Eric Kaufman writes in this 2019 book:
* 80 per cent of the world’s 156 major countries have an ethnic majority and half contain a majority of at least 70 per cent. Europe is one of three relatively homogeneous world regions, along with North Africa and East Asia. States in these zones often have ethnic majorities of 90 per cent or more, mainly because geoclimatic variation – topography and soil type – is lower.
* I contend that today’s white majorities are likely to successfully absorb minority populations while their core myths and boundary symbols endure. This will involve a change in the physical appearance of the median Westerner, hence Whiteshift, though linguistic and religious markers are less likely to be affected. Getting from where we are now, where most Westerners share the racial and religious features of their ethnic archetype, to the situation in a century or two, when most will be what we now term ‘mixed-race’, is vital to understanding our present condition.
* The demographic transition is important for politics because it unfolds at different times between world regions, between nations and even between ethnic groups within nations. In Northern Ireland, for instance, Protestants entered the demographic transition sixty to eighty years before Catholics. That meant Catholic birth rates were higher than Protestant ones for decades, which is why the Catholic share of Northern Ireland increased from 35 per cent in 1965 to close to 50 per cent today. Since voting in Northern Ireland largely takes place on ethnic lines, this had serious political ramifications, which played a part in the violence which gripped the province between 1969 and 1994. 21 In other words, it is the unevenness of the demographic transition between groups which carries political implications.
* the West, especially its European-origin population, will be a demographic speck of a few percentage points by the end of the century. Meanwhile, economic power will continue to shift to other parts of the globe. All of which is likely to sharpen the awareness of European origins among tomorrow’s mixed-race Western majorities.
* In East Asia, automation and guest worker programmes drawing on South-East Asian labour are ensuring that the region’s demographic deficit will not produce multicultural nation-states. The same is true in Eastern Europe as rifts over accepting Syrian refugees showed in 2015. The Eastern rejection of cosmopolitan liberalism stands in stark contrast to the Western response, which emphasizes inclusion, multicultural citizenship and a celebration of diversity. This difference, I would argue, largely explains why right-wing populism has not reared, and will not rear, its head in Japan or Korea. These nations remain attached to what I call closed ethnic nationalism, in which proscriptions proscriptions against intermarriage and tight ethnic boundaries coexist with immigration policies designed to maintain majority ethnic predominance. Japan’s foreign-born share is 1.5 per cent, Korea’s 3.4, a fraction of the 10–20 per cent we typically find in the West.
* Over 90 per cent of wars since 1945 have taken place within rather than between countries. Of these, most have been ethnic wars. 24 In developed countries the same forces tend to produce contestation rather than violence, raising the importance of ethnicity in politics and society. In our more peaceful, post-ideological, demographically turbulent world, migration-led ethnic change is altering the basis of politics from class to ethnicity. On one side is a conservative coalition of whites who are attached to their heritage joined by minorities who value the white tradition; on the other side a progressive alliance of minorities who identify with their ethnic identity combined with whites who are agnostic or hostile towards theirs. Among whites, ethno-demographic change polarizes people between ‘tribal’ ethnics who value their particularity and ‘religious’ post-ethnics who prioritize universalist creeds such as John McWhorter’s ‘religion of anti-racism’.
* I chart the four main white responses to ethnic change: fight, repress, flee and join. Whites can fight ethnic change by voting for right-wing populists or committing terrorist acts. They may repress anxieties in the name of ‘politically correct’ anti-racism, but cracks in this moral edifice are appearing. Many opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighbourhoods, schools and social networks. And other whites may choose to join the newcomers, first in friendship, subsequently in marriage.
* rising diversity triggers two responses: conservatism and authoritarianism. Conservatism involves maintaining continuity with the past and resisting change. 26 If the West was diverse and became more homogeneous – as occurred in Poland or Vienna after 1939 – the conservative instinct would be to wax nostalgic about past diversity. Ethnic change is the irritant, not levels of diversity, which is why a meta-analysis of the academic literature I helped conduct shows ethnic change nearly always predicts increased anti-immigration sentiment and populist-right voting. 27 Psychological authoritarianism, by contrast, concerns the quest for order and security. Diversity, whether ethnic or ideological, however long its provenance, is problematic because it disrupts a sense of harmony and cohesion. Thus for authoritarians high levels of ethnic diversity are as much the problem as ethnic change . Even if the rate of change stays constant, high diversity levels increase discontent among those who value existential security and stability.
* A precedent can be found in the anti-immigration agitation of Protestant America in the mid-nineteenth century. The Irish famine and its aftermath saw over a million largely Catholic Irish immigrants move to America, a country which was over 95 per cent Protestant. By the 1850s, Catholics were a majority or large plurality in most north-eastern cities. Horrific violence followed in which mobs torched Catholic churches, vandalized Irish neighbourhoods and attacked priests. Many white Protestants responded by forming anti-Catholic societies or voting for anti-immigration parties. The rise of the Native American (‘Know-Nothing’) Party of the 1850s was breathtaking. In the words of the historian Ray Allen Billington: ‘The result was phenomenal. Whole tickets not even on the ballots were carried into office. Men who were unopposed for election and who had been conceded victory found themselves defeated by some unknown Know-Nothing.’ 28 All but one of the 377 state representatives of Massachusetts were Know-Nothings. They won 22 per cent of the vote in 1856, the most successful third party in American history. Many thought a Know-Nothing President was inevitable until the North–South divide over slavery intervened.
* A second white response is to repress ethnic instincts in the name of anti-racism.
* Our predisposition towards religion, morality and reputation – all of which can transcend the tribe – reflects our adaptation to larger social units. Be that as it may, humans have lived in large groups only in the very recent past, so it is reasonable to assume tribalism is a more powerful aspect of our evolutionary psychology than our willingness to abide by a moral code. Today what we increasingly see in the West is a battle between the ‘tribal’ populist right and the ‘religious’ anti-racist left.
* The fact our tribal makeup can be tricked to apply to sports teams or empires shows that evolution exerts only a distant force on behaviour. We favour genetic relatives, but this primordial tribalism is a weak tie-breaker that comes into play only when everything else is equal. A white American in a foreign airport usually feels closer to a black American than to a white Frenchman.
* As long as political conflicts are centred on ideology or states, primordial tribalism remains latent. What matters most is economic and institutional heft, with nepotistic instincts deciding things only at the margin. A trans-ethnic social group like the left can harness our tribal instincts the same way white nationalism can. Only if the two institutional forces are equally resourced will evolutionary psychology hand victory to white nationalism because it resonates slightly better with our instincts.
* Daniel Bell, used the term modernism to describe the spirit of anti-traditionalism which emerged in Western high culture between 1880 and 1930. With the murderous excesses of communism and fascism, many Western intellectuals embraced a fusion of modernist anti-traditionalism and cultural egalitarianism, distinguishing the new ideology from both socialism and traditional liberalism. Cosmopolitanism was its guiding ethos. Unlike socialism or fascism, this left-wing modernism meshed nicely with capitalism and globalization. The left-modernist sensibility spread from a small elite to a much wider section of middle-class society in the 1960s with the rise of television and growth of universities, taking over as the dominant sensibility of the high culture.
As it gained ground, it turned moralistic and imperialistic, seeking not merely to persuade but to institutionalize itself in law and policy, altering the basis of liberalism from tolerating to mandating diversity… Meanwhile the economic egalitarianism of socialism gave way to a trinity of sacred values around race, gender and sexual orientation. Upsurges of left-modernist fundamentalism became a feature of campus life in the mid-1960s and waxed in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as in the period since 2013.
* left-modernism laid the basis for a new moral order – a redefinition of sacred and deviant – which pushed immigration restriction beyond the pale, keeping it off the political agenda. This permitted business and humanitarian considerations to override cultural concerns, facilitating the immigration-led ethnic changes which have powered right-wing populism.
* Negative liberalism says we should allow people to pursue their goals as long as they don’t infringe the rights of others. Positive liberalism consists of promoting particular goals, such as autonomy or diversity, as the proper aim of human individuals and societies. 33 Tolerating difference is critical for negative liberalism. Celebrating it is not. If someone doesn’t have a taste for Marmite, asking them to celebrate it is a coercive form of positive liberalism with no roots in the Western legal tradition.
* In the 1960s, resistance to left-modernism came from formerly socialist, primarily Jewish, intellectuals like Bell, Nathan Glazer and others. Glazer was an especially influential critic of the multicultural resurgence of the 1990s. 35 These criticisms shaped intellectual life on the centre-right and informed opposition to bilingualism and affirmative action in the United States. Even so, the multicultural narrative continued in the media while affirmative action was upheld by the courts and practised in elite universities. Events moved more quickly in Europe in the 1990s, where populist-right gains in countries such as France, Italy and Austria prompted mainstream politicians to abandon the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Where left-modernism was formerly able to portray national identity as dangerous, clearing the way for multiculturalism, political change desacralized multiculturalism, permitting it to be debated, whereupon it was swiftly replaced by civic nationalism.
Immigration was the next moral battleground.
* The fact Trump openly talked about building a wall and banning Muslims and still won shifted the so-called ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable political ideas within the right-wing media. This weakened the anti-racist taboo among American conservatives and made it acceptable to openly campaign on a platform of reducing immigration. In Canada, by contrast, the taboo still holds on the right, so talk of reducing immigration lies beyond the bounds of the permissible. The only question is whether levels should remain the same or increase. Thus the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which was strongly pro-Israel and willing to criticize conservative Muslims, didn’t dare touch Canada’s ‘immigration consensus’. This has produced the highest immigration levels in the OECD and increased the non-European share of the Canadian population from around 2 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent today.
* Immigrant children typically speak the native language without an accent, but will tend to retain their religion and, if non-white, remain racially distinct. Non-Christian groups, apart from East Asians, generally remain religious over generations, though there is a slow process of secularization under way among Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. 41 Physical differences likewise erode only over generations, through intermarriage.
Race does much of the work in demarcating whites from minorities today. Religion, despite the challenge of conservative Islam, is becoming less important as the West grows more secular. Current thinking on the role of racial appearance in nationalism divides primordialists, who think race matters because of our tribal instincts to cooperate with those who share more of our genes, and instrumentalists, who think it counts only because it serves people’s material interests.
* The Irish or Jews in America, though outside the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core, were distinguished from African-Americans or Chinese in daily social interactions. Some Latinos can pass as white: whether they do so is less dependent on census categories and laws than emergent, bottom-up social processes of social acceptance similar to those which eventually made gay marriage a non-issue in America. I’m a good example as someone who is a quarter Latino and a quarter Chinese but is considered white by most people…
* Appearance plays a central part in this even if race isn’t ‘real’: physicists tell us there are no actual colours in the electromagnetic spectrum, just a continuum. Yet we perceive colours and develop similar words for them across cultures. This is partly due to the way our brain processes electromagnetic stimuli and partly because of how cultures classify the primary colours. 43 A few small groups, such as the Namibian Himba, don’t recognize the colour green, calling it a shade of blue. 44 Still, broadly speaking, there is cross-cultural consensus around colour and I don’t believe this can be deconstructed. Is the same true for our established racial groups? Broadly speaking, I think so.
* the ultra-Orthodox are a third of Jewish-Israeli first-graders and by 2050 will form a majority of observant Jews in America and Britain. Since these groups are essentially all white, they push against the grain of the West’s racial trajectory… The main reason large sections of Brooklyn are becoming whiter is because of the rapid growth of the city’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where women bear an average of six to seven children.
* The liberal conceit that whites must be post-ethnic cosmopolitans has outlived its usefulness. Some warm to cosmopolitanism, others prefer to identify with their ethnic group… Elites who use national and supranational institutions to advance a cosmopolitan vision are eroding conservatives’ trust in liberal institutions.
* England is projected to be 73 per cent white in 2050, precisely where the US was in the year 2000. This puts America half a century ahead of Western Europe on the racial transformation curve.
* A ride on public transportation in New York, San Francisco or Chicago is generally a far more ‘majority-minority’ experience than taking the London tube or Paris metro.
* much of our left-liberal lexicon on immigration – multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, anti-whiteness, diversity – developed in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
* By the time of American independence in 1776, the free population of the United States was 98 per cent Protestant and almost entirely white apart from a small population of free blacks in the North. Eighty per cent of the colonists were of British descent, predominantly English, but with a significant Scotch-Irish component. The remaining 20 per cent were almost all of North-West European background – German, Dutch, Swedish, French or Irish. African-Americans and Amerindians comprised a fifth of the total, but were effectively disenfranchised and not considered part of the American nation. The Constitution in 1790 restricted citizenship to ‘free white persons’. John Jay, despite his Huguenot ancestry, considered Americans ‘essentially English’ as did foreign visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville.
* Many of the American founders viewed Americans as descendants of the Anglo-Saxons who had fled the Norman yoke in England. This borrowed from British Whig historians who considered the British monarchy, which stemmed from the Norman Conquest, to be a tyrannical institution which quashed the primitive liberties enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxon tribes.
* American political nationhood, as in much of Western Europe, was constructed around what the sociologist of nationalism Anthony Smith terms an ‘ethnic core’. 5 We can think of two aspects to ethnic groups: a time dimension connecting them to ancestors, and a spatial dimension distinguishing them from neighbouring groups in the present. The spatial aspect is referred to in the literature as an ethnic boundary and its symbols typically include one or more of language, religion and physical appearance. At different times, and in different places, certain markers become more important. In Northern Ireland, the groups look and sound the same, but differ by religion. Hungarians and Slovaks look alike and don’t differ much on religion, but language sets them apart. In Britain, Afro-Caribbeans have the same religion and language as white Britons but look physically distinct. Sometimes the boundary markers all matter and reinforce each other, as with white Afrikaner Protestants and black Zulu animists in nineteenth-century South Africa.
In the United States, the boundary markers for the ethnic majority were the ‘W-AS-P’ trinity of white appearance, unaccented English, British or Dutch surname, and Protestant religion.
* Catholicism represented what the Czech-British sociologist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, calls a ‘counter-entropic’ trait. That is, retained through generations and resisting decomposition over time. Whereas language or accent tends to fade in the second generation, religion and phenotype are often inherited and therefore endure.
* In the 1820s, the Founders’ lofty pronouncements about Anglo-Saxon origins found little echo in the population, most of whom remained attached to denominational, state and regional identities. …These sudden [immigration changes 1820-1860] ignited ethno-nationalist sentiments in the Anglo-Americans who felt threatened by the increase in foreign, and especially Catholic, population.
* As with perceptions of Islam in the West today, Catholicism was viewed as an alien faith with no place in American civilization. …From the 1840s, anti-Catholic political movements had begun organizing and contesting elections. By 1854, these came together as the Native American Party, known as the ‘Know-Nothings’ because of their oath of secrecy. The ‘native’ monicker resulted in a new American term, ‘nativist’, shorthand for Anglo-American ethnic nationalist. The party sought to reduce immigration and introduce a twenty-one-year residency requirement for citizenship. The Know-Nothing Party was the most successful third-party movement in American history.
* Chinese immigration was facilitated by the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China. But this raises the question of who favoured immigration. Was it humanitarian liberals of the kind that champion open immigration today? Hardly. Liberal Progressivism would not emerge for another four decades. Instead, large businesses, pro-growth politicians and the Protestant clerical establishment comprised the main open-borders coalition.
* The American asylum tradition was not an egalitarian project. Anti-racist egalitarianism played no part in liberal thinking at the time. Americans welcomed immigration to grow the country, and could wax lyrical about the US as a ‘new’ nation made up of various European peoples.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance.”
* Opposition to immigration was centred in the urban Protestant working class. An important part of the Republican base consisted of former Know-Nothings, many of whom were tradesmen. Pressure from this quarter led to repeal of the contract labour statute, but the battle would continue in California in the 1870s. Most Protestant Americans lived in the countryside and relatively few inhabited larger cities. Nevertheless, urban labour – especially mechanics and those in the craft unions – drew on the ethnic and racial traditions of American nationhood to call for restricted entry. Meanwhile, older waves of immigrants were progressively assimilated into the white working class. One index of assimilation was Irish-Catholic participation in the anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party in California whose agitation resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Led by Irish-born Denis Kearney, it brought Protestant and Catholic together in what has been described as ‘the most successful labour-based movement in American history’.
* American Protestant clergy, meanwhile, cherished a laissez-faire theology in which God favoured America, with immigration a sign of divine providence. The more zealous maintained that the ingathering of the world’s peoples was a prelude to the Second Coming.
* Laissez-faire theology dominated more strongly among the Protestant clerical elite of the eastern seaboard than in California, where local pastors generally opposed Chinese immigration. Nevertheless, until 1890, the liberal perspective prevailed at national conventions of the mainline Protestant denominations. Business-oriented Christian support for immigration is still recognizable at the upper level of both mainline and evangelical denominations, and in parts of the ‘country-club’ wing of the Republican Party.
* restriction in America is a function of both raw numbers and the distance of immigrants from the Anglo-Protestant cultural core. When numbers and cultural distance increase together, as they often do, pressure for restriction grows.
* As the country grew into an urban nation, the Social Gospel movement arose, uniting a concern for the working class and the ills of the industrial city with the belief that government should control immigration…
* By 1929, WASP interests had prevailed and the quotas came to be based on the WASPier 1920 population stock rather than 1890 immigrant population. Half the country’s immigration quota was now allocated to Britain – the aim being to freeze the ethnic composition of the US population. 31 American national identity at this point is best described as racial, in the sense of excluding virtually all non-whites, and ethno-traditional, in seeking to maintain a population mix in which Anglo-Protestants remained a majority. This is distinct from ethnic nationalism, which would mean that only members of the WASP group could immigrate or be citizens – which was not the basis of the 1924 Act.
* A new feature of the discussions around immigration in the 1910s and 1920s was racism. American intellectuals considered anti-Catholic bigotry a backward sentiment, but hailed eugenics, the science of improving the inherited characteristics of individuals, to be modern and scientific. Eugenics was connected with scientific racism, which ranked different ethnic groups as more or less advanced. This meant Catholic Irish and Germans were now ‘Nordics’, considered by some race scientists to be on par with Anglo-Protestants, an interpretation which many of the Old Immigrant representatives endorsed. Some race scientists demurred, ranking the Irish lower down the pecking order.
Eugenics, despite its scientific patina, was based on a slipshod methodology which confirmed pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. For instance, when it was discovered that African-Americans were under-represented in the prison population, eugenicists improvised an ad hoc argument that this was only because blacks worked on plantations so couldn’t get into trouble.
* Pro-immigration’s intellectual foundations were classical liberalism, the American tradition of asylum and the theology of divine providence. Its handmaidens were growth-oriented politicians and commercial interests. Pro-immigration liberals like Emerson embodied the same unquestioned racist assumptions as immigration opponents.
* The Liberal Progressives were the first recognizably modern left-liberal open borders movement. They combined aspects of individualist-anarchism, ecumenism and Progressivism into a new synthesis. Two intellectual traditions nourished Liberal Progressivism: Anglo-American anarchism and secularized Reform Judaism. The former was represented in the persona of William James, the second by Felix Adler. James was an established New England writer who developed the philosophical stance known as Pluralism. Pluralism initially had little to say about ethnic diversity but rather called for people to combine aspects of multiple ethical systems in order to arrive at the truth.
* Presbyterian spokesmen pivoted from anti-immigration to pro-immigration positions between 1904 and 1913, and now called for universal brotherhood.
* Notice how the rationale for clerical pro-immigration views changed from ‘God’s Will’ prior to 1890 to secular cosmopolitanism and pacifism after 1910.
* During the revival of the second (anti-Catholic) Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the elite of mainline Protestantism in both northern and southern states editorialized tirelessly against them in their ecumenical and denominational papers. Denominations routinely fired pastors who backed the Klan. In churches where parishioners sympathized with the hooded order, liberal ministers often chose to be forced out by their flock rather than speak for the Klan. Locally, ministers joined civic leaders and journalists to denounce the organization. Even where a city was Klan-run, as in post-First World War Indianapolis, Protestant leaders, civic elites and local journalists showed their resistance to it by conducting war commemorations in which Catholic, Jewish and Protestant clergy gave joint addresses.
Meanwhile, the mainline Protestant missionary effort, both overseas and among ‘home’ missions in the United States, lost its crusading zeal after the First World War and began to question its entire rationale. Beginning with a critique of Western imperialism, missionaries began doubting the wisdom of displacing non-Christian faiths. Eventually, they abandoned missionary activity altogether.
* In 1924, mainline Protestant clergy were almost unanimous in their opposition to immigration restriction. However, their liberal activism was out of step with the views of their parishioners.
* The Young Intellectuals [of Greenwich Village 1912-1917] were Anglo-American bohemian artists and writers rebelling against their own Protestant culture. Inspired by Nietzsche and Bergson’s romantic individualism and modernism in art, they sought to overthrow what they perceived as a suffocating Puritan inheritance. The Young Intellectuals discovered the joys of Harlem’s black jazz scene, experimented with drugs, exhibited modern art at Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘291’ studio or read poetry aloud in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salon.
* [Randolph] Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism , whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to:
“Breathe a larger air … [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide.”
Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.
* [Bourne split] the world into two moral planes, one for a ‘parental’ majority who would be asked to shed their ethnicity and oppose their own culture, and the other for childlike minorities, who would be urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms. This crystallized a dualistic habit of mind, entrenched in the anti-WASP ethos of 1920s authors like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken and the bohemian ‘Lost Generation’ of American intellectuals such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. All associated the Anglo-Protestant majority with Prohibition, deemed WASP culture to be of no value, and accused the ethnic majority of suppressing more interesting and expressive ethnic groups. The Lost Generation’s anti-majority ethos pervaded the writing of 1950s ‘Beat Generation’ left-modernist writers like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac – who contrasted lively black jazz or Mexican culture with the ‘square’ puritanical whiteness of Middle America. As white ethnics assimilated, the despised majority shifted from WASPs to all whites. The multiculturalism of the 1960s fused the Liberal Progressive pluralist movement with the anti-white ethos of the Beat counterculture.
* FDR told Catholic adviser Leo Crowley in January 1942, ‘Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here on sufferance.’
* Nathan Glazer put it: ‘In the later ’20’s the Quota Act took its toll, then the depression began and nobody wanted to come, so for a long time American public opinion lived in the consciousness and expectation that America was completed … No one expected that America would again become an immigrant society.’
* the US census bureau defines anyone with ‘one drop’ of minority identity to be non-white. This overstates the decline of whiteness. In 2013, half the country’s newborns were categorized as non-white in census terms, yet 60 per cent had at least one white parent.
