades, the rage represented in extreme right-wing movements has expressed itself in spectacles of mass violence—the Christchurch mosque mass shooting in New Zealand; the racially motivated mass shootings in Buffalo, NY and El Paso, TX; the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA—while also becoming increasingly mainstreamed into formal political parties. The politics of right-wing rage threaten not only liberal–democratic norms of mutual tolerance and respect but also potentially heralds a postliberal future characterized by a belligerent ethno-nationalism and reinforced by orthodox interpretations of religion and strict norms of gender expression.

At the heart of this rage lie anxieties about demographic replacement, or the idea that ethnic majorities within Western societies are systematically being replaced by populations from the global south, with oversight from globalized elites who benefit from migrants’ low-wage labor. While the idea of a “great replacement” has different resonances depending on who is articulating it, at the heart of the idea is an anxiety that one’s place in the world is threatened by declines in in-group fertility combined with increasing rates of out-group immigration. For many right-wing groups in the United States and Europe, the idea of replacement centers on a racial concept of whiteness infused with Christianity, which in turn positions the threatening “others” as non-White and non-Christian. Although mainstream politicians rarely invoke the racialist logic of replacement, the narrative of replacement has seeped into formal political campaigns through the guise of a defense of “traditional” cultures, gender norms, and family structures.

Fears of replacement, for Feola, ultimately reflect a melancholic subject position, which locates these subjects in a “field of loss” (p. 13). Famously, Freud argued that melancholia occurs when the subject cannot let go of the lost object; therefore, the wound of loss is “interiorized into the ego” such that the lost object becomes increasingly central to one’s sense of identity (p. 13). For Feola, the lost object accompanying right-wing melancholia is whiteness, best understood as a set of symbolic, social, cultural, and material benefits that buffered majority populations from exposure to precarity and lack of standing. From a melancholic position, alternative futures in which the lost object could be replaced are unimaginable. Hence the insistence—increasingly violent—on making the past present as opposed to seeking out new alliances across lines of difference. Melancholia licenses a politics of (White) refusal, which inherently erodes the power of liberal norms of compromise, tolerance, and negotiation. Politics becomes an increasingly zero-sum contest in which the other is figured as the source of suffering as opposed to a legitimate partner for dialogue or collaboration.

Across the five substantive chapters of The Rage of Replacement, Feola explores the different ways in which the narrative of replacement has shaped political visions, strategies, and movements. In the introduction, Feola defends his methodological choices to focus on the narrative of replacement as it has suffused extremist right-wing movements, online discourse, and political campaigns. Feola’s source material includes the manifestos of racially motivated mass shooters, publications of right-wing organizations, statements from offline extremist groups and online communities, and the campaigns of right-wing politicians. Feola traces the narrative of replacement across these disparate sources, largely emphasizing commonalities as opposed to cleavages within and among these groups and showing how the narrative of replacement underwrites seemingly different political projects. In the first chapter (“You Will Not Replace Us”), Feola unpacks the idea of replacement and explores the pathologies of a melancholic politics of refusal, which leads to a zero-sum view of politics that cannot imagine alternative futures beyond whiteness. In the second chapter (“The Catastrophist Vision of the Far Right”), Feola expands this thesis by exploring the apocalyptic tone of far-right movements, reflecting what he sees as a paranoic certainty that politics is inherently a struggle between distinct peoples or races, who cannot be mixed without a disastrous dilution of national character. From these perspectives, often infused with the language of biology and genetics, replacement is not a relatively benign phenomenon of generational shift or cultural blending, but an existential threat. Immigration is recast as an invasion, declining birth rates are depicted as race suicide, and the combined effect is seen as “white erasure or “white genocide” (p. 36).

Chapters three (“Metapolitics and Demographic Fear”), four (“Visions of Escape”), and five (“The Reproductive Politics of a ‘Nice, White Nation’”) explore distinct political strategies following the anxieties and rage of replacement. In chapter three, Feola details how New Right figures have increasingly appropriated Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony to emphasize how struggles over “beliefs, sentiments, and values” are more important than the power achieved through “institutions, elections, or policies” (p. 57). Symbols, discourse, and culture lie upstream from electoral politics and public policies, and therefore “metapolitics” trumps politics as usual. Right-wing groups deploy new media technologies such as internet memes to directly infiltrate popular consciousness in ways that the formal political system and traditional media infrastructure cannot. The targets of this metapolitical strategy are the operative ideas and beliefs of liberalism itself, including commitments to equality and individual autonomy. By undermining these beliefs, right-wing metapolitics erodes the support structures for the liberal democratic consensus that has dominated North American and European politics since the second world war. Chapter four explores the strategy of separation or secession, envisioned by many far-right groups as the only remedy for cultural and racial admixture. Although secessionist visions have been articulated by both libertarian and racially conservative groups on the right, Feola argues that racialist visions are increasingly salient within proposals for separation, once again underwritten by claims of biological distinctness that underlines specific cultural values and traditions. In chapter five, Feola explores the racialist logic in so-called “pro-natalist” policies aimed at increasing the birthrates of native populations in North America and Europe, which have fallen below replacement levels in the past several decades. For far-right figures, “reproduction is a battlefield,” and the birthrates of native-born populations represent the front line in a struggle for cultural hegemony (p. 106). Feola explores the historical roots of birthrate anxieties, which seem to intensify at times of significant social change or uncertainty. He also explores the blatant anti-feminism of many strains of pro-natalism and the ways in which panic about birthrates has fused with anxieties over shifting gender norms and expressions.

In the coda, Feola discusses the civic costs of the narrative of replacement as it has spread into different political strategies and movements, and he briefly explores an alternative pathway for political imagination that would emphasize the possibility of building solidarities across difference in the interest of a material politics of equality. It remains unclear, however, if this strategy can speak to the melancholic investments in whiteness that Feola describes. We will need other books to envision how resonant counter-narratives might speak to the anxieties of displacement that far-right groups use to their advantage to push a restricted and racialist political agenda.